The name may suggest some grainy, low-budget 70's American slasher. Corpse Mania is an astonishing, transgressive Chinese giallo, the first I've ever seen. Without the Internet and the chain of companies that culminate in Netflix, I'd have never known about hundreds of excellent foreign films that never made it to US theaters. A few minutes into Corpse Mania and it's apparent that director Kuei Chih Hung and his writing partner On Szeto were heavily influenced by Mario Bava's Blood & Black Lace. The artistic cinematography highly evocative of Bava's genius with its deep blues and blood reds, fog-shrouded locations and creepy, decrepit large houses. The masked, behatted knife-wielding murderer brutally striking in operatic, shocking scenes that are pure Italian giallo. Kuei Chih Hung takes the basic plot (and look) of Black Lace and pushes it way--way--over the edge, changing the original's fashion house to a house of prostitution. While the police investigation in Black Lace was of minor importance to Bava, who was more interested in depicting his picturesque murders, the police investigation is the main thrust of CM, headed with grim determination and plodding authority by Yung Wong. In another alteration, the villain is not only insane, he's a necrophile, bringing sick hookers to his home. After the girls eventually die of their illnesses, he abuses them in graphic, revolting detail. (Warning: There are sickening scenes of maggots crawling all over their decomposing bodies.) The English subtitle translation of Cantonese is typically stilted but this is to be expected. Like Black Lace, there's several twist endings (that I never saw coming) and a final scene that depicts the bureaucratic approach to execution that exists to this day in China. Kuei Chih Hung created a little-known horror masterpiece that DVD has resurrected. Like Bava, his interest is style and surreality, not logic, common sense (why does a girl walk alone down dark alleys knowing a killer is after her?) plot details and reality. The fact that he got the Shaw Brothers to produce it is itself surprising.
Review of Corpse Mania
