by Linda Kay

Original Title: Qu mo jing cha

Directed by: Wei Tung

This review contains a Severe Kitty Carnage Warning!

Cat Out of the Bag Alert! This review contains some spoilers for this film!

Synopsis: Part of the Mr. Vampire series of films. Uncle Feng (Ching-Ying Lam) is a mainland Taoist police officer who has the talent to deal with evil supernatural entities. When a drug ring in Hong Kong starts utilizing zombies for their work, Uncle Feng is brought in to investigate, much to the chagrin of Sergeant Lam (Wilson Lam), the skeptical young man assigned to keep the unpredictable elder “magician” in tow.

Cat Burglar (Scene Stealer): Uncle Feng uses a spell on Lam’s partner (Michael Kiu Wai Miu) to trace the escape of one of the gang members named Eddie (Frankie Chi-Leung Chan). Eddie has run to the head of the gang, an evil Sorceress (Michiko Nishiwaki) who is sitting with a longhair white cat as her guards bring in Eddie.

The Sorceress rolls a red ball past the cat which Eddie tries to return but is stopped by one of the guards.

At this point the Sorceress twirls a flower which flies apart and a magic spell is performed where Eddie’s mirror image is transferred into the cat.

Kitty Carnage Warning! At this point things go really dark when the woman grabs the cat by the neck and starts throttling the poor animal. Eddie is also being choked as this happens.

The Sorceress then very loosely winds a bit of yarn around the cat’s neck, which immediately cuts off Eddie’s air.

The cat is then jerked up into the air by the yarn and is left dangling, struggling as it is being hung, while the same happens to Eddie. Thankfully the cat actor, while clearly not happy with what is happening, is dangling from a harness and not actually being hung by thr neck.

In the last shot of the scene Eddie is dead but the cat, while likely is supposed to also be deceased, is clearly alive hanging calmly in the harness in the background.

Understandably, certain shots from the scene with the cat were cut from some British releases of the film because of their strict policies against violence to animals on film. Thankfully scenes like this are no longer being tolerated in movies, but we really believe (and genually hope!) the cat actor was not subjected to any permanent harm during this particular movie shoot. The cat was also included in artwork created later for the film.

Final Mewsings: Next time you want to kill a guy, just kill the guy. Don’t involve the cat!

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