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.