Banana Spirit (1992)

Original title: 精靈變

Chic (Francis Ng) works as a beautician for the dead (his words, not mine) in a morgue, but he also helps his spiritual boxer buddy Che (Ngai Sing) out with an exorcism business that isn’t always completely honest even though Che does have actual spiritual powers.

One drunken night, the guys take a friend’s bet to wander off into a banana plantation at night to conjure up a banana spirit out of a banana tree. Banana spirits do apparently like a bit of good old ghost/living slash but also tend to – as most ghosts and spirits in Chinese folklore and religion do – suck their partners’ life energies.

The ritual – that includes Chic imagining his perfect woman whom he just met in form of a model in a bar - works out pretty well, and soon Chic has a new spirit girlfriend named Chang (Josephine Foo), who is actually a rather sweet gal, not in the habit of sucking the life out of anyone not a rapist.

She also uses her X-ray vision to help Chic win back the gambling debt Che owes the rather unpleasant gangster Rabid Hsiang (Tommy Wong); though Hsiang unfortunately cops to Chang’s true nature, which will lead to violent problems later in the movie.

Chic rapidly falls for Chang, of course, and why wouldn’t he? However also as a matter of course, in Hong Kong movies (and in Chinese culture), relationships between humans and spirits seldom end terribly well, so the couple’s time with each is other going to be short, and Chic, Cheng and their master Chen Sheng (Lam Ching-Ying playing your typical Lam Ching-Ying role of this era) will have to put quite some energy into at least getting her back where spirits like her belong safely in the end.

Lo Kin’s Banana Spirit is a rather typical ghost romance movie of its era in Hong Kong filmmaking, mixing an earnest romance, sometimes wild slapstick and whacky humour, kung fu, and eventually some pretty unpleasant (but fun) looking effects into a concoction that feels lively, surprising and likeable even when you know all of its constituent parts from quite a few other movies. This isn’t a masterpiece of its genre – it’s neither quite that charming nor visually quite imaginative enough – but a film doesn’t need to be that to be a highly enjoyable time, and that, Banana Spirit certainly is.

I particularly liked how genuinely Chic and Chang seem to fit together, filling the holes in each other’s character, the film thus perfectly fulfilling the romantic element while not overplaying it. I also had a lot of fun with the film’s other parts: Lam Ching-Ying is obviously always the best, if he’s kicking a burning dead guy’s butt, making fun of his increasing age that apparently means he can only use kung fu defensively anymore (which does of course set-up a couple of fun fights), or romancing Chic’s aunt. Rabid Hsiung’s return from the dead as a melty fire undead gentleman is fun too, providing the opportunity for more kung fu and a couple of excellent looking effects, and adding the needed outward dramatic tension to the climax.


All of this will be a bit too episodically structured for strict contemporary tastes, particularly of western viewers, but the film’s looseness never feels lazy. It is simply a way to pack a broader variety of fun stuff into its running time. It’s a bit of a trade-off against greater structural tightness and tension of course, but whenever any given scene calls for it, Lo Kin has no problem providing that tightness too; and this isn’t so much a film about creating tension as one that wants you to fall into tropes and ideas as if they were your favourite comfy chair. If you ask me, there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

In short: Satan Returns (1996)

Original title: 666 Mo Gwai Fuk Wut

aka Devil 666

aka Satan's Return

aka Shaolin vs. The Devil's Omen

Hong Kong, 1996. A guy and host of a demonic entity subtly named Judas (Francis Ng) is desperately looking for Satan's daughter. He only knows that she must have been born on the 6th of June 1969, so he wanders around the city, "testing" the devilishness of women with the appropriate birthdate by cutting their hearts out. Satan's daughter, you see, would live on without one.

Fortunately, even the HK movie police realizes that the killings are the work of a serial killer, so they put the homicidal cop Nam (Donny Yen) and his band of incompetents on the case. Because she has grown up as an orphan under the tutelage of the Catholic church, internal affairs officer Chan Shou-Ching (Chingmy Yau) who was just starting an investigation into the dubious human rights record of Nam, is helping out on the case, which turns out to be especially useful when Judas activities begin to concentrate on her.

During the course of the investigation, Chan starts to suffer first from oh-so-mysterious nightmares, then from personality changes, and then begins to have little chats with the off-screen voice of Satan, who seems quite positive that she's his daughter and will soon awaken to her heritage. And he just might be right.

What happens to Chan does of course mean that the whole murder series the film's plot is based on makes no sense at all, and that all Satan's forces would need to do to win the day would be to just wait until their big daddy's daughter comes into her own, but what can you expect from a script written by Wong Jing? "Written" seems like a very strong word for this thing anyway. I suspect that the scriptwriting process consisted of Wong Jing taking the scripts of Seven and one or two of the movie's rip-offs, and those of a few Omen-style horror films, ripping out random pages, throwing them in the air and then randomly stacking them together again, adding scribbles like "add Donnie Yen's showcase #1 fight here", "add tit joke #353 here" and "needs more incompetence". On the positive side, he forgot to add his trademark rape jokes.

So yes, Satan Returns is hardly what one would call coherent (or, if one has a grumpy day "a movie"), but just a random conglomeration of crap that just happened to land in the same script and then got directed with distractible nervousness by a directorial non-entity named Lam Wai-Lun (who seems pretty excellent at self-sabotage and even manages to ruin Yen's two and a half theoretically awesome fight scenes by more obfuscating than staging them).

Fortunately for my mood, some of the crap the film consists of is pretty funny - I always love the HK interpretations of Christian theology - and/or so merrily insane that it's impossible to argue with the film's will to entertain. I mean, how many serial killer/satanist movies are there in which one of the cop's plans fails because they're distracted from watching a colleague playing decoy by the aftereffects of painful flirting attempts over the decoy's hidden microphone and the following shouting match with a colleague (I said these people are incompetent, right?). Plus, the grand finale has Donnie Yen crucifying the enthusiastically scenery-chewing Francis Ng. And if that's not a reason to watch a movie, I don't know what is.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,horror,action,chingmy yau,donnie yen,francis ng,wong jing

In short: Horror Hot Line...Big Head Monster (2001)

Ben (Francis Ng) is the producer of a Hong Kong radio show that gives its listeners the opportunity to phone in and tell their own "true" urban ghost story.

Although Ben doesn't believe in the stories, the show is successful enough to warrant the visit of American reporter Mavis (Josie Ho) and her crew. It looks like Mavis is supposed to make Ben's show look bad, but when a strange call about an encounter with a "big head baby" comes in, and even stranger things start to happen around the production, her journalistic instincts set in and she and Ben start to look into things they had probably better ignored.

 

This grandly titled film is very atypical for Horror films from Hong Kong. There are no people puking up insects (actually no puking at all), no necrophilia, no cannibalism and not even a Buddhist exorcist. Instead the film tries its hand at the very un-Hong Kong notion of subtlety, even a little psychological depth, obviously influenced by Japanese films, but foregoing the mere rip-off for a strangely raw tone of its own (raw subtlety? Does this make any sense?).

We are never even getting a clear look at the titular monster, and when it's time for the finale, director Pou-Soi Cheang decides to steal from Blair Witch Project rather than Ringu.

The film should be a good choice for everyone who wants to see a different kind of Hong Kong Horror film.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,horror,in short,pou-soi cheang,francis ng