He Lives By Night is what you get if you mix a giallo movie with a Hong Kong comedy, the film combining stylish, mean spirited murder scenes (the killer using a retractable craft knife before strangling his victims) with really daft humour of the kind that often leaves me baffled. The result is a strange concoction, but one that is certainly never boring.
The film opens with a murder set-piece that immediately draws comparison with Argento: a women walking home alone at night encounters the maniac while navigating her way through washing lines hung with coloured sheets. The killer cuts the sheets, the woman running wildly amidst the fabric, her terrified face framed by one of the slashes (shades of Tenebre). Suffering several wounds, the lady crawls free of the sheets, but is grabbed by the maniac, who uses the victim's white fishnet stockings to strangle her.
The film then enters comedy mode as we are introduced to policeman Lousy Wong (an early role for Simon Yam), his overweight buffoon of a boss, Dragon (Kent Cheng), and tomboy radio DJ Sissy (Sylvia Chang), who Dragon takes an immediate liking to. Dragon's attraction to Sissy provides much of the film's goofy humour. But Dragon isn't the only man interested in the disc jockey: a nut-job obsessed with Sissy keeps calling the radio station, and makes violent threats when his advances are rebuffed. He, it is quickly revealed, is a red herring, as it is not long before the real killer is shown to be a transvestite (inspired by De Palma's Dressed to Kill?), who lost his marbles when he caught his wife (wearing white stockings) in bed with another man (dressed as a woman). Now, his murderous rage is triggered whenever he sees a woman wearing white silk stockings.
There's a little more wacky comedy, when Dragon takes Lousy and Sissy to a restaurant for a slap up feed, but the film returns to horror after the nutter - a shoe's salesman by day - serves two women, one of whom is wearing stockings. He breaks into their home, and attacks one of the women while her friend is taking a bath, using his trusty knife/strangulation modus operandi. He doesn't notice the other lady hiding behind the shower curtain, but she sees him, wrongly identifying him to the police as a woman. Fortunately for Dragon and Lousy, Sissy is something of a sleuth herself, and works out that the killer is a man in drag. She agrees to act as bait for the sicko, appearing on TV in stockings, luring the murderer to her radio station.
The final act is a lot of fun, the DJ having to keep the killer at bay while the police wrongly pursue the red herring. The action gets more and more insane, Sissy defending herself with a samurai sword, electrocuting the maniac, and finally defeating her attacker when he tries to crush her with a drinks dispensing machine (the product placement for 7-Up is hardly subtle).
6.5/10, rounded up to 7 for Eric Tsang in punk/new wave make-up, and for two inexplicably strange comedic scenes: Dragon tries to woo Sissy in his apartment by wearing glittery eyeshadow and PVC trousers (always a winner with the ladies), and Sissy and Dragon doing a silly dance in dungarees. Oh, and be sure to watch to the very end of the credits for a surprise.
