Film · 1980 · Films · 1980s
Encounter of the Spooky Kind
Scored from 26 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Cheung is a rickshaw-puller in a village in Republican-era China, known for accepting any dare and easy to goad because of it. His wife is sleeping with the wealthy Master Tam, who wants him dead and hires the Taoist sorcerer Chin Hoi to arrange it, beginning with a bet that Cheung can pass a night alone in an abandoned temple with a coffin. When the corpse gets up, Cheung has to find a rival priest to counter the spells aimed at him, and the two magicians end up fighting each other through his possessed body. Written and directed by its star, Sammo Hung, this Cantonese film blends kung fu, slapstick and hopping-corpse folklore, and is credited with launching Hong Kong's jiangshi horror-comedy cycle.
Released in 1980, Encounter of the Spooky Kind is an action, comedy and fantasy film. It plays in Cantonese. Its country of origin is listed as Hong Kong.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,140 1980s films, not against the whole corpus. Only 26 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 26 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Encounter of the Spooky Kind lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 26.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
