Out of the Dark 回魂夜

Leon (Stephen Chow) is a ghost hunter. He's kept in a mental hospital, but he doesn't particularly mind, knowing full well that he can always get out when his help is needed. And this time his help is needed by a bunch of police guards who are assigned to watch over an apartment complex on the very night when the spirits of two murdered residents are due to return for revenge. Karen Mok plays a girl named Kwan here, who simply has nothing to do, and so she latches onto Leon.

Impressions: Probably Stephen Chow's most unfairly maligned film. It's not quite what people are used to getting from him, that's for sure, but even so, as cinema it's an almost absolutely perfect film, marred only slightly by a few small problems, which I'll get to below.

But first, the pluses. For one thing, Out of the Dark is one of Chow's most parody-heavy films, built on specific movies. Personally, I immediately lost it when I saw Karen Mok in the makeup of her character from Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels, wildly bouncing on a bed. The picture ends with a TV playing Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express. Gags like this are piled sky-high, and the films being parodied are very famous ones - Highlander, Poltergeist, Léon, Pulp Fiction - basically whatever happens to be within arm's reach. And it's all done, if a bit crudely, then - most importantly and decisively - hilariously! Funny from the first frame to the last (I'd especially single out the "training" episode, where Chow teaches the guards to fear nothing - superb!), though I did warn you that this isn't quite the film people expected from Stephen Chow.

The thing is, it's a horror movie. A real, full-blooded horror movie with oceans of blood and mountains of corpses. Sure, the corpses get mercilessly mocked, but they're also cut up quite for real, and the picture has more than one genuinely terrifying suspense scene. Characters genuinely die, ghosts possess everyone in sight, the ranks thin out... Karen Mok takes an axe to the neck - a real nightmare, whose cruelty sometimes oversteps every boundary. That's what I wanted to flag as a minus. Hmm... I'm not entirely sure it is a minus, it's just clearly the reason so many people call Out of the Dark Chow's worst film. He'd stooped pretty low with his jokes before, but joking about the dying and about ghosts is something he's unlikely to be allowed (there's one junkie in the film who, over an hour and a half, gets shot about five times, electrocuted, has his veins cut, has a sharp blade driven into his neck, gets hit by a car... all in naturalistic detail). Personally, I tuned into that wavelength from the very first frames, and by the end of the film I could say with confidence that it's one of the best films I've seen from Stephen Chow. Just don't watch it after a heavy dinner (and especially not during one) - unpleasant consequences guaranteed.