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.