Set in the days of ravenous bandits, bloodthirsty bounty hunters and aggressively superstitious villagers, _A Chinese Ghost Story_ traces the steps of the one truly humble, honest man in the country: a feeble wandering debt collector. His modesty is so unusual that it sweeps the resident spirit of a haunted temple completely off her feet. Where she typically uses sex appeal to tempt bolder men to a grisly demise, the demure warm-heartedness of this new arrival is something different. Soon united by a strange sort of almost-love, the pair clash with her (literally) ghoulish family, confront a tentacled would-be suitor and rush to return her urn to its proper burial plot so she can find redemption in reincarnation.

Subtitle viewers beware: this mile-a-minute script doesn’t give us much time to lift eyes from the bottom of the screen. A lot of that is nonsense - our featured characters share a penchant for aimless rambling or nervous singing - but, if you’re like me, the threat of missing something important is impossible to ignore. We gain temporary respite during the wuxia-inspired action scenes, spontaneous floating fights which flash metallic glints and soft waves of fabric (not to mention decapitated heads) at regular intervals. Our protagonist is no warrior, though, which means much of our interest lies in escaping those battlefields, not dominating them. And then, naturally, it’s straight back to the long-winded vocal essays.

Both the story and the effects borrow liberally from _The Evil Dead_. There’s a supernatural entity in the basement, a breed of wrinkled, stumbling undead to fight... we even clash with a few evil, clutching trees. _A Chinese Ghost Story_ is more clearly out for laughs, though, at least in comparison to _Evil Dead_’s first chapter, and in that respect it’s rather graceless. Most jokes drag on for too long, especially in the exhausting first two acts. Fortunately, it rebounds in time for the bonkers final scenes set in the creeping gloom of the underworld. There, our senses are assaulted by an assortment of clever horror extremes: biting, floating heads, swords of fire and a hundred-foot tongue monster. It can feel like work to reach that payoff, but at least the effort isn’t a total waste.