Three Films Make A Post: He's a Modern Day Devil Hunter He's a Master of the Martial Arts He's… MR VAMPIRE!

Magic Cop aka 驅魔警察 (1990): In what is sometimes sold as a direct continuation of the Mr Vampire series, Lam Ching-Ying plays a policeman who does rather more Taoist movie monk work than policework. Here, he’s on the trail of a Japanese sorceress who uses the walking dead as drug mules, for reasons the film never gets into. The film isn’t quite as slapstick heavy as some of the Mr Vampire movies, but has a lot of fun milking the differences between Lam’s character and Wilson Lam Jun-Yin’s big city cop.

The black magic in this one is also seriously creative, with things I haven’t seen quite like it in other Hong Kong films featuring black magic; the climax does of course become, as is tradition, properly mind-blowing. Director Stephen Tung Wai – who did much more work as an actor – may not be one of the great horror comedy directors from Hong Kong, but he certainly knows how to make the most out of what martial artists and effects people offer him.

Time aka 殺出個黃昏 (2021): Staying in Hong Kong, though a couple of decades later, Ricky Ko’s film concerns the travails of three former triad badasses played by Patrick Tse Yin, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo and the great Lam Suet, who are now elderly, lonely and depressed, with nobody, a family that doesn’t love them and a prostitute being their only connections to life, respectively. Their ties as friends, and a very small-scale plot concerning a troubled girl who adopts Tse’s character as her grandfather do return hope and a bit of light into their life. In between, there’s seriously played semi-naturalistic drama, a bit of funny martial arts, and some ironic but always empathetic variations on classic gangster movie tropes.

It’s a lovely little film, clearly harbouring a lot of love for the actors, the archetypes they represent here and people who haven’t really had any luck in life.

The Ghost Station (2021): But let’s not end on a positive note today: on paper, this tale of a young, bottom feeding online reporter (Kim Bo-ra) stumbling upon a cursed subway station and accidentally unleashing a curse on rather a lot of people who’d never had encountered it without her, sounds like a nice enough bit of South Korean horror. Alas, director Jeong Yong-ki never manages to turn the film into anything but a series of disconnected scenes I’ve seen realized much more effectively in other movies, never building up the creepy and spooky mood that’s needed for his movie to work. He doesn’t even manage to turn the subway station into a proper liminal place, which is quite an achievement given that they are liminal by nature.

Actually making good use of the social commentary about a certain style of online media and responsibility inherent in the plot is of course just as beyond the film.

In short: The Stewardess (2002)

Original title: 非常凶姐

Ken Ma (Sam Lee Chan-Sam) spends his working time as a small time screenwriter and his free time as an improbable pick-up artist. His life becomes rather more interesting when he opts for what he thinks is only a one night stand with air hostess Apple (Lee San-San).

Before he can even blink, he’s Apple’s official boyfriend – and Apple’s not the kind of girl who’ll let her boyfriend run around trying to sleep with other women, or indeed one who’ll stop at anything to control him. In fact, first order of business for her is introducing Ken to her father, triad boss Dragon (Michael Chan Wai-Man), for photos and fingerprinting, so it’s easier to find Ken if he leaves the straight and narrow, and needs a corrective loss of a certain sexual organ ending with “ick”. So clearly, nothing could go wrong with the romance between our sleazy protagonist and his horrid new girlfriend.

Yet things do become even worse than expected when a Japanese woman (Seina Kasugai) who always dresses in red and generally introduces herself ominously as “Yurei, air hostess” steps into Ken’s life and sexes him up right quick (not that there’s any resistance from his side, mind you). Soon, Ken isn’t just in trouble with a violent girlfriend and her penis-cutting dad, but also has to cope with the little fact that “Yurei” is batshit, murderously insane even for a character in this movie.

