The Spooky Family (1990)

Original title: 捉鬼合家歡

Hung Ping (Kent Cheng) is a wizard, exorcist and ghost hunter. Apparently, there’s not terribly much to do anymore in his kind of job, so he moonlights as a mad scientist, experimenting with the ghosts and jiangshi (hopping vampire) he seems to collect like Pokémon, all the while trying to cope with the chaos caused by his dropped on the head son (Cheung Lap-Kei). Why, just now he’s invented a machine with which a human should be able to control the body of a jiangshi! Because the family’s ghost servant (Peter Chan Lung) isn’t supernatural help enough, or something.

Bringing food on the table is Hung Ping’s wife (Pauline Wong Siu-Fung), adept at all kinds of Chinese fortune telling styles, though of a rather dominating temperament. Sometimes, their daughter (Alvina Kong Yan-Yin, I believe) substitutes there.

Things become rather more exciting for the family when a bunch of other wizards who hate our hero – for no reason the film ever bothers telling us – empower an already very powerful jiangshi (Kwan Kwok-Chung) of the “Copper Vampire” subtype (the best kind, we are informed) and put Hung Ping on the thing’s tracks. At first, Hung Ping and son manage to catch the thing, if with a lot of effort, but afterwards, the family seems to catch a real whiff of bad luck. As a matter of act, it’s magical bad luck caused by the jiangshi. Of course, the thing isn’t going to stay trapped forever either. Things become so bad, Hung Ping will even need the help of his “colleague sister” (Nina Li Chi). There’s a whole thing about the unspoken love between these two and the understandable jealousy of the wife, too. At least that’s the sort of problem easily solved in this time and place.

And if you now believe that Chin Yet-Sang’s Hong Kong horror comedy The Spooky Family plays any of this in a plot-centric manner, I’ve clearly gotten you quite confused. The post-Mr Vampire Hong Kong horror comedy genre isn’t terribly interested in plotting at the best of times, and in this particular case, the film is really a series of sketches, magical martial arts sequences and gags that uses the jiangshi business as a pretext for showing us all this rather than the film’s reason for being.

That’s not a bad thing in this particular case, for nearly every single scenes is pure Hong Kong style gold, full of bizarre ideas presented with greatest glee and joy, expectedly excellent wire and non-wire fu with choreography that hits the perfect spot between serious beat ups and slapstick, and an acting ensemble that does the physical parts with the same sharpness as the verbal comedy. They are so good at it, this is one of those comparatively rare Chinese language comedies where parts of the non physical comedy work for this non-Cantonese speaker, particularly when Pauline Wong and Nina Li get into it.

Also involved are various colours of magical light, Billy Lau in an absolutely hilarious cameo fight as Hung Ping’s old nemesis, “The Top Wizard”, using mostly gimmick variations of Western stage magic tricks and gadgets in his fights while dressed like a late 1980s pop star. It’s a thing to behold, but really just one of dozens of ideas and little and big jokes the film relentlessly throws at its audience: there’s the whole jiangshi remote control bit, the more traditional (for this kind of movie) binding and pin based fighting style of Colleague Sister, the literal magic of a happy family photo, a skit in which the Wife tricks a gang of really stupid cops, and so much martial arts slapstick of the highest order, only a dead person (sorry, jiangshi in my audience) could watch this one without laughing, and then laughing some more, and then contemplating why they don’t collect supernatural creatures.

The Trail (1983)

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

aka The Trial (which has as little to do with the movie as the other English language title)

Original title: 追鬼七雄

Revolutionary era China. A guy going by the nickname of Captain (Kent Cheng Jak-Si) and his cohorts are using a most excellent opium smuggling technique: Captain and his second Ying (Ricky Hui Koon-Ying) dress up as Buddhist monks while the rest of the gang pack the loot into belts, straps those on and dress up as jiang shi (also known as hopping vampires, or in the case of these subtitles, zombies, though they are not exactly either) the supposed monks are herding around. It’s a rather brilliant plan, truly.

However, one local evil potentate (Miao Tian) pays our heroes to take the corpse of what he tells them is his brother with them, for his brother, his main henchman explains, has died of leprosy, and getting his remains away as stealthily as possible is absolutely necessary to protect the village’s good reputation. It’s a lie, of course, and the old bastard is trying to cover up a murder. This lie and their own greed will cost our dubious heroes dearly after they have dumped the body in a sulphur pit.

