Like a bad episode of Hef’s Playboy After Dark, Erotic Ghost Story tries desperately to be titillating but instead only makes you giggle. Wrapped around the loosest of plots, the film follows the sexual exploits of a trio of sisters who are in reality “fox fairies.” Seeking to maintain their human forms, they must help mankind and stay relatively chaste in the bargain. When they run into a mysterious, reclusive scholar in the woods near their house, they one by one begin to seduce him and eventually they find their burgeoning humanity in jeopardy (How do they know it’s in jeopardy? Why, the fox hair sprouting on their breasts, of course!). Many, many lingering close-ups of the girls’ ample bosoms might seem to make this a must for fans of Russ Meyer’s films and patrons of the Hooters restaurant chain, but for the rest of the populace, it’s a long-winded, tedious exercise in ennui. And when the scholar in question turns out to be none other than Wu Tung, the mischievous god of carnal desire, well, things just go from bad to worse. A three-faced entity with oodles of weeping sores and giant claws, Wu Tung proceeds to rape and eat a girl he finds in the woods before going to do battle with the sisters and their unlikely savior, a magical shaolin priest. What’s going on here? You tell me: Thanks to Nam’s less-that-delightful cinematography and some of the most unerotic sex scenes I’ve ever seen, I’ve already forgotten. So will you.
This article appears in August 12 • 1994 (Cover).