There are strange things going on all around you that you have no idea about. The life of the average man on the street can be far more mysterious than you could ever imagine. Or so the hero of Chiu Sin-Hang and Yan Pak-Wing’s nostalgic comedy Vampire Cleanup Department (救殭清道夫) realises on being co-opted into a top secret government anti-vampire squad after embarrassingly getting bitten on the bum by a creature of the night.
Tim (Babyjohn Choi) is a down-on-his-luck young man who was raised by his eccentric grandmother after his parents’ death and now assumes she has dementia because she continues to call him by his father’s name. All of his family members seem to have some association with rubbish, his grandmother collecting cardboard to alleviate their poverty, and Tim seems to have internalised a sense of himself being the same. Tim thinks his parents were regular street cleaners who were killed in an accident, only later finding out that they were part of the cleanup squad and everyone has been keeping this from him to keep him safe from vampires. Realising that he’s immune, however, after being bitten on the bum and feeling no ill effects beyond embarrassment, they decide he’s a prime candidate for injecting new blood into the team.
Though most obviously paying homage to classic hopping vampire movies such the Mr Vampire series several of the alumni of which are featured in the film, it also seems to have some spy movie influences with its small cell of operatives and Bond-esque vampire fighting gadgets while in some ways seeking to move on from the central Taoist mythology. Master Ginger (Yuen Cheung-yan) is apparently the only Maoshan Taoist left in Hong Kong. Part of Tim’s early training involves learning all of the various seals he uses to trap vampires but photoing them instead, while otherwise basically acting as a general dogsbody doing the team’s washing and other miscellaneous tasks.
Meanwhile, the gang is seemingly targeted by a shady rival organisation run within the local police force. Slimy policeman Chu (Jiro Lee Sheung-ching) is working with a foreign scientist who says that vampires are real, they’re just dead bodies infected with a virus that makes them move. He needs more samples to come up with a vaccine, and Chu seems willing to do whatever it takes to get them to him. A vaccine is eventually developed, but it is it seems homegrown in being taken from Tim’s blood which is immune to the toxin and developed through his parents’ sacrifice, which is perhaps a subversive hint of a grassroots organisation run by ordinary people like street cleaners standing up to an authoritarian external force that wants to stamp out their history and take away their power.
But at the same time, as all this has been kept from Tim, he has a hard time separating the “vampires” from the people they used to be, convinced that some of them can be rehabilitated and go back to being more like people. On his first case, he comes across a beautiful young woman (Lin Min Chen) who was apparently buried alive as a sacrifice to the landlord vampire, another hint at lingering feudalism and land profiteering in the contemporary era. Tim is moved by seeing what he thinks are tears, but turn out to be droplets leaking from the air conditioner. Nevertheless, he can’t bring himself to burn her as he’s been being taught to do so takes her home and starts looking after her until she eventually bonds with him and fights back against her former master.
Shedding his nerdy image by removing his glasses so he can see “properly”, the conclusion that Tim comes to is that vampires and human beings are much the same in that there’s good and bad everywhere. Sometimes it’s possible to turn an enemy into a friend and aim for peaceful co-existence, but at the same time a lot more youngsters have joined the apparently secret organisation to defend their streets from an evil external threat. Though a little more cute and cuddly than the films that inspired it, Vampire Cleanup Department does at least succeed in resurrecting the hopping vampire tradition for a new generation.
Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)
