The Ghost Snatchers (1986)

Original title: 俾鬼捉

Thanks to the help of his libidinously overactive uncle Fan Pien-Chou (Stanley Fung Sui-Fan) somewhat shlubby, chubby Chu Bong (Wong Jing – yes, that Wong Jing) has gotten a job in a new high-rise. Why, it’s even the same building his girlfriend Hsueh (Joey Wong, which isn’t exactly the actress I’d cast as a guy’s girlfriend if I want to sell him as a loser, because clearly, something must be pretty right with him) is working in, so things do seem to look up for now.

Unfortunately, the building has been built on an execution ground from the time of the Japanese occupation during World War II and is about the most haunted place imaginable, so soon, Chu Bong, Fan and Hsueh have various troubles concerning the building ghost king’s plan to finally gather enough victims to be reincarnated (and lead Japan back to imperial glory). Chu Bong and Fan are in particular danger because their horoscope is especially wrong for the place; as luck will have it, though, Hsueh’s sister – I think, she could also be an aunt given the quality of the subtitles – Ling (Joyce Godenzi) is a feng shui expert and Taoist mage, so all might not be lost (except for the future of imperial Japan).

The Ghost Snatchers’ director Lam Nai-Choi (or whichever version of his name you want to use, because he’s got a bunch of them) is one of my unsung heroes of Hong Kong filmmaking during the 80s, a guy with a surprisingly diverse portfolio of films when you keep in mind he only directed thirteen at all, and quite a talent for very different genres, from weird fu masterpiece The Seventh Curse, over the excellent rape revenge piece Her Vengeance to this cute bit of HK horror comedy.

Now, The Ghost Snatchers is probably one of the director’s lesser films, with a structure so episodic it lets The Seventh Curse look like the tightest film ever made (and a plot that is much more meandering than my write-up suggests mostly because I left out oh so many details one really doesn’t need to know to understand the gist of the film), and its lack of any character who’d make a true anchor for its plot.

This doesn’t mean the film isn’t hugely entertaining in its own way. Like many of Hong Kong’s horror comedies of the period, it changes emotional tone from one scene to the next, going from mild stupidity through complete absurdity to outright horror, with more than just a few moments of typical ickiness – of the last, we get an exploding head, a ghost who rips his own beating heart, followed by its eyes, out, and other delights, of the first a “mah-jongg ghost” embodied by a perfectly ridiculous hand doll.

These things leave little room to base much of what’s going on in the characters, so everyone is a one-note caricature: Fan is horny yet kind, Chu Bong dumb yet loveable, Hsueh is Joey Wong and a virgin, Ling the modern female magician having to cope with the trouble of having a period (which is a plot point, of course), and so on. Nobody changes, and nobody learns anything because everyone’s only there to provide an opportunity for Lam to show the audience crazy, icky stuff and make (generally low-brow) jokes. Some of the jokes, like Fan’s funeral speech at the funeral service of Hsueh’s brother, are even very funny.

And when it comes to the weird stuff, Lam delivers the goods. Apart from the Mahjongg ghost, there’s also a TV ghost trying to bore one of our heroes to death and growing a pair of naked, hairy legs out of its TV when his victim tries to flee; a climactic fight against a rickety skeleton you need to see to believe; detours like the hunt for three of Fan’s ten souls (don’t ask me, I’m German) that can be found in his favourite places, like a bordello and a porn cinema; and for the finale a hellish pocket dimension mostly made out of papier-mâché, red fluids, dry ice smoke and the traditional (and always excellent) red and blue lights of supernatural Hong Kong. Also, there’s a grabby giant hand doing its grabby giant hand thing. And so on, and so forth, without much time for thought, and most certainly without any pause that could leave the audience bored or (much, much worse) thinking too much about what’s going on.

So, screw “lesser film”, this is actually grand entertainment in the 80s Hong Kong style I sorely miss.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,reviews,comedy,horror,lam nai-choi,wong jing,joey wong,stanley fung sui-fan,joyce godenzi

In short: Naked Killer (1992)

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not an admirer of the horrible Wong Jing. The man's general attitude towards movie making, which can be summarized with "I don't care enough to make an effort", just rubs me the wrong way. Additionally, unlike the man, I don't think rape jokes are very funny.