For because the corpse has a score to the settle with the potentate, it returns to life right quick as a real jiang shi (not doing any hopping but all the more rotting) and starts killing animals and opium smugglers alike. Captain and his gang decide to destroy the thing (his whole-sale slaughter of the local population and one of their own is bad for business, or something), arming themselves with the urine of virgin boys and the traditional yellow charms. Things are not going to go well for them.

The style of Ronny Yu’s The Trail has much less to do with the later jiang shi classic Mr Vampire than I had expected, apart from this too being a horror comedy. The depiction of the monster is much more gruesome than the pale hopping gentlemen in traditional garb other films about its kind have made me accustomed to (and, as far as I know, it’s much closer to the depiction of the creatures in much Chinese folklore about them). It’s a rotting, shambling monstrosity that is pretty close to a zombie, just stronger, meaner, sometimes cleverer and definitely harder to kill – probably even when its enemies were more competent than our protagonists are.

As a comedy, this is a pretty dark one, with a group of morally suspect protagonists mostly doomed to die pretty horrible deaths and two survivors who will learn exactly nothing from what happened to them, the film’s epilogue showing them disguised as catholic priests selling fake possessions but of course stumbling into a pretty hilarious The Exorcist situation. The humour is Hong Kong standard, though pleasantly avoiding the greatest extremes of slapstick and random nonsense, keeping most of the jokes integrated into the actual plot. In a really surprising turn of events, I even found myself laughing about a lot of the funny business, certainly thanks to the chipper casts of guys we know and love from dozens of other Hong Kong films, but also because Yu as a director always was rather fantastic at the timing aspect of things, be it in comedy, action, or suspense.

The suspense scenes here in particular turn out very nicely, with many highly effective sequences of our hapless heroes trying to first catch, then avoid the jiang shi only to see things getting worse and worse with every well timed bad turn. Yu escalates their troubles with a rhythm one could probably dance to, sometimes building tension out of comedic elements (there’s some excellent business concerning the monster and frog voice imitations), at other times ending the tension with a laugh that actually does work as comic relief for once.

If that’s not enough for you, there’s also a nice underground tomb set, some adorable miniature work and the mandatory blue light to gawk at and enjoy, as well as a bit of decent kung fu and an absurdly unsubtle yet curiously effective synthesizer score.

In short: Vampire Buster (1989)

aka Ninja Vampire Busters

Original tile: 捉鬼大師

Mainland China. A horde of enraged fans of one Chairman Moa (that’s what the subtitles call him) – coming rather late to the Cultural Revolution - storms the house of Buddhist magician Cheung Sap Yat (Kent Cheng Jak-Si) to smash superstition. In practice, that seems to mean the furniture. Things nearly go too far when the – alas torchless – mob attempts to destroy a very special vase that holds a centuries-old black magician turned demon imprisoned. Cheung manages to prevent the smashing, but only by throwing the vase into the sea. You really couldn’t get away with this sort of thing in Chinese Hong Kong cinema now.

Anyway, the cursed things soon enough washes up in Hong Kong, where it finds its way to an auction house, and then into the possession of rich guy and city councillor Stephen Kay (Stanley Fung Sui-Fan). Thanks to the stupidity of fake fortune teller and fake feng shui expert Chan (Nat Chan Pak-Cheung), the demon is set free, possessing Kay and other members of his household – that also includes his mother (Hung Mei), his son (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau), his son’s girlfriend (Elsie Chan Yik-Si) and his own trophy girlfriend (Anglie Leung Wan-Yui) – on its way to doing Something Very Evil.

Fortunately, Cheung illegally immigrates to Hong Kong for some demon killing before the thing can get ideas like possessing Kay, becoming president of Hong Kong and building a wall on the border to Mexico.

On the scale of Hong Kong horror, or rather supernatural comedy, Stanley Siu Ga-Wing’s and Norman Law Man’s Vampire Buster (which doesn’t actually feature a vampire, be it Chinese or Western style), lands somewhere in the middle of the quality scale. It certainly isn’t a Mr Vampire, but it also isn’t one of those films that randomly stitch together supposedly funny scenes that aren’t, rape jokes and crap wire fu and pretends it’s all in good fun.

