Bi gui zhuo (1986)

... aka: 俾鬼捉

... aka: 誰當鬼

... aka: Bei gwai yuk

... aka: Ghost Snatchers, The

... aka: Invasion from the Beyond

... aka: Shui dang gui (Who Is the Ghost?)

Directed by:

Ngai Choi Lam

Nearly every guy working at Fox Centre, a high rise office building, has the hots for secretary Judy Hsu (former Taiwanese model Shu-Yuan Hsu). She's so in demand she makes interested parties fill out an application that, according to the subtitles, is "To check if you've in recent years got V.D., syphilis or AIDS. Also your size and lastingness." What nobody knows is that Judy is the target of evil spirits. During a late night office party, lightning strikes the building and Judy is accosted in the bathroom by said spirits. The walls split, a long corridor opens up, hands burst through and start throwing her around and then a giant hand grabs her. Now possessed, a voice regularly calls out to her, demanding she "Kill all men and women!" Sometimes her eyes glow red and she's aided by the pale-faced ghosts of former Japanese soldiers. So why Judy? Well, it has something to do with her having a yen horoscope.

Meanwhile, we meet luckless "fatty" Bong Chu (Jing Wong); your standard HK ghost-comedy leading men who creates a mess out of pretty much everything he touches ... and life returns the favor! He's the type who can't even sit down for a simple breakfast without a fly landing in his fish congee. Since he's unemployed and still living at home, his parents make an arrangement with his uncle, Pien-Chou Fan (Stanley Fung), for him to work as a security guard at Fox Centre. He's trying to save up money to get married to his girlfriend, Hsueh Tai, who's played by the super-cute Joey Wong. Yes, part of the joke is that she's way out of his league, even though there's a catch. Hsueh's brother, Erh-Lung (Michael Wai-Man Chan), is a low rent underworld figure with a thug entourage who swindles his money away and tries to prevent him from dating his sister. Also, a bird shits on his lunch.

Because of its design, the Fox Centre is cursed. It all has something to do with yin and yang and magnetic forces and spiritual fields and feng shui and Japanese soldiers being executed on the site of the building during the war and now wanting to rebuild the Nippon Empire and, well, let's just say Fox Centre was erected in the wrong place in a super-specific way that's made it a hot spot for paranormal activity. Back when the building was first being built, several construction workers died under mysterious circumstances. And then the architect who designed the project (supposedly) died by suicide. And then the Inquiries Commission chairman in charge of investigating the mysterious deaths died himself. You get the picture.

Since it's a special time of year when all the yins and yangs are compromised or something, anyone working there who was also born during a certain time of the year is in danger, which happens to include Bong, his uncle and Hsueh. They seek assistance from Hsueh's fortune teller godsister, Ling Chang (Miss Hong Kong 1984 and future Mrs. Sammo Hung, Joyce Godenzi), who advises the chairman (Wai Shum) of things he can do to thwart the evil. That involves closing up parts of the building, like the top floor and the parking garage, and other things that he's not willing to do. 

Ling, who's young, beautiful and has a good personality, also becomes the unlikely love interest of Pien-Chou, who's middle-aged, average and a pervert who spends all his free time in porn theaters and massage parlors. Hey, you guys already used that hot-chick-who-can-do-1000-times-better-hooking-up-with-a-complete-idiot joke once already! Ling goes out of town for a single day to try to get them help and what does Pien-Chou do? He tries to have sex with the possessed Judy, even after he's explicitly told she's a ghost!

Dumb moments aside, this movie is packed with so many ghostly, gory, weird shenanigans that it almost succeeds in spite of itself. We get a face pulled off, an ear bitten off, a heart ripped out of a chest, eyeballs ripped out, an exploding head, a nightmare inside of a nightmare, someone split in two with a giant guillotine, someone split in two with a samurai sword, centipede eating, a ghost pissing blood, a movie theater slowly filling with ghosts, a "safety charm" that can be used once to ward off ghosts, a male spirit medium with a dubbed-over female voice, a haunted TV set that eventually sprouts arms and legs and lots of other entertaining stuff. The only thing we don't get is a decent screenplay.

