international horror scene with Black Magic in the mid-'70s, legendary Hong Kong-based studio Shaw Brothers kept 
trying to outdo itself with a string of supernatural freak-outs that climaxed in the early '80s. Drawing on both Western genre hits and local lore while often exploiting the increasingly lax censorship with sex and nudity, these films often didn't get much exposure abroad but have gained appreciative audiences thanks to home video and repertory screenings. Three fine, mahjong-heavy representative examples can be found in the 2025 Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray set Shaw Scares Vol. 1, a sampler of the studio's output in the first four years of the 1980s outside of the more familiar shockers like Seeding of a Ghost. 
yarns like The Shining, The Exorcist, and Poltergeist.
here, especially when the film stops cold for a few minutes for a bizarre striptease sequence that has to be seen to be believed. It doesn't go for the gross-out as much as some of the more notorious Shaw films from this period, but there's more than enough horror content to make this a solid party choice with friends. For whatever reason this one was pretty tough to see for a long time, only getting a VCD release from Intercontinental during the initial flood of Shaw titles from Hong Kong; eventually it ended up on Blu-ray from Imprint in Australia in Shaw-Shock: Shaw Brothers Horror Vol. 1 (along with Seeding of a Ghost and The Oily Maniac) taken from a dated master and featuring a commentary by Dylan Cheung and a video appraisal by Victor Fan. As with the other films in the set, the Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray comes from a fresh 4K scan from the original negative featuring the original theatrical credits and audio with no tinkering. It looks gorgeous with excellent detail and very vivid colors, and the Cantonese DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono audio sounds great with improved optional English subtitles included. (As with the other two films here, no English dub was ever created). The one extra here is a very packed audio commentary by Samm Deighan whose enthusiasm for the film is infectious as she sorts through the crazy plot, the depiction of 1940s Japan in Hong Kong cinema, 
the family and 
sexual relationships at play, and numerous other Shaw films connected to this one. 
magic grotesqueries that had largely defined Shaw horror by this point, it doesn't skimp on the gag reflex moments either including a 
bit involving a toilet guaranteed to stick in your memory forever. This is another one that's been largely under the radar for a long time if you missed out on the 2007 Hong Kong DVD from Intercontinental (which had English subtitles), so the Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray is going to be quite the revelation for a lot of horror fans who won't be ready for what hits them. Again the quality here is superb with excellent detail throughout; some flickering water damage is evident in one reel but isn't enough to spoil things, and the wild color gel lighting looks great. Again the Cantonese mono DTS-HD MA 2.0 audio is pristine, and the English subtitles will frequently make you do a double take. The always reliable Frank Djeng offers a new audio commentary in which he covers some of the superstitions involved here, the influence of Dario Argento and the Omen films, and the director's background, plus a lot more. In "To Hell with the Devil" (30m50s), screenwriter and assistant director Lawrence Cheng chats in English about his lifelong love for movies, his job as a disc jockey that led to his work in the movie industry, and his affinity for writing horror movies despite his difficulty 
watching them. 
Finally on the third disc we get 1980's Haunted Tales, which started as a feature film called The Ghost by Chor Yuen that was left unfinished and later planned to be completed as Hellish Soul, eventually ending up as the one-hour vignette we have here. Grafted on to turn the project into a two-part anthology is the 39-minute remnant of another abandoned film by Mou Tun-Fei, The Prize Winner, which was obviously made later and goes to far freakier lengths with the idea of a conjured fox spirit wreaking havoc on the lives of a group of friends. The first tale involves the highly unfortunate new living situation for the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Chow, whose countryside house comes with two very strange neighbors, inexplicable graves, and a guy missing an eye who keeps lurking around the property. Then in tale two, a party game involving a saucer and summoning the dead turns out to be a very bad idea for apartment manager Ah Shing who gets a winning lottery number and a whole lot of trouble for himself and anyone in the building when it comes with a price higher than he can pay. The latter story is so out of control you can't help but imagine how it would have played out at feature length, including a show-stopping sequence involving a prostitute and a glass table guaranteed to bring down the house.
lighting with a couple of bloody shocks, and of course the tonal dissonance here goes with the territory for something that's a lot closer to Night Train to Terror than Amicus. Plus you get a crazy library music soundtrack mainly culled from Italy (including some nice Armando 
Trovajoli), thankfully preserved here intact as with the prior films. This one also went the VCD route early on from Intercontinental in 2006 and got little attention since until this release, which obviously look exponentially better here with another lustrous restoration from the negative. This time the commentary honors go to the Unsung Horrors podcast's Lance Schibi and Erica Schultz who are clearly having a good time talking about child kills in cinema (the topic of Erica's book, The Sweetest Taboo), the patchwork history of the film, the extensive filmographies of pretty much everyone involved, and their other favorite Shaw titles. In "Adapting Liminal Home into Haunted Tales" (12m12s), screenwriter Alex Cheung and singer-actor Teddy Robin sit down together to talk about the collaborations leading up to this project, the commercial demands of Shaw Brothers, and random silliness. Also included is a 40-page book featuring the essays "The Shaw Brothers Horror Movie That Was Resurrected from the Dead" by John Charles about Sex Beyond the Grave and "Unfinished Business: The Shaw Brothers Guide to Completing Incomplete Films" and "Ghosts, Gore and Gu: Hell Has No Boundary and the Birth of Hong Kong Horror Films" by Keith Allison.