Rather, this is an actual movie with an actual plot, generally consistent characterisation (most characters are of course comedically cowardly, whereas comrade Cheung is of course an overweight badass surrounded by idiots), decently funny jokes – at least as far as I can make out through cultural distance and pretty bad subtitles – and perfectly okay filmmaking.


The last thirty minutes or so are even actually charming and fun, the film going through all the hallmarks of HK horror comedy and a bit of mild weird fu with genuine enthusiasm, providing lots and lots of blue light and dry ice fog while various people fly through the air, mystical glowing symbols are drawn on body parts, and various bodies are possessed by various spirits.

Past Misdeeds: Run and Kill (1993)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

"Fatty" Cheung (Kent Cheng) is not the luckiest of men. He might have a solidly running business selling gas, a doting mother, a loving little daughter and a pretty if costly wife (Lily Lee), but he's bound to lose all of it faster than he could have expected.

When Cheung comes home early on his wedding anniversary, he finds his wife having a bit of adulterous fun with a decidedly thinner and younger man than himself. Cheung is not the kind of man prone to violent outbursts, so he just protests limply that the couple really shouldn't do it in his living room and skitters away to get drunk.

That wasn't Cheung's best idea. When he's so drunk he really doesn't know what he's saying anymore, a girl named Fanny (Esther Kwan) talks him into getting a little payback on his wife. She knows the right man for the job, too.

Said right man is a member of a Vietnamese gang, and - showing the low standard of customer service in the gangster business - for him, a mumbled "she should be dead" by a drunk guy lying puking and crying in the gutter is an assassination order. He takes all of Cheung's cash as an advance payment and gets on his way.
Some time in the morning, Cheung, of course not remembering a thing, stumbles home only to find his wife and her boyfriend still at it. They're not doing it for long anymore, though, because a bunch of Cheung's gang "friends" break into the apartment, rape and kill the wife, kill the boyfriend and leave Cheung alive and ready to be arrested.

The Hong Kong police's Inspector Man (Danny Lee doing a guest stint in his usual role, but strangely abstaining from hitting anyone with a phone book) is sure that there's something fishy about the affair, but he can't prove anything, and Cheung isn't talking, so he lets the man go.

The police will turn out to be the least of Cheung's problems anyway. Turns out that the gang is rather enraged about his being in the apartment when they did the deed. They are even less pleased that Cheung can't pay what he owes them. Blowing up Cheung's gas business seems like a fine way to show that displeasure.

At that point, Cheung decides to go into hiding in a house he owns somewhere in what goes for the country in Hong Kong. As bad luck will have it, he finds it occupied by a gang of mainland Chinese gangsters. Those guys at least aren't too mean to him, though. As a matter of fact, Wah, the youngest of them, eager to distinguish himself as a hard guy like his brother Ching Fung (Simon Yam), even promises to help Cheung out with his problem with the Vietnamese.

Unsurprisingly, Wah's intervention doesn't end too well, leaving some of his colleague's dead, and Wah, Cheung and Fanny in the hands of their enemies. Ching Fung comes slaughtering to the rescue a bit later, but at that point, Wah is nearly dead from torture.

A bit later, he truly is dead, and Ching Fung is very, very angry and also quite insane. This can't end well for Cheung or his family.

Billy Tang has directed quite a few of these ripped-from-the-headlines Hong Kong CAT III crime films with a nasty bend, with Red to Kill probably his best known film. At first, I thought Run and Kill would be one of the more harmless films of its type, with just enough of sex and violence to give it Hong Kong's adult rating, but it turned out that the film's slow and harmless beginning was just Tang's way to produce an adequate drop height.

The further the film goes along the nastier its tone gets. It really isn't the way the violence itself is depicted that gets to you here, it is the nature of the violence itself. What happens to Cheung's daughter Pinky is one of the more shocking things I've ever seen in a film, even for the usually not very friendly world of CAT III cinema.

Much of the film's harsh emotional effect has to do with Tang's immensely tight direction. Apart from an absolutely useless scene with Lee that exposits about plans of the mainland gangsters which will have no import at all on the rest of the movie, Run and Kill wastes no time with scenes that have no importance for the growing sense of doom and desperation that permeates it.

