Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe (2015)

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe (2015)
Chinese Title: 九層妖塔
Translation: Nine-Story Demon Tower

Starring: Mark Chao, Yao Chen, Jin Chen, Li Feng, Tiffany Tang, Rhydian Vaughan, Wu Jun
Director: Lu Chuan
Action Director: Chen Jia-Fu

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe is one of those movies where the DVD box cover (and promotional poster) is a lot more exciting than the actual film. You have a cover with a bunch of attractive young people holding AK-47’s, plus a bald guy (that reminds me of a young Gai Chun Hwa) armed with a sword, with a kaiju-sized dragon looming over them in the background. Now *that* looks like an appealing fantasy adventure film. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what we get in the end.

The movie begins with a montage of important archaeological discoveries in China, including the discovery of a tomb in which the body inside is magically preserved, even after thousands of years. That particular find becomes the impetus for the creation of Bureau 749, the sort of outfit that Hellboy or Abe Sapien might work for. You know, when things go bump in the Mainland, they bump back? Their current investigation is in the Kunlun mountains, where soldiers are helping the scientists to excavate a cave in one of the mountains. This scene is particularly bizarre in an “only in the PRC” way, where we see young, attractive nurses singing patriotic songs to exhausted laborers in an attempt to keep them working. All that is interrupted by an “explosion” that takes several lives.

In the wake of the disaster, a team of volunteers is put together to investigate the cause of the disaster. Among the volunteers are our hero, Hu Bayi (Mark Chao, Young Detective Dee); Yang Ping, a young nurse (Yao Chen, Journey to the West: Demon Chapter); Yang Lin (Wang Qing Xiang, The Grandmaster and Red Cliff), the head scientist of Bureau 749; and Hu Bayi’s commanding officer (Hu Jun, of The Warring States). They head back into the cavern where the explosion had occurred and discover a new shaft, which leads to a great abyss. Carved into the walls of the abyss above them are statues of various gods, which makes for some neat imagery. Descending into the abyss, our heroes find an ice cavern, which leads to another exit from the mountain, into a snowy valley within the range.

The team come across the footprints of Something Humongous, but before they can find out what it is, they are beset by a horde of “fire bats,” which cause whomever they touch to become engulfed in blue flames until they are reduced to ashes. The Something Humongous turns out to be a dragon, which causes an avalanche to kill several more volunteers. Our heroes, while fleeing the avalanche, jump into another ice cavern, where the rest of the Expendable Meat die. By the end, the only survivors are the ones I mentioned by name.

They find a huge pagoda inside another cave, which Yang Lin identifies as the Demon Pagoda. In addition to housing some sort of demon, it also holds the secrets to the mythical “Ghostly Tribe,” the remnants of an alien race that once ruled the Earth before being defeated by Prince Yi thousands of years ago. Only a descendant of Prince Yi can enter the Pagoda, and lo and behold! Hu Bayi just happens to be a descendant. As they are opening the Pagoda, Hu’s commanding officer interrupts them, leading to a series of disasters that result in the officer’s death, the disappearance of the Yang family, and Hu almost getting burned to death. And this marks the end of the first act.

The second act is set three years later, where Hu Bayi has been released by duty. We learn that Bureau 749 is trying to recruit him (presumably), he ends up in the hands of Mr. Wang (Jerry Li Chen, of Saving General Yang and Aftershock). Mr. Wang manages a very special public library which, according to him, is full of the rarest manuscripts and tomes in China. Hu starts receiving correspondence in the form of books and articles by the late(?) Dr. Yang, where he learns about the Ghostly Tribe. Three years after that, we learn that Mr. Wang is the Guardian of the Tomb (of Prince Yi) and that Hu was infected with the essence of the Ghostly Tribe after he almost got incinerated by the fire bats. The Ghostly Tribe need him to open the Pagoda, and if that means sending demon-troll-werewolves into Xinjiang to ferret him out, that's what they'll do. Oh, and Yang Ping is back, now looking like a low-rent Shu Qi.

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe is a generally unsatisfying adventure film in the vein of Indiana Jones, mixing fantasy and science fiction (probably because overt supernatural elements would be censored by Mainland officials). There is too much going on and the backstory of the titular Ghostly Tribe is a bit too convoluted to really make sense or become compelling. The love story between Hu Bayi and Yang Ping is a little more effective, but Hu spends much of the movie being ineffectual and only becomes more proactive in the final third.

Moreover, much of cast isn’t onscreen enough for us to care about them. Almost everybody we meet, even briefly, in the first act is dead by the end of the first half hour. And then we meet a *new* expedition team in the last act, but we also don’t spend enough time with them to really care about their plight, so the script is basically telling us to care “because these people are young and attractive,” and that’s obviously not enough. Compounding that is the fact that several important characters, as in those who provide us with most of the exposition during the second act, disappear once the final expedition is under way, which constitutes bad writing by any metric. Having a second info dump after the climax drags out the denouement more than it should, too.

The technical side of the film is hit-or-miss. There is *a lot* of mediocre 90s-level CGI on display, as is wont to happen in these big budget Mainland films. We have avalanches and sandstorms—I half expected Arnold Vosloo’s face to appear in the sand during the latter sequence.  There are lots of floating objects that might’ve looked interesting in 3D, put just look fake and cheesy in regular HD. There is some beautiful photography--you cannot go wrong with Chinese mountain ranges and deserts. I also liked the sense of wonder and whimsy when the characters are exploring the caves in the first act. Too many "adventure" films have become excuses for big action set-pieces, but slack off in the adventure department.

The monsters fare the best. We have the aforementioned dragon that shows up in the first act, and then the final act is a running battle through a devastated town between our heroes and an army of giant werewolves. Those creatures looks a lot better onscreen than some of the other digital effects, so I’ll give them that. Too bad the script fails to explain what they actually are supposed to be in relation to the Ghostly Tribe. Some characters refer to them as demons, so I think they are the original creatures that came to Earth, some of which assumed human form, intermarried with our species, and became the Ghostly Tribe. But I'm not sure. They look pretty cool on screen, though.

The film has a credited “martial arts director”, Chen Jia-Fu, whose other major credit is Ameera, a horrid post-modern take on the Girls n’ Guns genre. But back to this movie: there are no actual martial arts to speak of. Even when shadow demons invade the royal library where Hu is working in the second act, and Hu’s boss pulls out a traditional sword, we don’t actually see any martial arts. Boring! The climax consists mainly of people fighting werewolf-troll monsters with assault rifles and RPGs, which is fun…but where’s the actual martial arts, people?

A follow-up to this movie, Bureau 748, was supposed to be released in China in 2019. Then it got pushed back to 2022, which is the current year at its HKMDB entry. Douban states that it's slated for release in 2026, but another article I read states that production finished this year (2024). Sadly, the plot synopsis I read suggests that this story will not be continued, instead focusing on the exploits of the bureau in the near-future. This saddens me, as Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe ends with a major plot thread—the disappearance of Dr. Yang Lin—unresolved, despite that being the reason for the entire third act in the first place! It also leaves the fate of Yang Ping ambiguous, which is also rather infuriating—she had a major role in the first and last acts, but we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen to her, if anything at all.

As it stands, Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe is mainly a big disappointment. The script needed a few edits, the CGI needed to be more consistent, and we needed some actual wushu on display. If you want a Chinese version of Indiana Jones, stick with the Operation Condor, some of those early Wisely movies, and Dr. Wei and the Scripture with No Words. This one tries, but doesn't quite make it.