CORPSE MANIA
CORPSE MANIA
dir. Kuei Chih-Hung, 1981
Hong Kong. 82 min.
In Cantonese + Mandarin with English subtitles.
Content Warning: sexual assault, necrophilia
A nineteenth-century period piece with equal debts to giallo stagecraft and the excesses of Nekromantik, Corpse Mania consistently flouts expectations over the course of its runtime: you might first mistake the film for a restrained police procedural until director Kuei Chih-Hung reminds you, in the least restrained way possible, that the subject of his film is a serial necrophile with less-than-stellar housekeeping habits.
In the true giallo fashion, however, things are not as simple as they seem, and the killer turns out to be only the center of a bizarre plot linking a constellation of figures from the Hong Kong underworld.