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.