Ye jing hun (1982)

... aka: 夜驚魂
... aka: He Lives by Night
... aka: Killer Stockings
... aka: Koroshi no sutokkingu
... aka: Night Fright
... aka: Ye ging wan

Directed by:
Po-Chih Leong

After leaving the nightclub where she works, a French showgirl is slashed with a utility knife and then strangled to death with her own white silk stocking while caught up in a bunch of multi-colored sheets hanging up in an alleyway. It's a scene that could have been plucked right out of a Dario Argento movie and one that partially informs the visual style of this offbeat Hong Kong production. But to assume this is just a stylish horror film or (bigger mistake) an homage to something else isn't giving it due credit. Outside of a few of the murder set pieces and some colorful lighting, this does its own thing, has its own tone (which is almost nothing like the Euro giallo or U.S. / Canadian slashers), is filled with humor (both lighthearted and twisted and, again, nothing at all like giallo or slasher flicks) and puts a quirky romance right at its center. In other words, this is not only not a copycat but it isn't really what I'd call an homage either.

The showgirl's murder happens right outside the window of late night radio show hostess Sissy (Sylvia Chang). Though a tomboy who usually dresses down, Sissy's mix of wit and sultry-voiced on air flirting has won her many male admirers. Among those is a nameless obsessed psycho played by Bing-Sum Hui, who's so into her that he uses her photos as wallpaper and has a mannequin in her likeness that he talks to. The stalker frequently calls her up to discuss his romantic designs on her and, when rejected, usually ends the conversation with a threat ("I'll kill you sooner or later!") He even starts trying to take credit for the string of murders following the showgirl's even though he's not actually the killer. And he's not the only one who's interested in her...

Pipe-smoking police chief Dragon (Kent Cheng) and his underling Wong (Yam Tat Wah / Simon Yam), the main detectives investigating the killer, have both fallen for the charms of Sissy. Dragon is pretty overt in wanting to marry her, keeps asking her out, goes to expensive and sometimes ridiculous lengths to try to impress her (see: the disco scene) and even lets her read classified case files from the investigation. Wong, or "Lousy Wong" as she's nicknamed him, has known Sissy since school and keeps his attraction to her a secret but is clearly jealous that Dragon is pursuing her and always trying to wedge himself into their plans.

When she's not playing music, answering letters and dishing out advice during "3 Hours with Sissy" our plucky heroine is commenting on the news, which also attracts the attention of the killer. Trying to psychoanalyze him publicly, making comments about him having no friends, being a chicken and a "cuckold" and then inviting him to call in to the show, ends up putting her in peril. She eventually even allows herself to be used as a decoy by the police and goes on TV to directly appeal to a specific fetish the psycho has.

The killer (revealed early on so I'm not ruining any plot twists here) turns out to be Eddie (Eddie Chan [sometimes Chen]). By day he's a polite, mild-mannered, well-dressed Gucci shoe salesman who keeps to himself. By night he's slapping on female attire and heading out to slash up women who happen to be wearing white stockings. He even has his eye on a young girl who lives in his slummy apartment block with her abusive, neglectful parents. After he saves her from being hit by a car, she becomes friendly with him, makes him a card and starts calling him "uncle." But her merely wearing white socks drives him up the wall.

A flashback reveals that Eddie was once a successful architect whose life was ruined by a cheating wife. In order to mess around behind his back, the wife's lover started dressing in drag and pretending to be a female friend so Eddie wouldn't catch on to the affair. After finding the two in bed together, he strangled his wife and slit the guy's throat. It was then off to a spell in a mental institution before he was released back into society. He strangles a punkette after she and her male friend (in Kiss make-up) rob a convenience store and, during the film's best scene, breaks into the home of Suzie (Elaine Jin), a bitchy housewife whose husband is always out of town, and murders her while her friend Nancy (Mabel Kwong) hides behind a shower curtain. With the cross-dressing killer and use made of both split screen and hazy soft focus photography, a lot of this actually seems as influenced by Brian De Palma's then-popular Dressed to Kill (1980) as anything else.