But I've always made an exception for the Wong Jing written and produced Naked Killer, for it is a movie that shows what can happen when the frightful man does bother to apply himself. It's not as if the script for this one made that much more sense than anything else Wong Jing has written, but it does at least tell a story with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end, instead of playing out as what feels like random scenes from different movies haphazardly stitched together, which is the usual Wong Jing feel. Furthermore, while Naked Killer takes place on a planet where traumatized hero cops begin to puke whenever they touch a gun (and suffer from erectile dysfunction only looking at Chingmy Yau can cure, but let's not go there), other cops are named "Dickhead", where part of the killer training consists of getting locked up in a pop art cellar with a chained rapist, and where people dress in the awesome primary-coloured (remember when movies had colours?) things the actors wear here, the crazy for once does make just enough sense to be entertaining. It's like the adaptation of a men's adventure novel about a killer where all the testosterone-y men have been replaced by women. The audience of this sort of thing (hullo Mum!) does like after all two things the most: ridiculous violence and staring at sexily clad women; as Carrie Ng's character here would agree, there's no need at all to feature men at all. Though Naked Killer is at least trying to cover all its bases by also featuring a Simon Yam masturbation scene.

A lot of what's fun about Naked Killer - and it's really a very, very fun movie - I blame on director Clarence Ford. Ford has the early 90s HK aesthetic down to an art, featuring the expected mix of blue light, fast edits and Evil Dead-inspired camera work most directors working for Wong Jing always seem to bored or tired (now, what happens in Jing's production house, inquiring minds want to know) to use consistently or as exhilarating as Ford does here. If people aren't fighting, there is - of course - more footage of Ng, Yau, Yiu Wai and Yam in ridiculous poses that often look like an alien's idea of sexiness to me than any sane person could ask for, giving the film an overheated mood as if nobody involved could think about anything but sex, even when thinking of sex seems totally inappropriate in a given context. In part, we can thank a "no breasts" clause in Yau's, Ng's, and Yiu Wai's contracts for the film's ridiculous imagination when it comes to the sexiness; it is, it turns out, possible to turn anything into softcore.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,wong jing,clarence ford,chingmy yau,simon yam,carrie ng,yiu wai,action,exploitation

Evil Cat (1987)

For four-hundred years, the male members of the Cheung family have battled the same evil cat spirit every fifty years, reducing it to the last of its nine lives by virtue of their special males only magic and kung fu.

It's good that the cat is on its last life, too, for there's only one male descendent of the Cheung's still alive. Master Cheung (Liu Chia-Liang) has only been able to produce a daughter (boo! hiss!), TV reporter Siu-Chuen (Joann Tang Lai-Ying) before his wife died, and will now have to face the evil cat all by himself, unless he finds a pupil and adherent to teach his technique too. No, I don't understand why a random pupil would be enough when the film's always going on about descendants, but then, this was written by Wong Jing.

When evil Kitty re-awakens, it kills a few people and possesses the body of Hong Kong entrepreneur Mr. Fan (Stuart Ong), making Cheung's job all the more difficult. After all, who will believe an older gentleman of doubtful sanity that a local rich guy is possessed by a murderous cat spirit? Fortunately, Kitty itself isn't much for secrecy, and shows its demonic nature to Fan's chauffeur Long (Mark Cheng Ho-Nam) by jumping into Fan's private fountain and eating a fish while making cat noises. Afterwards, Kitty tries to kill Long and his mother, but only manages to drive Long into the arms of Cheung (who had already met Long in a moment of Wong Jingian random chance).

Cheung's pretty happy with that part of the situation, because now he has a willing pupil and a potential husband for his daughter all in one person. Now there's only the problem of destroying the cat spirit forever while trying not to get arrested by the cop investigating the cat killings, Handsome Wu (hide your daughters! It's Wong Jing in person!).

With Evil Cat, horror and exploitation specialist director Dennis Yu joins forces with the horror known as Wong Jing, and somehow manages to squeeze a watchable film out of the anti-master's script.

Yu is helped by the surprising state of Wong's script, namely that it's not quite as terrible as the man's usual written output. That's not to say that Wong produced something all that coherent or sensible, it rather means the film makes somewhat more sense than the writer/producer/director/actor's usual output. The relative (there is a bit more randomness and people acting like idiots than I like in the film) dearth of random, lazy short cuts in the film's plot might even hint at the unthinkable - Wong Jing may actually have been trying.

Of course, Wong Jing being Wong Jing, his mere presence on and off screen also means that Evil Cat contains a handful of scenes of perfectly humourless humour - in something that may be irony all including Wong Jing as an actor -, a bit of vomiting, some minor (again, for Wong Jing) misogyny and the completely inevitable rape scene when the evil cat has to seek a new host in form of Mister Fan's personal assistant. Well, at least this time around the rape is committed by a blue cartoon swirl, and not played for laughs, which lets it beat eighty percent of all Wong Jing rape scenes for tastefulness.

If I'm leaving the impression here that (to put it mildly) I still don't care for Wong Jing's work at all, that's absolutely true. But hey, unlike with ninety-nine percent of the guy's other films, I actually enjoyed watching Evil Cat, though most probably for the elements Dennis Yu and Liu-Chia Liang added.

Liu-Chia Liang's contribution is twofold. Firstly, he's upstaging his younger, mostly horribly bland acting colleagues, by the virtues of screen presence, charisma and dignity even when he's acting silly in each and every scene he's in, and makes these scenes magically three times better than they were without him. It's quite fortunate that he's in most of the film.

Secondly, the veteran is also responsible for the film's action direction, providing a bit of elegance and excitement and bringing out the true spirit of weird fu from time to time. I also have to say that Liu himself looks incredibly fit for a man aged 51 in his fights.

Dennis Yu's direction is mostly pretty inconspicuous here, not distractingly bad, not overtly exciting, but at least the director does provide his audience with some excellently ridiculous monster effects and cartoon swirls, and that's exactly what the film needs.

Say what you will about me, but never let it be said I'm not appreciating a director who has no compunction against repeatedly showing us actors acting possessed by crouching on all fours, baring their teeth, jumping around and making pathetic attempts at cat noises, or using something I'll just have to call cat fu.

And that's before the cat spirit's final transformation comes into play: hair metal cat, a creature so absurd that I found it utterly impossible to dislike the film it's appearing in, Wong Jing or not.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,reviews,horror,comedy,dennis yu,wong jing,liu chia-liang,joann tang,mark cheng,chui suk-woon

In short: Satan Returns (1996)

Original title: 666 Mo Gwai Fuk Wut

aka Devil 666

aka Satan's Return

aka Shaolin vs. The Devil's Omen

Hong Kong, 1996. A guy and host of a demonic entity subtly named Judas (Francis Ng) is desperately looking for Satan's daughter. He only knows that she must have been born on the 6th of June 1969, so he wanders around the city, "testing" the devilishness of women with the appropriate birthdate by cutting their hearts out. Satan's daughter, you see, would live on without one.

Fortunately, even the HK movie police realizes that the killings are the work of a serial killer, so they put the homicidal cop Nam (Donny Yen) and his band of incompetents on the case. Because she has grown up as an orphan under the tutelage of the Catholic church, internal affairs officer Chan Shou-Ching (Chingmy Yau) who was just starting an investigation into the dubious human rights record of Nam, is helping out on the case, which turns out to be especially useful when Judas activities begin to concentrate on her.

During the course of the investigation, Chan starts to suffer first from oh-so-mysterious nightmares, then from personality changes, and then begins to have little chats with the off-screen voice of Satan, who seems quite positive that she's his daughter and will soon awaken to her heritage. And he just might be right.

What happens to Chan does of course mean that the whole murder series the film's plot is based on makes no sense at all, and that all Satan's forces would need to do to win the day would be to just wait until their big daddy's daughter comes into her own, but what can you expect from a script written by Wong Jing? "Written" seems like a very strong word for this thing anyway. I suspect that the scriptwriting process consisted of Wong Jing taking the scripts of Seven and one or two of the movie's rip-offs, and those of a few Omen-style horror films, ripping out random pages, throwing them in the air and then randomly stacking them together again, adding scribbles like "add Donnie Yen's showcase #1 fight here", "add tit joke #353 here" and "needs more incompetence". On the positive side, he forgot to add his trademark rape jokes.

So yes, Satan Returns is hardly what one would call coherent (or, if one has a grumpy day "a movie"), but just a random conglomeration of crap that just happened to land in the same script and then got directed with distractible nervousness by a directorial non-entity named Lam Wai-Lun (who seems pretty excellent at self-sabotage and even manages to ruin Yen's two and a half theoretically awesome fight scenes by more obfuscating than staging them).

Fortunately for my mood, some of the crap the film consists of is pretty funny - I always love the HK interpretations of Christian theology - and/or so merrily insane that it's impossible to argue with the film's will to entertain. I mean, how many serial killer/satanist movies are there in which one of the cop's plans fails because they're distracted from watching a colleague playing decoy by the aftereffects of painful flirting attempts over the decoy's hidden microphone and the following shouting match with a colleague (I said these people are incompetent, right?). Plus, the grand finale has Donnie Yen crucifying the enthusiastically scenery-chewing Francis Ng. And if that's not a reason to watch a movie, I don't know what is.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,horror,action,chingmy yau,donnie yen,francis ng,wong jing

Black Ransom (2010)

A series of kidnappings of mid-level triad bosses is being committed in Hong Kong. The perpetrators are a group of ex-cops led by Sam (Michael Miu), a man with a character-defining trauma so generic I refuse to explain it here and see themselves as doling out some sort of vigilante justice while making a lot of money before killing their chosen victims. The kidnappers count on the fact that the families of their victims will rather pay a princely sum to get their loved ones back than go to the police as well as the fact that the police won't look too hard for disappeared gangsters.

Sam's plan works well enough until someone does go to the police with a kidnapping in progress. At first, his tight-knit gang has no trouble dealing with the attention, but after a major fiasco, the new Chief of the Organized Crime Unit, Madame Koo (Fala Chen), puts her trust into the aging cop Mann (Simon Yam). Mann hasn't been allowed to carry much responsibility for a long time now. The cop liked his relegation to the back ranks because it afforded him time to nurse his own character-defining trauma, but once he has gotten on Sam's trail, he proves himself to be exactly the man Madame Koo has hoped for.

Little does he know that his character-defining trauma and that of Sam are the responsibility of the same man, and little does the film try to explain what the motives of the gangster responsible for inflicting said traumata were. After all, this is a Wong Jing movie, and ridiculous coincidences are much easier to come up with than proper plot development.

Black Ransom was shot in 2008 but only came into Hong Kong cinemas at the beginning of this year, very atypical for a movie made in the city. At first, this factoid frightened me a little. How bad, I thought to myself, must a film be so that Wong Jing doesn't want to see it released? The film's first thirty minutes seem to suggest that a film must be solid and watchable to achieve this special sort of treatment by the producer/director/writer/fan of rape jokes, but the threat of a film that is actually good in the way people less inclined to follow the ways of pain in a movie than I am use that word dissolves soon after. A bit later, and every major development in the film's plot begins to depend on pure, mindnumbingly idiotic chance and/or the utter stupidity of its characters. The latter is especially problematic when one keeps in mind that Yam's and Miu's characters are supposed to be genius level cops and robbers.

I wouldn't complain too loudly about its non-script if the film was trying to be a silly, fast action movie that lives by its ability to produce visceral thrills, but for some reason Wong Jing seems to think he's making a film about the moral and intellectual duel between two intellectual manly man who have more in common than they would ever admit (and where oh where have I heard that one before?). In this context, much of the film's plotting and characterization has the stink of a laziness that tries to hide behind melodramatic posturing, as if emotional weight could be won simply by telling the audience it's there.

This notwithstanding, I can't say I didn't feel entertained by Black Ransom. It might have been the very un-Wong-Jing-like absence of rape "jokes" and rape sequences, or Simon Yam's highly ironic (or is it post-ironic?) performance as a cop seemingly based on the Alec Guinness version of Obi Wan Kenobi, or the increasing absurdity of the script's refusal to do anything beyond heaping stupid coincidence on even more stupid coincidence, or it might even have been the pretended gravitas of it all, in any case I spent most of my time watching Black Ransom giggling like a loon.

I don't think that was the reaction Wong Jing had in mind, but it's the one he got out of me.

 

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