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Because there are no more rooms in town, little rent collector Ning
(Zhao Lei) decides to spend the night at an abandoned temple that's
supposed to be haunted and from where nobody has returned - allegedly. He
is not a superstitious person though, and the first person he meets at the
temple, swordsman Yan (Yang Chih-Hing), who has been staying at the temple
for weeks without being harmed, only seems to reaffirm him. Then he meets
a lovely girl Xiaoqian (Betty Loh Ti) in another wing of the temple, and
before he knows it, the two have fallen in love and he has written a poem
onto a picture she has painted. Sure, her granny (Tang Rhoqing) chases him
away to guard her granddaughter's innocence, but there's nothing
particularly weird about that, right? Ning only starts second-guessing
the events of the night before when he finds Xiaoqian's picture at a shop
in town, and the shopkeeper tells him he has had it for ten years, was
given it by a girl who later died for safekeeping - but he has no
explanation how Ning's poem got onto the painting. That night, some more
travellers stay at the temple, but they all turn up dead, and Xiaoqian
shows up in Ning's room to warn him that her granny wants to kill him
later on - and he is saved only by swordsman Yan. Ning makes some
investigations about Xianqian and finds out that she really has died 10
years ago, and now acts as bait for granny, a carnivorous demon, and the
only way to save her would be to bury her in her native soil - so Ning
searches, finds and unearths her skeleton to bring it back to her hometown
... but he soon has to realize he is pursued by granny every step along
the way, and when he has almost made it, she blocks his way and prepares
to kill him ... but Yan interferes again, and he fights granny until
daybreak, when she is weakened enough for him to kill her and save the day
... Though I'm not one who likes to compare films to other,
more recent films in my reviews, I feel compelled to do so here anyways,
so here goes: The Enchanting Shadow is of course an earlier version
of the later, more famous A
Chinese Ghost Story - but while the later film is a triumph of
kinetic cinema, The Enchanting Shadow is much more on the stagey
side and is rather lacking in action. And in diret comparison, I have to
admit A Chinese Ghost Story
is the more entertaining, more imaginative and ultimately better film. That's
not to say The Enchanting Shadow is pure garbage though, it's just
more of a traditional, studio-bound period romance with ghost story
elements thrown into the mix - definitely nothing to set the world on
fire, granted, but ok genre entertainment if you're into that sort of
thing.
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