Dragon and Lousy Wong, who pretend to be the killer to scare Sissy on multiple occasions (including putting on a Santa Claus mask and accosting her in a dark alley as she walks home!) are two of the most ludicrously unprofessional cops you'll see in any film and it's here where the film sometimes flounders. While some of their scenes are amusing (sometimes even hilarious) their ineptitude and clownish behavior gets annoying after awhile. But, thankfully, this picks back up again for a lively (and lengthy!) finale featuring a pursuit through the radio station at night, cops running around in their underwear (and seemingly unable to use an elevator or even walk up stairs properly) and the killer pushing a 7-UP machine through the hallway trying to crush our leading lady.

The director has had a pretty interesting career. Born in the UK, he studied in London before relocating to Hong Kong to work in TV and film (1985's The Island seems to be his only other HK genre credit). Afterward, he made the Jude Law vampire movie Immortality (1998; aka The Wisdom of Crocodiles) in the UK, the Cabin by the Lake TV movies in Canada (2000 -2001), The Darkling (2000; another TV movie) in the U.S., the Steven Seagal action film Out of Reach (2004) in Poland and the Wesley Snipes action film The Detonator (2006) in Romania. He then returned to Hong Kong to make the horror film Baby Blues (2013) but then came back to America to shoot The Jade Pendant (2017) just last year in Utah. Guess he loves to travel.

The screenplay is from Kin Lon, who scripted a number of other genre films in the 80s and 90s and went on to direct some as well, including the great HEARTBEAT 100 (1987), which kind of fine-tuned some of the same things attempted here, Into the Night (1988) and Banana Spirit (1992). The cast includes Carroll Gordon, Eric Tsang (also the production manager), Billy Lau as a convenience store cashier and veteran actor Kung-Wu Huang as the radio station security guard who keeps a box of weapons (including a nail-lined club, brass knuckles and nunchucks!) at the front desk in case anyone's feeling insecure walking home alone at night.

This Cinema City release was very successful at the box office and was nominated for three Hong Kong Film Awards, winning for Best Editing (Kuo-Chung Chou) and Best Cinematography (Arthur Wong). The music from Violet Lam is also great. There was a U.S. VHS release on the Rainbow Audio & Visual label plus a DVD release from Mega Star / Tai Seng. Both have English subtitles and a few outtakes and bloopers at the very end.

★★★

Ling huan xiao jie (1988)

... aka: 靈幻小姐

... aka: Lady Vampire
... aka: Miss Magic
... aka: Miss Magic Spirit

Directed by:
Fung Hak-On

At a small film studio, a director (Teddy Yip) and crew are shooting some kind of period action / horror / samurai swordsman epic. When they're not busy gambling away their pay, some of the immature extras play a prank on obnoxious fellow extra and "fatso" Billy Tung (Billy Lau, doing his usual mugging routine) by pretending to be hopping vampires, leading him to humiliate himself by confessing that he's never had a woman (“I'll shoot you with my virgin pee!”) Unbeknownst to any of them, but a real ghost (Lau Chin-Dai), a nice, friendly one at that, is actually haunting the grounds. Studio janitor Uncle Fok (Fat Chung) knows about her and interacts with her. Earlier, he'd found her bones in the mountains behind the studio and had them buried. However, even a proper burial hasn't brought her peace and she's still hanging around. The ghost girl idolizes the studio's star actress Jenny (Petrina Fung), but encounters with the starstruck ghost, brief and innocent as they may be, drain Jenny of her energy so Uncle Fok frowns upon it.

A frequent presence on set is Wong-Ngan (Pauline Wong Yuk-Wan), who's married to studly film star / martial arts expert Wai-Keung Chiu (Norman Chu); a man who has a bad habit of (really) beating the shit out of the extras during action scenes. Wong-Ngan is just a wee bit insecure in their marriage, paranoid he's fooling around behind her back and had previously tried to kill herself by drinking antiseptics and slitting her wrists multiple times. Wai-Keung, who's doing an all-night shoot, promises to be home at 8am so they can have breakfast. However, there is no overnight shoot. He just wants to go out with his buddies to get some drinks. Wong-Ngan catches him there, slaps Jenny in the face, is slapped back by Wai-Keung and angrily storms off. When a drunk Wai-Keung returns home later that night he discovers his wife has hung herself. The fact she put on a red dress beforehand means that she'll be back.