If Sam Leong Tak-Sam’s horror comedy The Stewardess is anything, it certainly is pretty darn weird. I’m not just talking the sort of comedic weirdness born from a disconnect between Hong Kong concepts of what’s funny and mine that inevitably leads to stuff flying right over my head. Nor do I just talk about the eyebrow-raising more common and garden weirdness of a film that comments on its Chinese protagonist sleeping with a Japanese woman with a fantasy scene that shows him wearing a military uniform and breaking a Japanese World War II style battle flag in two over his knee. Rather, I’m talking about the sort of freeform insanity that can’t help but add some perfectly bizarre flourish to even the most pedestrian of scenes and concepts, of course – this being a Hong Kong film – often leaving all sorts of good and proper taste behind to offend whoever is available – the Japanese, the triads, the mentally ill, Takashi Miike, its own lead actor and everyone else are all fair game for whatever dumb idea Leong and co-writer Rikako Suzuki have in any given moment.

More often than not, Leong presents the general and specific weirdness in a stylish and slick – yet still batshit - manner that makes parts of the film look like the love child of a pretty screwy giallo and young Takashi Miike on one of his milder days. Add to this the outrageous performance by Seina Kasugi, Lam Suet doing his standard triad guy named Fatty thing, and certainly nobody will get bored watching The Stewardess.

Womb Ghosts (2010)

The Hong Kong Police is puzzled. How can a female inmate of a mental institution (Chrissie Chau) get repeatedly pregnant and lose her child always on the same lunar date when their DNA tests have made quite clear that nobody who comes in contact with her can be the father? And why have all the stillbirths exactly the same DNA?

The film will explain all in a long and complicated flashback sequence with undeclared flashbacks inside of the flashbacks for maximum confusion.

Turns out that the woman's name is Zoe, and that she was once working as a hospital nurse. There, she had ample opportunity to have an affair with the young, nasty doctor Joseph (Chris Lai) who just happens to be married. Joseph is the careful type of arsehole and gives Zoe her contraceptive shots himself, so that nothing can disturb his comfortable life with Zoe on one hand and his wife Winnie (Koni Lui), who just happens to be the one who paid for his studies, on the other. Of course, whatever he may wish for, there will be pregnancies in his future.

In a not very related side plot, the film shows the misadventures of Zoe's father Lok (Lam Suet). Lok runs an interesting kind of scam, using the ghost of a dead baby to spy on people seeking his help as a fortune teller. With his special ghostly assistant, his advice looks quite a lot more useful than it actually is. Still, he is not satisfied with the performance of the ghost. Would you believe that the damn thing doesn't even eat the placentas Lok buys from Zoe without a good whipping!?

Lok's experience with ghosts comes in less handy than you would think when Zoe suddenly gets regular visits from an angry girl ghost who later proceeds to crawl into her womb.

Dennis Law's Womb Ghost is a rather confusing film. While the plot will make sense (well, more or less) in the end, the way Law throws random flashbacks and flashbacks inside of flashbacks around sabotages the film as a narrative, even for a viewer who is as little plot-oriented as I am.

The film's also not playing fair with its own time line, to be better able to surprise its viewers with one or two plot twists it couldn't use otherwise. Of course, lying to one's audience only works under certain, artfully constructed circumstances or will just get annoying at best, infuriating at worst. In Womb Ghosts' case, Law's disregard for the trust between audience and director mostly adds to the confusion of the narrative; to produce a worse effect, the film's plot or characters would have to be a bit more interesting than they actually are.

That's not even the last problematic aspect of the film's script. There's also the fact that there just isn't much of import happening during the course of the film. The melodramatic scenes plainly don't work, and you could cut out the whole side plot concerning Lam Suet without doing the main plot line any harm. Then, of course, the film would only be fifty minutes long.

Ironically, Lam Suet's superfluous scenes are also the most interesting and effective of the film. This is mainly thanks to the actor's visible joy in hamming it up and the fact that the film has some of its best Hong Kong horror moments when he is on screen. It's been a while since I have seen a film from Hong Kong going this excitedly for the gross-out and the breaking of taboos, with icky things having to do with dead babies, a child-whipping scene and a few other bits and bobs bound to make the viewer decidedly uncomfortable.

Alas, I was also feeling quite uncomfortable with the performances of the rest of the cast. While they aren't exactly bad, they are very obviously models at the very beginning of a new acting career; certainly nice to look at and trying to act, but not yet at a point where they can rescue an unfocused mess of a script like this one.

I'm glad when a Hong Kong movie is still trying to go to the nasty places that made me fall in love with HK horror, but I'm not too sure that bad taste foetus stuff is enough to recommend a movie.

 

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