In short: Taxi Hunter (1993)

Original title: 的士判官

Mild mannered insurance salesman Ah Kin (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang) seems to have regular run-ins with Hong Kong taxi drivers. As the film portrays them, taxi drivers are basically a gang of greedy scammers and rapists, and Ah Kin is so good-natured, he is an obvious victim for any bully. When his pregnant wife (Perrie Lai Hoi-San) dies in a brutal taxi driver caused incident, Ah Kin at first falls into a deep hole of depression and alcohol not even his best friend, hero cop Yu Kai Chung (Yu Rongguang) can get him out of.

He gets somewhat better when he throttles yet another asshole taxi driver in a spur of the moment loss of sanity. Made somewhat happier by the deed, Ah Kin starts on a new side-line as a serial killer, punishing taxi drivers with bad professional ethics whenever he encounters them. He’s rather realistically not really great at physical violence, so much so he’ll eventually buy a gun to make kills meet.

If you go into Herman Yau’s serial killer movie Taxi Hunter expecting something as dedicated to the gross-out as the director’s The Untold Story (made in the same year as this one, also starring Wong) or his later Ebola Syndrome, you might be somewhat disappointed by this one’s often consciously awkward and comparatively quiet violence. Yau actually has quite a talent for staging more awkwardly realistic action in a dramatic and exciting way, and he uses this ability to pull the serial killer thriller down on the level of the human.

In fact, Taxi Hunter’s greatest strength does not lie in its moments of suspense and mild horror – expertly as Yau works them – but in the way the film has a humanizing view on each of its main characters, showing so much – often unexpected - compassion for Ah Kin, his best friend who is of course the cop tasked with catching the taxi hunter, Kai Chung’s comic relief partner (Ng Man-Tat), and the partner’s reporter daughter (Athena Chu Yun), the whole film ends up playing like a tragedy much more than your typical serial killer or revenge movie. Unless you’re a Hong Kong cab driver, then you’re apparently just an asshole (though killing you is still wrong, as Kai Chung will explain).

This unexpected amount of humanism is packaged inside of a fast-paced Hong Kong thriller that flows so well, for once even the comedic interludes fit.

Troublesome Night 4 (1998)

Original title: 陰陽路4與鬼同行

Various groups of Hongkong citizens who arrived on the same plane in Manila, Philippines encounter local ghosts and ghoulies in three slightly connected tales of horror.

In the first one, Alan (Timmy Hung Tin-Ming) is rather surprised when he learns the package his company has tasked him with to deliver contains human ashes; even more so when he realizes there’s a ghost haunting the ashes. On the more positive side, a friendly local from his company (Anthony Cortez) is very helpful indeed. So what when he seems to have sex with the ghost (unless Alan dreams it)?

Tale number two concerns honeymooners Wing (Louis Koo) and Apple (Pauline Suen) and what happens to them after Apple closes a hotel bible. After having heard some dire news about Wing’s fidelity from one of those random Chinese soothsayers apparently roaming Manila’s streets, and following a couple of weird omens Apple does her subconscious best to make her new ideas about Wing’s nature come true. Will he cheat on her with a really aggressive stripper with a – dumb – philosophic bent (Anna Capri)? Or will Apple learn a valuable lesson through the suffering of her husband?

Three asshats (played by Simon Lui, Wayne Lai and, umm, Cheung Tat-Ming, I believe) really want to use their vacation for, and I quote, “whoring”, but seem to have not completely surprising trouble finding anyone wanting to sleep with them even for money. Eventually, they end up in a very special nightclub, and learn a valuable lesson about the importance of having enough fingers to hack off and throw at monsters, as well as the deadly sins of Catholicism.

Clearly, having warned the public about the supernatural dangers occurring in Hongkong in the first three films of the anthology series, director Herman Yau and the recurring members of the cast needed a bit of a vacation in the Philippines, only to turn their touristy gaze of spooky comedy on the strange rituals of that most exotic of religions, Catholicism. Or rather, some aspects of the Filipino version of the same, which does put a bit more emphasis on actual bodily suffering in the here and now than most interpretations of the creed you’ll encounter in Europe.

