Jokers Playing Games (1987)

... aka: Sky Deities

Directed by:

"Tommy Young" (Kong Yeung and Yeung Tong-Mei)

Here's yet another little-known Hong Kong ghost comedy; one of dozens if not hundreds from the 80s alone. This one isn't on IMDb and I couldn't even find a Romanized version of the title anywhere. It was originally released as 娶錯老婆投錯胎. I tried to translate that and it made no sense whatsoever so I'll just leave it alone for now. The “Jokers” are a trio of immature, klutzy imbeciles who strut and bumble around their small village causing various problems and accidents. The primary one is a cocky hairdresser named Law (Law Ho-Kai), who's obsessed with the extremely vacuous Eliza (Eliza Yue) and sets about wooing her. He runs into competition from Imbecile #2, a dorky friend of his who attempts to sway her his way with flowers and non-Japanese chocolates. Imbecile #3 is Chicken (Chun Wong), who works at a fish market and also happens to be Eliza's brother. Since Chicken is chubby, he is, of course, the go-to guy who can easily be coerced into doing bone-headed things on behalf of the other two. The guys mug their way through a bunch of pea-brained comic scenes that involve accidentally tossing a fish down a woman's blouse, shaving half of a guy's mustache off, threatening a group of annoying children with death, setting a clothesline full of girl's underwear on fire and joining in on an aerobics session set to an instrumental version of Madonna's “Material Girl” (!!) They, and nearly every other character in this film, seem completely obsessed with gambling, whether it be on horse races of Mahjong games.

There's a mayoral election going on in the village and the two candidates are businessman Uncle Wah (Ng Hing-Wah), another buffoon, and doctor Bill Chan Wang (Bill Tung), who practices both standard medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. Eliza and Chicken both rent their apartment from Bill and his wife (Tang Pik-Wan). The wife, along with most of the rest of the jealous village wives, hate Eliza and want her driven out of town because she's desired by all of the menfolk. In an effort to get their husbands more interested in them instead, they make putrid-smelling soup from horse penises (!) that will supposedly make their husbands horny. Little do they know, but they really have nothing to worry about because Eliza suffers from a case of the “bouble-sexes.” I think they meant "double-sexes" or, in layman's terms, she's a hermaphrodite. Bill attempts to cure her the old school way through magic, but when his wife overhears him asking Eliza to remove her panties, a shit-storm erupts. As a result, Chicken and Eliza willingly leave the village and attempt to try their luck in the big city.

Psst, don't ask "What's for dinner?" You'll be sorry.

Eliza decides to try her hand at modeling and makes a good first impression during training when she rips the wig off off her drag queen walking coach and mocks him. Meanwhile, Chicken manages to get a new job at the Dai Fu Kei Funeral Home making and selling coffins, where he runs into trouble with a competitive co-worker named, uh, Donald Duck. Yeah, that's what the subs are telling me. The two eventually decide to start working together. When a family refuses to pay the asking price for burial services, Chicken and Donald decide to save money by making the coffin out of cheap plywood. It turns out to be too small so they cram the body inside and, during transport, the coffin begins falling apart and the body eventually falls out right in front of the family. I think that was supposed to be funny.

Because of his troubled upbringing, Chicken has remained a virgin all these years. Thankfully, his new job helps to remedy that when he falls in love with one of the corpses (!) and begins having sex with its ghost (!!) Soon, a couple of fat male cops from the otherworldly “Immigration Department” show up wanting to take Chicken's ghost lover, Mei Ling (Maria Yuen), back to hell. Because he'd only partially seen her in the dark and doesn't know what she really looks like, the two ghost officers force Chicken, Eliza and Donald to hit the streets looking for a woman with a large “spot” (mole) on her face. They're unable to locate her, but instead run across an ugly woman (Yu Miu-Lin) who keeps trying to commit suicide because no man wants to marry her. She's run over by a car, the ghost woman possesses her body and then Chicken ends up marrying her after she gets the huge mole hacked off. A happy ending for everyone? Well, not quite. There's another ghost, a possession and some hopping vampire impostors thrown into the mix at the very end.

I usually have a lot of fun with these Hong Kong ghost movies. Even when they're dumb as hell you can usually count on them to provide a few laughs from all the goofy slapstick as well as a few thrills from the choreographed action scenes, stunt work and / or special effects. Not so here. This is terrible! The constantly-bickering characters are extremely obnoxious, the actors are annoying, the writing is awful and the directors seem to have no regard whatsoever for pacing or general coherence. As far as the special effects are concerned, they're unimaginative and unimpressive and I think most elementary school students could have done a better job on the ghost makeups with a 5 dollar Halloween kit. Worst of all, this isn't the least bit funny. The only thing to even put a smile on my face were the terrible English translations on the subs.

Veteran actress Lisa Mok Wan-Ha was the producer of this cinematic equivalent of Chinese water torture. For some reason, many of the actors use their real names for their characters. There was an English-subtitled VCD released here in America by Ocean Shores in the late 90s.

★

Deranged (1987)

... aka: Enloquecida (Crazed)
... aka: Follia! (Madness!)
... aka: Vom Wahnsinn besessen (Possessed by Madness)

Directed by:
Chuck Vincent

Made by adult film director Vincent and cast with porno actors in most of the lead roles, this bleak, depressing, low-budget and apparently polarizing psychological drama / horror flick was briefly ushered out to a theater or two before reaching its final destination on a video store shelf courtesy of Republic Pictures. Deranged at least played at the Criterion Center in New York City prior to its VHS release, which garnered it a review in the widely-read New York Times. In her review, critic Caryn James took a rather snooty, moralistic approach in her evaluation; attempting to undermine the movie by pointing out the porn connections over and over again. In case that didn't work, she called it “conspicuously cheap,” complained that “most of the movie takes place on a single set” and concluded that it was a “...sleazy, muddled movie that should have been kept in the can.” Many genre critics also didn't seem impressed. Rick Sullivan of the Gore Gazette referred to the director as a “scumbucket” and panned it for being like “an off-Broadway play” and containing too many “dull monologs and useless flashbacks.” Even the usually-reliable Michael Weldon of Psychotronic (a rare critic I typically agree with) called it a “disturbing Repulsion copy” that's “pretty unwatchable.”

While there's admittedly a smidgen of truth to what all of the above have to say, there's also a blatant disregard for recognizing the good where it is clearly present and none of the above complaints really ruined this movie for me personally. Sure it borrows rather heavily from Repulsion (same basic plot, same setting, some of the same symbolism and elements of surrealism), but it ultimately does enough of its own unusual and interesting things to differentiate itself. And sure it's primarily filmed on one set and often resembles a stage play, but who says that's necessarily a bad thing? As far as it being cheap, sleazy, disturbing, muddled, etc., all of those are present and accounted for to one degree or another but there's far more to this film than that.

As Deranged opens, mentally-unstable Joyce (Jane Hamilton aka Veronica Hart) and her bitchy, sarcastic half-sister Maryann (Jennifer Delora) drop Joyce's husband Frank (Paul Siederman aka Jerry Butler) off at the airport. He's going to be away on business for an entire month in London, leaving the frail and very pregnant Joyce in the care of her less-than-nurturing family. Maryann takes Joyce to have dinner with her extremely snooty, social climber mother Sheila (Jill Cumer), which turns out to be a surprise baby shower. Through all of this, Joyce keeps seeing things (like a razor-wielding minister in a mirror) and hearing various voices in her head; her disapproving mother's voice, her sister's voice, her husband's voice, her own voice / conscience... After the party, she's dropped off at home, where she's attacked by a masked man clad in black, who stomps on her stomach and smacks her around. She manages to kill him by gouging out his eye with a pair of scissors, but miscarries due to the attack, which sends her even deeper into her own psychosis.

Instead of calling the cops and going to the hospital, Joyce hides the attacker's body under a table, puts a pillow under her shirt so she still looks pregnant and holes up inside her apartment acting as if nothing has happened. From then on out, we get a mix of nightmarish delusions, flashback scenes and scenes of what's really taking place in the present day all blended together in a rather unusual way. Instead of fade outs and scenes being set elsewhere, Joyce actually interacts with everything that's going on both in reality and in her own mind inside her apartment. Sometimes the present day scenes and the flashbacks take place in the very same scene; often times even in the same shot! Though this sounds like it may be confusing, it's not. Vincent and cinematographer Larry Revene do a rather inspired and fluid job choreographing all of the action. Many tracking shots are used to prowl around the small, claustrophobic set, with the camera often panning from the kitchen through the living room into the bathroom or bedroom on the other side and back again. There are many long, unbroken shots in the film, but the performers manage to pull these off and they're done so well most viewers won't even notice there's been no cut.

We learn a great deal about the troubled main character through all of these scenes and what we learn certainly explains her current mental state. Joyce's beloved millionaire father Eugene (Jamie Gillis) slit his own throat open, which may have been prompted (at least in part) by her mother carrying on an affair with a guy named Darren (John Brett), who's Maryann's real father. After discovering her dad's body in the bathtub, Joyce is accused of murdering him by some family members after she inherits the bulks of his money. That's when the voices first start, which lead Joyce to drop out of college, seek therapy and then hook up with “Brooklyn bum” / tennis instructor Frank; a union her mother is strongly against because she thinks he's a gold-digger only after her money. After the two sneak off to Vegas to marry, Joyce reveals her pregnancy to Frank. He angrily suggests she get an abortion, which may be because he's actually in love / having an affair with Maryann. All of that - plus a dash of incest - have caused Joyce to become unstable and extremely paranoid about the true intentions of most of the people in her life.

While she's busy reliving her various traumas, Joyce lets her apartment go to hell; allowing a faucet to overflow,  leaving out food to rot and forgetting to pick up everything she knocks over. The burglar's dead body begins stinking up the place to the point where her neighbors start complaining so she stuffs it in a closet. Joyce is sporadically visited by both Maryann and hunky deli deliveryman Nick (Gary Goldman), who just so happens to be attracted to pregnant women, and fields nosy phone calls from her nagging, awful mother. There are a few murders, imagined zombies appear and things are capped off with an ambiguous ending that is extremely annoying yet works as a way to make us question what we've already seen from Joyce's vantage point.

Aside from the consistently interesting direction and camerawork, this also has a decent screenplay from Craig Horrall and an effective score from Bill Heller, which is a mixture of haunting synthesizer and lullaby music plus distorted sounds of glass breaking, moaning, heartbeats, etc. The primary cast are all pretty good but this proves to be Hamilton / Hart's show all the way and she is truly impressive here playing an extremely difficult role that most big name Hollywood stars wouldn't have been able to pull off. Vincent also produced and did the art direction; the latter under the alias "Marc Ubell." Fellow adult film director Lem Amero was the casting director. 

Sadly, Vincent, Horrall and Amero were all dead by 1991 from AIDS, so we're unlikely to ever learn much about the making of this film. It's not even on DVD but absolutely deserves to be. The same team also made the very entertaining BAD BLOOD (1989).

★★★