In short: Troublesome Night 2 (1997)

Original title: 陰陽路之我在你左右

This second Troublesome Night film was directed by the first film’s co-director, horror – and particularly CATIII horror- veteran Herman Yau. Despite Yau’s background, the film keeps to the less extreme tone of the first one, though the second segment features quite a bit of vomiting, the ole “insects in your food” play, and the whole film seems to be slightly more bloody than the first one.

The three tales here are a bit closer connected than in the first film, and concern the misadventures of a trio of radio DJs (Louis Koo, Simon Lui and Allen Ting all, like a lot of the other actors from the first movie returning in different roles here). It’s the shortened DJ version of the Ten Little Soldiers, really. So the first of the gang gets into ghost trouble after he encourages a girl grieving the death of her boyfriend (also ghost related) to kill herself during a call-in segment, and the second goes on a yacht tour with two of the first one’s friends to get over his buddy’s death only to end up in what I can only assume is the Hong Kong version of the Bermuda Triangle, but with ghosts. Number three cleverly leaves the radio before something nasty can happen to him, but then dooms himself by accidentally urinating on an awkwardly placed ghost tablet, which leads to a haunting by his dead friends and a female ghost we already met shortly right at the beginning.

Narratively and structurally, with plotting and ending sequences directly mirroring parts of the beginning, this is obviously constructed more as a whole than the first Troublesome Night. It does trade this degree of structural tightness for some of the first film’s peculiar charm, though, having no time to go off in really strange directions. It’s still a very fun movie, with a lot of jokes that actually land and a bit more of the patented Hong Kong melodramatic pathos, as befits ghosts of the kind used here. It’s full of ghost appearances that generally shouldn’t frighten anyone but still are the fun kind of spooky. The middle episode drags a little, though, spending a bit too much time on puke jokes and general comedic shenanigans, which is slightly more troublesome in this second outing than it would have been in the looser first one.


It’s still a highly enjoyable film, pretty, charming, a bit goofy and not heartless.

Troublesome Night (1997)

Original title: 陰陽路

This is the first film in a locally obviously well-liked horror comedy anthology series from Hong Kong that went for the record by getting up to a whopping nineteen movies, most of which are not terribly easy to find with subtitles around here. In this as well as its horror comedy style and its love for mining local folklore, the Troublesome Nights series is comparable to the Filipino Shake, Rattle & Roll series, though the cultural sensibilities of Hong Kong and the Philippines, as well as the folklore used, are of course very different from each other.

The four tales in this anthology were directed by Steve Cheng, Victor Tam, and Herman Yau and feature a whole murder of well-known faces, from Simon Lui, who is the host of the tales but also takes part in some of them, over Louis Koo, to Teresa Mak and Law Lan.

All of the tales have pretty simple plots of a kind anyone with a basic knowledge of ghost movies from Hong Kong will have no trouble recognizing – there’s the tale about some young people working in the film biz getting punished for their shenanigans in a graveyard, followed by a very traditional phone call with the dead story, a ghostly “romance” of doubtful consensually and finally a visit to a cinema that turns out to be as haunted as London.

The stories, however, play out rather more complicated than they sound described. In part, it’s because of the way the film connects the stories, with side-characters turning into protagonists, and ghosts, the host – or his mole-foreheaded “twin brother” interacting with the characters, and every tale told with a raconteur’s love for the narrative detour. The tendency to go off in strange directions could have turned out rather annoying, but it’s actually a huge part of the film’s charm, giving the directors opportunity to make fun of the HK film biz in a companionable manner, or just to lighten things up with one curious idea or another.

Tonally, this is far from CATIII horror or many HK horror comedies, featuring as it does little gore or centipede puking, nor going the extreme slapstick route. It’s comparable to a PG-13 movie in its hardness, just without the teen fixation and the moping. The stories do get crazier the longer the film goes on, though, with the first couple keeping their weirder sensibilities to intros and outros, before the rest of the film starts acting crazy in a very charming manner. Did you know that ghost sex caused by your ill-advised wearing of red underwear during the night will eventually turn your hair red too? Or that ghosts might be distracted by being allowed to beat up a Feng Shui master whose qualifications come from a TV quiz show? And let’s not even talk about the cheap yet awesome spacial shenanigans the final story gets up too.

All of this might not be coherent, and will certainly only scare only the most easy to scare, but it’s deeply fun, presenting local folklore and ghost beliefs with a sense for the charming and the goofy that makes it pretty impossible not to like Troublesome Night.


Particularly since the film is a fine example of the virtues of late 90s Hong Kong cinema, too – we all have suffered through the vices enough – presenting itself much slicker in looks than the energetic yet more ramshackle films of only a couple of years before, though in this case not becoming so slick as to turn boring and curiously lifeless. There’s a sense of a handful of directors using technological and logistical advances with an eye for fun first, and edginess or plastic sexiness last, here, resulting in a film that contemporizes things the traditional material it is working with nicely without flattening it.