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.
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