mosquitodragon’s review published on Letterboxd:
HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon
Movie 29
4th of 8 films from 1981
I'm not going to claim Corpse Mania is the greatest Asian horror film I've ever seen. I don't think it's a patch on Kueh Chih-Hung's indescribably demented The Boxer's Omen. It sags into a mass of its own meandering weirdness in large chunks of its runtime. But I'm still going to try and sell it to you.
Imagine a Hong Kong giallo complete with cloaked, gloved, sunglass-wearing killer. His victims are generally young women. However, because this is a Kueh film after all and he never likes to do anything without a healthy dollop of bizarre gruesomeness, add in a huge element of necrophilia. Very maggotty necrophilia at that (although those look like meal worms and earthworms, which are probably wriggling around on those bodies in great consternation - human bodies being the last place they want to be. Then again, lying motionless and naked under a mass of worms is probably the last place those actresses wanted to be. Sometimes, in this game, no one wins.)
For all that Kueh films make you wonder if the guy was strictly sane, he definitely had a talent for shooting striking and beautifully composed images which placed him a cut above his Hong Kong peers. Corpse Mania looks lovely (just wanted to string those words together, but it does look great).
This is one for fans of weird cinema but I think giallo fans who are interested in how other national cinemas tried their hand at the aesthetic will find this film quite interesting. Its uneven pacing is hardly unusual for a Hong Kong film, but I can assure you the ending ramps things up very nicely indeed, so this is a general recommend from me.
Hard to procure, but there's a very decent scan on Youtube - accessible via the link below:
