Horrible Mansion in Wild Village (with “Mansion” spelled as “Masion” in posters and credits), is a shockingly amateurish little horror film in which a reckless young biker (Cai Juntao) has an accident and ends up seeking help in a decrepit old mansion inhabited by a little girl (Jia Lin) and her stern grandmother (Kara Hui). And a terrifying and mysterious horned creature. And a mute girl locked up in the attic. From this familiar but decent premise, director Lu Shiyu makes his film an endless – though only 80 minutes long – series of shrieky nightmare sequences (the main character wakes up with a jolt roughly once every two minutes), ham-fisted flashbacks and trite stalking scenes. The mansion set is effective (though you can easily picture the director yelling “more cobwebs! I want more cobwebs!”) and Kara Hui, who has probably never phoned in a single performance in her career (more than 150 films), is suitably creepy, but the laughable and repetitive script keeps tension low, and resorts to the mother of all lame twists in order to make its overt supernatural elements palatable to Chinese censorship. Mainland Chinese horror has no high points yet, but it does have a new low point. 1/2*

Chan Pang Chun’s Daughter is that rare Hong Kong horror film that features a Catholic – rather than Taoist – exorcism. It stars Kara Hui as Sharon, a successful psychologist who’s raising her teenage daughter Jenny (Yanny Chan) alone, but has been neglecting her for a while, all the while being a control freak when it comes to her future. But as the usually despondent Jenny starts acting increasingly defiant and strange, Sharon herself is plagued with horrific nightly visions, and she decides to call on the help of a priest (Kenny Wong). Daughter seems to have been helmed by two different directors: one who lets the dread sink in, favors creepy wide angle shots over close-up jump scares, and relies on Kara Hui’s intense and affecting performance rather than on CGI demon faces; and another who soon gets the upper hand, and who seems more concerned with regurgitating every single cliché linked to the subgenre of exorcism films, culling especially from William Friedkin’s seminal 1973 film. Beds will quake, innocent girls will talk in a demonic voice, pea soup will be vomited, priests will be flung across the room by unseen forces, and so on. You know the drill. There’s a half-decent twist at the end, but even at 80 minutes the film feels interminable. **