Nieh Yun Peng (Fan Yang) is a wealthy young man travelling through the countryside with his faithful servant Dahuozi. They encounter a young woman. They fear she is contemplating throwing herself into the lake. They suspect she is a ghost. After this slightly disturbing incident they seek shelter for the night in a lonely house. The mistress of the house, a young woman named Anu (Margaret Hsing Hui) seems rather reluctant to take them in but eventually relents.
That night Nieh Yun Peng accidentally sees Anu naked. She is shocked. She explains that she is a virgin and that her reputation has now been compromised. Nieh Yun Peng (a good-natured but perhaps slightly naïve young fellow) gets rather flustered and quickly agrees to marry her. Meanwhile his servant has blundered into the bedroom of Anu’s maid, with the same result. Nieh Yun Peng and his servant have both now acquired brides.
Given that both Anu and her maid are young, beautiful and charming this is not such a great hardship.
Nieh Yun Peng’s uncle and aunt are rather disturbed. They suspect that Anu may be a ghost. The aunt takes the precaution of sewing a Taoist image into a gown they are giving Nieh Yun Peng as a wedding present. The image is a kind of talisman against ghosts.
Anu is strangely frightened by her husband’s new gown and insists that he toss it into the garden, where she burns it.
While praying at his mother’s grave Nieh Yun Peng encounters a Taoist master, Taiyi. Taiyi can summon ghosts but he suspects that in this case he’s dealing with a very powerful ghost indeed.
Of course a complication is that ghosts don’t always know that they’re ghosts.
Twenty years earlier a woman was raped and murdered and there may be a connection. She may have come back looking for revenge. And she may be looking for revenge on certain members of Yun Peng’s family.
I always get a warm feeling inside when I see the Shaw Brothers logo come up at the start of a movie. Their movies were variable in quality but even their lesser films are at the very least interesting and enjoyable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Shaw Brothers movie that left me truly disappointed. And of course their movies were always visually interesting. Like all Shaw Brothers releases from this period The Bride from Hell was shot in Shawscope (their version of Cinemascope) and in colour - extremely vibrant colour.
I love Chinese ghost stories. They’re fascinatingly different from western ghost stories. Chinese ghosts can be malevolent or benign and they are corporeal. They can eat and drink, and they can engage in the pleasures of the flesh.
Unfortunately this movie really does turn out to be a bit of a letdown. The special effects are embarrassingly crude. Surprisingly for a Shaw Brothers film it looks cheap. The script is rather unfocused - we need to get to know Anu in order to care about what happens but too much time is spent on the comic subplots involving Yun Peng’s servant. It’s also a bit too obvious. Very early on we know exactly what is going on so there isn’t a great deal of dramatic tension.
The Bride from Hell was directed by Hsu-Chiang Chou who also helmed a slightly earlier Shaw Brothers horror film, the odd but intriguing The Enchanting Ghost (which is a much more interesting movie than this one).
88 Films in the UK have released this movie on Blu-Ray. The only extras are the liner notes by Calum Waddell and they’re mostly concerned with politics.
The Bride from Hell is a bit of a mess although it does have its spooky moments. It’s mostly worth seeing as an early example of Hong Kong horror which (aside from the comic relief with the servant) takes its subject matter fairly seriously. If you’re interested in Chinese ghost folklore then it’s possibly worth a look.
On the subject of Chinese ghost stories I reviewed Pu Songling’s fascinating early 18th century collection of such tales, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, not too long ago.
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