After the funeral, Wai-Keung doesn't seem the least bit upset (“Wives are like clothes... I can buy new clothes.”), but he soon will be once his former wife's vengeful spirit returns to settle the score. She doesn't waste any time taking over Jenny's body and sends her out to try to kill him. The friendly studio ghost opposes her and Uncle Fok, who's not just skilled as a janitor but also at exorcism and swordfighting, expels the ghost from her body. Jenny is taken to the hospital, while Uncle takes Wai-Keung to an old lady spirit medium (Lap-Ban Chan) who does some kind of ceremony with incense, spell paper and eggs with faces drawn on them that allows the angry ghost to speak to her husband through her. Convinced he and Jenny were having an affair, the unreasonable ghost proves herself to be immune to reason and promises to kill them both.

Wai-Keung attempts to appease the spirit by putting some of her favorite things around their home but when that doesn't work he goes to “ghost buster” Priest Troublesome (Peter Chan Lung) for help. They rig up his apartment to trap the spirit inside (using “magic powder,” a spell paper lamp and contaminated perfume) and then Wai-Keung's left alone to stab her with a magic dagger. None of that works and she ends up attacking him in the parking garage (by starting up and moving the cars herself) and then blowing up his car with him inside. But now that he's gone to join his wife in ghost world, she still won't be content until the innocent Jenny is dead, too.  Uncle Fok comes up with a plan to get her soul out of her body and trap it in paper so that Wong-Ngan thinks she's dead. He can then return to the spirit to her body once the ghost is gone.

After successfully separating Jenny's spirit from her body, Fok prepares Billy and four of his pals to do battle with the ghost but their trick backfires. Wong-Ngan gets into a heated battle with both Fok and the good girl ghost from the movie studio, which ends with one of the guys (Tai Bo) being forced to eat Jenny's spirit paper containing her soul (otherwise it'll be burned and she'll be dead for good), which makes him pregnant. Wong-Ngan leaves but she'll be back so Fok sends for reinforcements. Ghost expert Master Wong (Bill Tung Biu), who's “sometimes” crippled and in a wheelchair but only when he wants to be (?), and his little apprentice Wai (Ho Kin-Wai, from the Mr. Vampire sequels) show up to help during the final battle.

This movie is the poster child of a 5 out of 10, or a C grade, or a 2 out of 4 as my ratings go. Nothing about it is terrible but there's also not much about it that really stands out either. While it does an admirable job balancing the comedy and action, the plot and all of the ghost fighting techniques are overly familiar, right down to a strange infatuation with virgin urine. We are even shown the little boy pissing into a bowl so it can be poured down some poor guy's throat to drive out the evil spirit at one point. (The boy is the only virgin left in the room after Billy gets raped in a coffin by a horny old female ghost in a cemetery). Also setting things at a film studio and not using that platform to take a few humorous digs at these kinds of films seems like a wasted opportunity. The best this really has to offer are some surprisingly well-executed special effects of spirits splitting and hopping in and out of bodies.

The director, who passed away earlier this year, is best known as an actor (he directed just four films but acted in over 150) and is the son of screen veteran Fung Fung, who also acted, directed and worked as a stuntman and action choreographer during his long career. The leading lady is Fung's daughter / the director's sister, who was a popular child star in the 1960s and likened to Hong Kong's answer to Shirley Temple. Despite receiving top billing, she doesn't really get much to do here and is covered with a sheet during the entire finale.

Currently with just six votes on IMDb, this isn't the easiest of such films to find nor is it really worth the effort. There's no DVD release anywhere to my knowledge but there was a subtitled VHS from Ocean Shores back in 1988 and likely a VCD release also.

★★