This attempt really makes up large parts of the considerable charm of this entry into the series: there’s nothing quite as wonderful as seeing something you know pretty well yourself through the eyes of someone for whom it is not really a cultural basic, looking for exploitational value. Yau is pretty great at finding the weird, the exploitational and the interesting in this view of Filipino Catholicism (that of course will have little to do with actual Filipino Catholicism), turning out one of the most entertaining and strange films in the series (or rather, as much of the series as I’ve managed to see). He also provides practically every single ghost with its own green spot light, always at least trying to make his standard spooks actually spooky, as well as the jokes actually funny, neither of which is something you can always hope for in the Yau-less future of this series.

The first story is doing the least with the Filipino surroundings, telling a straightforward tale of love lost expressed through ghosts, but it’s a fine way to ease an audience into the film with things everyone around the world will pretty easily understand (don’t tell me about your weird culture that doesn’t know romantic love, please). There’s also the first appearance of on-screen nudity in the film – a first in the series, I believe - all of which will be provided by the Filipino actresses, some shaped like you’d expect in an exploitation movie, some doing the old “old hag-like nude woman” thing.

In the second tale, the film really starts approaching Catholic ideas of sin and fidelity, making rather a lot of peculiar bible quotes and ending up on an interpretation of Catholic sexual moral that has very little to do with actual Catholicism but works rather well as an exoticizing of Catholic morals, with quite a bit of nudity and general weirdness thrown in.

The final tale then really goes all out, featuring some traditional Filipino monsters, scenes where our protagonists throw their own hacked off fingers at their enemies to drive them away, a ghosts and ghoulies judicial sessions that explains their sins to the characters in a language they literally cannot understand, and ends up with a lot of spooky dream-like imagery as well as a handful of great bad jokes. Again, the interpretation of sin and punishment the film espouses is bizarre, but it’s bizarre in an absolutely charming and interesting manner that turns what would be a terribly – though not completely undeservedly – moralizing tale into the sort of whacked out weirdness that always makes my day. Teachable moment: if you’re a sleazy man, you really should try to find yourself actual prostitutes instead of monsters with a religious bent.

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.

Three Films Make A Post: ON THAT DAY... WE ARE DEMON. Hopefully not ironically.

Nightmare (2012) aka 青魇: As happy as I am that Hong Kong exploitation veteran turned more mainstream director Herman Yau is still making movies, I’m not at all happy with this generically titled mix of slight headfuck movie and bland mystery. It’s all nice and glossy looking, but neither the “is this dream or is this reality?” business nor the film’s mystery are very interesting. Worse for a film like this, the solution to the mystery as well as the (boring) explanation of what’s really going on are abominably obvious, which is a bit of a problem in a film that hasn’t anything else to offer beyond a handful of rote jump scares.

Nurse 3D (2013): As regular readers know, there’s little I loathe more than films that excuse their crappiness by being “ironic”, and by “not wanting to be taken seriously”, which nearly always are codes for “we just couldn’t be arsed”. Douglas Aarniokoski’s horror comedy is no exception to the rule. It doesn’t help that I found the film’s sense of humour aggressively unfunny and obvious, its attempts at ironic sexiness and ironic exploitation (seriously, you can do neither “ironically”, that is, without committing) painful to the extreme, and Paz de la Huerta’s central “acting” “performance” (I just gotta use scare quotes here and also ask myself why the production didn’t hire an actress with basic skills and just as willing to drop her clothes, until I remember this crap is based on Huerta pin-up photos, though ironically, I presume) extremely painful yet also very very dull. The whole film is pretty much anathema to everything I want and like in a horror movie, be it a comedy or not.

Hell Commandos (1969): José Luis Merino’s Spanish-Italian Euro War movie, on the other hand, is not a very good film either, but it does at least hit the main beats of its particular genre without being ashamed of them, reaching the coveted level of filmic mastership known as “perfectly watchable”. As is typical of its sub-set of war films, the tone fluctuates between sentimentality and cynicism in awkward yet entertaining fashion, while people get killed, the Second World War is won, Nazis are pigs, American soldiers are pigs until they decide to sacrifice themselves for a good cause, and a romantic subplot is a lot like nature in Jurassic Park. From time to time, the film stumbles onto exploitation gold, clearly without noticing, when it explains how French resistance women (well, one at least) can identify American soldiers by the way they kiss, or when just inexplicably weird shit happens for no good reason at all (and definitely without ironic detachment).