The film is bathed in the typical cold blue of a 90s Hong Kong production, a cold light that is to the film and others of its kind what shadow is to the American noir.

In a sense, the noir seems like an apt comparison for Run and Kill and other of the more ambitious CAT III crime films. Tang's film and Hollywood's noirs share a sense of absurdity, a love of coincidences (or the believe in a malevolent universe) which make bad situations worse. And how noir is the film's basic story about a seemingly happy man losing everything through a mixture of his own stupidity and sheer bad luck?

Of course, there is one thing that divides a CAT III cinema like this and noir quite harshly: it is the way they relate to violence.

Where the Hollywood movies only imply violence and often use their thick shadows to hide it, the Hong Kong films go all out with it, sleazily wallowing in it. Sometimes this is surely out of pure exploitational instinct, but at other times, like in Run and Kill's particular case, I can't shake the feeling that this is very much a difference born out of a more honest nihilism in the Asian films. In a sense, the Hollywood noir wouldn't let go of a concept of morality (in part surely out of reasons of censorship, but only in part), admitting to the darkest sides of humanity and the world itself, yet still judging them as if there were a moral instance to be judged by and hoping as if there were something better to hope for.

CAT III has given up on that. You can't show a father having to watch his little girl burned to death and later running around cradling her charred remains and try to put a moral bend on it,  and Run and Kill never does. The film's nihilism runs much too deep to still put trust into a concept of hope. The still humanist "Look, isn't is sad and terrible?" of the noir has transformed into the simple command to LOOK.

Three Films Make A Post: When You're Cornered Like An Animal It's Kill Or Be Killed.

Vampire's Breakfast (1987): A very dead looking Western style vampire haunts the Hong Kong nights. Intrepid reporter Kent Cheng Jak-Si is on the case, when he's not taking fake vampire pictures or romancing Emily Chu Bo-Yee. For a Hong Kong horror film, this one's rather atypical, for there's neither an attempt to be as outrageous as possible nor lots and lots of mean-spirited humour (in fact, what there is of humour in the movie is of a rather good-natured kind). Unfortunately, there's also nothing to take the place of these more typical HK horror tricks, so there's really not much to talk about here, particularly since director Wong Chung isn't exactly exploding with imagination, visual or otherwise.

What's left is a mildly diverting movie that's entertaining enough for the ninety minutes of one's time it takes, but nothing more.

Apartment 1303 3D (2012): Look, I've got as much patience for shitty horror movies as the next guy, but there are certain things I find non-negotiable in a theoretically subtle horror movie about ghosts like this one. Unfortunately, this one, directed by Michael Taverna, is all kinds of dreadful, with no opportunity to be clever or just effective that isn't missed, numerous failures of timing and imagination, utterly dreadful dialogue, and a certain actress so bad, the script has her talking to herself instead of emoting. Well, that, or the script doesn't realize it doesn't need its actors to tell the audience what they are supposed to be feeling when they could, you know, act. It's difficult to decide which alternative is worse, and I don't really want to think about this one anymore than I already have, for life's too short for certain movies.

Shadow of Illusion aka Ombre Roventi (1970): Mario Caiano's film is what happens when you replace the satanic cult in your typical occult conspiracy horror film with an Egyptian-themed cult attempting to attain the power of Osiris by sacrificing a woman they take for Isis (Daniela Giordano), and let the resulting film take place in Egypt. It's a decent little flick with a bit too much Egypt tourism, and a rather meandering middle, but there's a lot of interesting temporal and local colour too gawk at. From time to time, Caiano even manages to stage a moment of inspired strangeness and surreality or two. It's a bit unfortunate that Shadow of Illusion is lacking in the tension department, or it could be a minor classic. As it stands, it's a peculiar sort of time capsule for fashion, fears and fascinations of its age.

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On WTF: Run And Kill (1993)

Sometimes, a cult movie fan just needs to watch a really unpleasant and deeply nihilist Hong Kong CAT III movie.

Sometimes, this cult movie fan finds that film, but also finds a better film than he expected. Read about this fascinating case in my write-up on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,billy tang,simon yam,kent cheng,crime,reviews,other places