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.

In short: Operation Pink Squad II (1989)

aka Thunder Cops (but not to be confused with another movie going by that title for better reasons)

Original title: 猛鬼大廈

As every fool, including me, knows, Hong Kong comedies could get completely crazy, particularly between 1983 and 1995, and not just because there are certain strains of Chinese humour based on things being surreal and random, but also because at that time, Hong Kong cinema wasn’t just willing to go there (and with “there”, I mean really anywhere) but jumped there while screaming some crazy stuff in half-parsable subtitles, possibly throwing centipedes in the process.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jeff Lau Chun-Wai’s (of the Haunted Cop Shop movies fame) Operation Pink Squad II starts as a high-octane comedy about an idiot policeman (Billy Lau Nam-Kwong) believing his new wife and co-cop (Sandra Ng Kwun-Yu) has an affair with their boss (the inevitable Wu Fung) when she is in truth doing undercover work together with four other women as hostesses trying to make contact with a gangster adorably named Maddy (Shing Fui-On), yet will later turn into a pretty typical Hong Kong ghost movie/horror comedy in the Mr Vampire style. Where “typical” really means as insane as possible, going through all types of humour known to mankind, half of which are alas lost in translation, leaving us with much – and often absolutely hilarious - slapstick and more jokes about bodily fluids than you can shake a stick at. Just that all of this is packaged into a tale also featuring a Buddhist Monk (Yuen Cheung-Yan) who has trouble keeping track of the little holy baggies he keeps ghost heads in, a hilariously intense – and rather cute - ghost (Cheung Choi-Mei) who will spend much time as a flying head chasing the cast up and down corridors, ghost hordes, and the unwillingness of men to become a special kind of virgin.

It’s a film so kinetic and so full of bad but usually very funny ideas a scene where our heroes whip out remote controls and start fighting the flying lady ghost head with model helicopters (complete in the colour yellow and with the appropriate Buddhist charms written on them, of course) isn’t the craziest thing you’ll see. When it comes to the gleefully (and this movie is nothing if not gleeful) bizarre, I’m particularly fond of the rescue through fairies in the climax where the film suddenly turns into something of a style at least fifteen years older, complete with appropriate changes in the music score, which also features some of the joys of lute-based fighting.


All of this may sound as if the “horror” part of the “horror comedy” description shouldn’t quite be big enough to qualify this for the sacred month of October around here, but if a film that features flying ghost heads and Billy Lau doesn’t qualify as horror, I don’t know what does.

The Haunted Cop Shop (1987)

Original title: 猛鬼差館

Macky Kim (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau) and Man Chiu (Ricky Hui Koon-Ying) are your typical Hong Kong comedy cops, which is to say, they are of dubious mental capacity, morals, and work ethics, like a couple of nasty little boys somebody thought it to be a good idea to arm. Not that anyone else we meet in their station is any better, of course.

As it happens, the titular cop shop our protagonists are based in was a Japanese officer’s club during World War II, where quite a few suicides took place once the Japanese side lost their part of the war. So clearly, there’s going to be no problem at all when the high point of ghost month comes around.

Well, except for the part where the excellently named Sneaky Ming (Billy Lau Nam-Kwong), brought to confession by our heroes by pretending to be ghosts in one of the film’s best scenes, loses a rigged Mah-jongg game against some of the place’s ghosts and is tasked with bringing Japanese general Issei (Rico Chu Tak-On) back to the world of the living. Issei, it will turn out, is a Western style vampire for no reason the film ever explains, complete with awesome/ridiculous and definitely snazzy high-collared cape, and Sneaky is going to be his first victim. When Sneaky attempts to explain the situation to our cop heroes, they don’t believe him until contact with the sun turns him to dust. Their boss is so displeased with this turn of events – and certainly doesn’t believe any of their talk about the supernatural – he calls in Chief Superintendent Fanny Ho (Kitty Chan Ga-Chai) to exclusively supervise Macky Kim and Man Chiu. Eventually, these three incompetents will team up to fight the vampires running round Hong Kong.

Jeff Lau Chun-Wai’s The Haunted Cop Shop is pretty much exactly what you assume a Hong Kong horror comedy made in 1987 to be. As in many a comedy from the city, its heroes would be absolutely vile if they weren’t as ridiculous as they are, and still the film manages to make their misadventures entertaining for other reasons than mere Schadenfreude. Having as a film’s – comedy or not – protagonists police personal that’s quite this hilariously incompetent wouldn’t fly at all in contemporary Hong Kong – not to even speak of mainland China – anymore, so viewed from today, Macky Kim’s and Man Chiu’s personalities even look a bit like social criticism. I am pretty sure it wasn’t actively meant that way in 1987. These are just standard Hong Kong comedy characters who look like something a bit different in hindsight.

Anyway, nobody’s going to watch this because of hard hitting social criticism but for the series of often actually funny, usually weird, and plentifully absurd things our supposed heroes encounter. Lau, working from a script by himself and a young Wong Kar-Wai – who is the last guy you’d expect to have written any of this – is very good at giving a film that’s actually mostly a series of loosely connected episodes a feeling of directed movement, making the whole affair much more satisfying than you’d expect. It does of course help rather heavily that many of the episodes are really rather funny, from time to time even playing with audience expectations of its genre.

My favourite bit of this sort of business comes when our heroes, looking for the vampires randomly stumble into the convenience store of Chung Fat Pak (indeed played by Chung Fat). Chung Fat Pak, it turns out, was once a successful Taoist exorcist. So successful there wasn’t anything left for him to exorcise, therefore the convenience store. Which he at once proves by having a short yet wonderful kung fu fight against two vampires, demonstrating the most awesome staking technique ever put to celluloid. Chung Fat, the audience will probably assume, is going to be the film’s Lam Ching-Ying type character (see the Mr Vampire films), the ultra competent master to the bumbling idiot protagonists. Then the boss vampire appears, rips off one of his arms, and Chung Fat sacrifices himself so that said bumbling protagonists can get away.

As in practically all Hong Kong comedies of this style, there are scenes of inspired slapstick – the bit early on where Sneaky Ming is ghost-bullied into confession is a perfect example –, scenes of wonderful surrealism, as well a couple of scenes that bring home this isn’t a film made anywhere but in Hong Kong. How about that bit where our heroes decide their new boss is going to believe their tales about ghosts and ghoulies when they ruin her luck by getting her to eat dog meat? Or several scenes that teach the importance of wearing one’s panties on one’s head when trying to fend off ghosts? I never got any of that reading M.R. James, that much’s for sure.


Lau does some rather fine work not only with the film’s pacing but also when it comes to staging the supernatural encounters in the right – often blue as you might imagine – light. When the film’s not laugh out loud funny, it is very moody indeed, never making the mistake of turning its supernatural threats into slapstick characters too. That’s after all what the protagonists are for, so large parts of the film consist of the three idiots stumbling through sets, set pieces and situations that would be rather fine straightforward horror if The Haunted Cop Shop weren’t populated by the kind of guys who dress up like their big antagonist just to teach their friends some pithy lesson.