Made four years after the original, this sequel is in many ways even loonier and Buñuel-like than Midnight Song.
The hideously scarred Song Danping - last seen jumping from a burning tower into the sea - turns out to be still alive, wandering the landscape like Manfred (cue Tchaikovsky's symphony) in search of his lost love, Li Xiaoxia. In a flashback we learn how he was taken by a mad doctor to a laboratory in the bowels of a castle, where he was promised a new face and barely escaped with his life. Back in the present, Song determines to find Li (who is grieving in bed, remembering their happy times together) but en route gets cau-
ght up in the anti-Japanese war effort in Shanghai.
The film is a glorious melange of Gothic horror, Chinese melodrama and anti-Japanese war propaganda that takes a while to get going (with its slow 20-minute opening) but makes up for it thereafter. The acting is fractionally better than in the original, with new leads: Tan Ying, who worked several times with Maxu during the '40s, plays Li, and Liu Qiong, who went on to become a director in China during the '50s and '60s, plays Song. Most memorable of all, however, is Hong Jingling as the grotesque doctor, with a beaky nose, hunched back, and teeth worthy of Dracula.
Derek Elley