The Spooky Family (1990)

Original title: 捉鬼合家歡

Hung Ping (Kent Cheng) is a wizard, exorcist and ghost hunter. Apparently, there’s not terribly much to do anymore in his kind of job, so he moonlights as a mad scientist, experimenting with the ghosts and jiangshi (hopping vampire) he seems to collect like Pokémon, all the while trying to cope with the chaos caused by his dropped on the head son (Cheung Lap-Kei). Why, just now he’s invented a machine with which a human should be able to control the body of a jiangshi! Because the family’s ghost servant (Peter Chan Lung) isn’t supernatural help enough, or something.

Bringing food on the table is Hung Ping’s wife (Pauline Wong Siu-Fung), adept at all kinds of Chinese fortune telling styles, though of a rather dominating temperament. Sometimes, their daughter (Alvina Kong Yan-Yin, I believe) substitutes there.

Things become rather more exciting for the family when a bunch of other wizards who hate our hero – for no reason the film ever bothers telling us – empower an already very powerful jiangshi (Kwan Kwok-Chung) of the “Copper Vampire” subtype (the best kind, we are informed) and put Hung Ping on the thing’s tracks. At first, Hung Ping and son manage to catch the thing, if with a lot of effort, but afterwards, the family seems to catch a real whiff of bad luck. As a matter of act, it’s magical bad luck caused by the jiangshi. Of course, the thing isn’t going to stay trapped forever either. Things become so bad, Hung Ping will even need the help of his “colleague sister” (Nina Li Chi). There’s a whole thing about the unspoken love between these two and the understandable jealousy of the wife, too. At least that’s the sort of problem easily solved in this time and place.

And if you now believe that Chin Yet-Sang’s Hong Kong horror comedy The Spooky Family plays any of this in a plot-centric manner, I’ve clearly gotten you quite confused. The post-Mr Vampire Hong Kong horror comedy genre isn’t terribly interested in plotting at the best of times, and in this particular case, the film is really a series of sketches, magical martial arts sequences and gags that uses the jiangshi business as a pretext for showing us all this rather than the film’s reason for being.

That’s not a bad thing in this particular case, for nearly every single scenes is pure Hong Kong style gold, full of bizarre ideas presented with greatest glee and joy, expectedly excellent wire and non-wire fu with choreography that hits the perfect spot between serious beat ups and slapstick, and an acting ensemble that does the physical parts with the same sharpness as the verbal comedy. They are so good at it, this is one of those comparatively rare Chinese language comedies where parts of the non physical comedy work for this non-Cantonese speaker, particularly when Pauline Wong and Nina Li get into it.

Also involved are various colours of magical light, Billy Lau in an absolutely hilarious cameo fight as Hung Ping’s old nemesis, “The Top Wizard”, using mostly gimmick variations of Western stage magic tricks and gadgets in his fights while dressed like a late 1980s pop star. It’s a thing to behold, but really just one of dozens of ideas and little and big jokes the film relentlessly throws at its audience: there’s the whole jiangshi remote control bit, the more traditional (for this kind of movie) binding and pin based fighting style of Colleague Sister, the literal magic of a happy family photo, a skit in which the Wife tricks a gang of really stupid cops, and so much martial arts slapstick of the highest order, only a dead person (sorry, jiangshi in my audience) could watch this one without laughing, and then laughing some more, and then contemplating why they don’t collect supernatural creatures.