88 Films' 88 Asia line brings to light another one of the Shaw Brothers' more earlier traditional ghost fare with their Blu-ray of THE GHOST LOVERS.

With young Lien-hua (Ching Lee, HAVE SWORD WILL TRAVEL) on her deathbed not long after her parents, her elderly former wet nurse Yuegui sends for Han (Wei Tu Lin, CORPSE MANIA), the young scholar to whom her charge was arranged to be married in childhood. Han does not arrive in time because he has been robbed, and his beaten body is discovered on the road by Zhangshiu who was once a servant of Han's family before his father was accused of slander and lost everything, forcing their move to the city. As Han recovers, he refuses to visit the home of Lien-hua since he was robbed of the silver he carried with him to pay back the loan taken from the family by his father. When news of Lien-hua's death reaches the town with a report that her father willed his estate to Han, imposters start showing up at the residence trying to make claims on the inheritance. Yuegui devises a way of rooting out the phonies by sending them to sit with Lien-hua's body. Fear overcomes some of them while her spirit animates her body to frighten off some (even frightening one to death when he gets handsy with her corpse). Zhangshiu and his wife hope to benefit from Han claiming his inheritance and are frustrated when he refuses to go without a means of paying back the loan as proof of his identity. Zhangshiu and his wife plot to murder Yuegui and steal the required amount of silver only to discover that Yuegui is already dead, having sacrificed herself to fulfill Lien-hua's dying wish of wedding Han and spending one night with him. While Zhangshiu and his wife try to convince Han that he has married a ghost, Lien-hua tries to convince him that she is still alive and Yuegui tells him that it is the couple who are lying. When Zhangshiu brings in a wandering shaman to attempt to exorcise the ghosts, Yuegui wreaks supernatural havoc on anyone who stands in the way of Lien-hua's happiness.

Made in the early seventies before the Shaw Brothers horror films embraced the excesses of BLACK MAGIC and KILLER SNAKES onwards, THE GHOST LOVERS is a rather old-fashioned ghost story with a light comic tone. The notion of repeated encounters with a ghost weakening a living being is not new, but Han would surely have died and been shown with some gory and gooey evidence of his unnaturally sickly state later on, just as the frights by Yuegui and Lien-hua exacted upon those who interfere would surely have taken on more than fright mask mugging. Bound for gory retribution in any other Shaw Brothers production would be Zhangshiu and his wife, who are instead here presented as more complex characters, greedy but also loyal to Han, succumbing to greed but genuinely remorseful when punished, even unable to figure out which one of them should die out of their love for one another when Yuegui threatens to kill one of them. The optical effects are superior to those of THE ENCHANTING GHOST and the film seems less stagebound in its exteriors. For casual viewers, the familiar story and its conventional wrap-up may be passable, while fans of the more grueling Shaw efforts may be groaning long before the end card brands it "Another Shaw Production."