There’s also, alas, a bit of a homophobic undercurrent that’s quite difficult to miss, which in its own sad way does fit the film’s romantic politics as a whole well in being deeply unpleasant and ill thought through. On the plus side, it’s not the “ironic” kind of homophobia that leaves the perpetrator an easy way out to explain it away.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,american movies,spanish movies,italian movies,in short,horror,comedy,war,herman yau,douglas aarniokoski,jose luis merino,guy madison,paz de la huerta

Dating Death (2004)

A group of emotionally twelve-year-old friends who hate each other has a fun time vacating in the digital villa situated on a digital island that belongs to the uncle of (supposedly non-digital) rich girl Sophie (Theresa Fu). It's all fun and games until the friends decide to play the deadliest game of them all - Truth or Dare. The burning question is quite obviously who among the pretty people is crushing on whom. Turns out that every male in the room has the hots for Sophie, which leaves the only other girl in the room, Lily (Stephy Tang) in a rather bad mood, especially since she and supposed Sopie-fan Ken (Yat-long Lee) have secretly been a couple for quite some time. Even worse, Sophie confesses to her own crush on Ken! Whoa.

Lily needn't have troubled herself, though, because the next morning, Ken has disappeared, leaving behind a broken window, lots of blood and one of his hands. Oops.

One year later (Ken's body has of course never been found, or searched for), Sophie, who has spent the last year overseas, returns home. Very soon after that, each of the friends finds a friendly invitation of Ken's to visit the island where he disappeared in his or her pocket.

For some reason, they all decide to go there. Fascinatingly, room number 7 from which Ken disappeared now sports a fabulous black handprint on the ceiling. Since the guys are all still in love with Sophie, they decide to show the dubious size of their brains by sleeping in turn in the possibly cursed room. Would you believe that whoever sleeps there disappears mysteriously? Would you further believe that other mysterious things happen until everyone runs around screaming like the cast of an old Monogram picture?

Dating Death's director Herman Yau has been churning out films in various exploitation genres for more than twenty years now, some of them - like The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome - classics of tasteless yet awesome Hong Kong horror. As it happens when someone directs three or more films in a typical working year, not everything he does is really worth watching, which segues excellently into the film at hand.

There just isn't anything interesting about Dating Death. The actors are all blandly pretty and absolutely forgettable in a soap operatic way, but they don't have to play characters with more depth than being "the pretty one", "the jealous one", "the junior magician", "the buddhist coward", "the boxer" and "the guy without even that much character", so at least nobody has to do any acting he or she could fail at.

The plot side of the script isn't much better, it being at once stupid and uninteresting, while Yau's direction is as uninspired as it gets without being totally careless. Surprisingly, given Yau's background in gross out films, there isn't even much blood or vomit on display. Worse, what is there is digital, as is the film's lone cockroach. Yes, it's a Hong Kong semi-slasher without much bodily fluids or insects on display, nothing I would ever have expected to witness.

Only three things about the film are somewhat memorable (and one of them is highly spoilerish regarding the identity of the killer). The film features one scene that for some reason ends with our panicked heroes all jumping fully clothed into a jakuzi together, which probably cracked me up more than it should have (I blame Movie Stockholm Syndrome derived from the boringness of everything that came before). Then there's the perfectly reasonable moment when only a handful of survivors are left and everyone points his or her finger at everyone else and goes "You are the murderer!" - "No, you are the murderer!" and so on and so forth for about ten minutes of laughter I'm glad I didn't miss.

Last but not least (and I repeat: spoiler) is the identity of our killer: it is David Copperfield junior in another confirmation of my theory that those magicians are a rather dubious lot, what with their rabbits and swords and wildly floundering arms.

Alas, even for someone with my lowered expectations and taste for the silly and the just plain dumb, these three elements are not enough to recommend Dating Death. If you have a hankering to see what Herman Yau has been doing with his better weeks in the last few years, I can heartily recommend the (comparatively subtle) The First 7th Night and the (comparatively gross) Gong Tau.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,horror,slasher,herman yau,reviews