While there's certainly some fun to be had here, that's a bit compromised by needless complication in the plotting, overly familiar characters and too many detours away from the primary story. A good example is a long and utterly pointless scene where Ling summons a "Mahjong ghost;" an awful, big-nosed, stuffed animal looking puppet wearing sunglasses, to help our bumbling heroes win a game. And then there's a subplot where one of the guys loses 3 of his 10 souls and the rest of the cast have to rush around trying to find them and then reunite them with his body before the hospital staff can conduct an autopsy. So what does any of that have to do with the haunted building? Not a damn thing really. It's like someone just came up with ideas they liked and threw them into the stew whether they belonged here or not.

Toward the end, we learn the only way to banish the evil is to locate the portal to a spiritual realm called "Asolo Field." While there, they must find the "Ghost King's skeleton," put a spell on it, return intact with something called a "longevity rope" and then let a virgin (Joey Wong's character) hold it. Oh yeah, and the only people who can enter are those that are yang. Got that? Nope, well then forget that and just enjoy the strangeness of the colorfully-lit ghost realm, which is accessed through a portal in the women's restroom mirror and culminates in a fight against an undead Japanese general and his animated skeleton (a well-executed puppet effect) around a lake of acid.

The director also made THE SEVENTH CURSE (1986), a better, more-polished horror-comedy than this one, the excellent rape-revenge film Her Vengeance (1988), the manga adaptation and box office hit The Peacock King (1989) and its sequel, Saga of the Phoenix (1989), Erotic Ghost Story (1990), another big hit in Hong Kong, the cult classic Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991) and, his final film, The Cat (1992). With a track record like that, it's a true shame he abruptly stopped working in film altogether in 1992.

Also in the cast are Charlie Cho (THE FIRST VAMPIRE IN CHINA) as a Mahjong player, Lap-Ban Chan (HOUSE OF THE LUTE) as Hsueh's granny, Tony Leung (who also wrote the script) as a security guard, Tau-Wan Yue as a cross-eyed security guard, Siu-Ming To as a cross-eyed TV ghost and lots of other familiar faces.

This Golden Harvest production did middling business at the box office. It was first released on VHS in Hong Kong in 1986 on the Pony Canyon label. That was followed by VCD and DVD releases from Fortune Star. The latter includes an English subtitle option, as does the Malaysian DVD release from Speedy Video. There's no Blu-ray to my knowledge, though this seems like a prime candidate for such a release so it'll probably happen eventually.

★★1/2

Next of Kin (1982)

... aka: Akumu no keifu (Genealogy of Nightmares)

... aka: Angustia a Flor de Piel (Anguish to Flower of Skin) (?)

... aka: Fatal Terror

... aka: Hell House

... aka: Mais Próximo do Terror (Closer to Terror)

... aka: Montclare - Erbe des Grauens (Montclare: Legacy of Horror)

... aka: Montclare - Haus der Schreie (Montclare: House of Screams)

... aka: Ondskapens hus (House of Evil)

... aka: Paluu Menneeseen (Back to the Past)

Directed by:

Tony Williams

In Australia, Next of Kin (an Aussie / New Zealand co-production) came and went in theaters without much fanfare or critical acknowledgment and was likewise mostly ignored on the global home video market despite being released in dozens of countries. Not even a Best Editing nod for Max Lemon from the Australian Film Institute, nor Williams winning a Best Director award at the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival in 1982 (even beating out Sam Raimi for The Evil Dead in the process!), nor it winning a Special Mention award at Mystfest in Italy in 1983, nor it receiving a cover story by the widely-read Aussie film mag Cinema Papers, seemed to help this film's plight any. I used to own tons of horror reference books and magazines back in the day and don't recall any of the reviews for this film being particularly glowing.

However, a funny thing happened decades later: It was one of many titles highlighted in Mark Hartley's Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008) documentary, which featured Quentin Tarantino drawing comparisons between it and The Shining, calling it one of his three favorite Aussie films of all time and otherwise singing its praises. Then, as it so often happens with films that receive the QT stamp of approval, many folks started running around championing the film as some kind of unheralded forgotten classic. While I find Tarantino being treated as the ultimate, infallible, final authority on all horror and cult movies a bit ridiculous and tiresome, I remain intrigued by how one man's opinion somehow manages to completely alter initial perceptions and transform a film that had received a lukewarm reception up until the chosen one's re-appraisal into a sudden classic. That's some Jim Jones style shit right there!

You know what's really fascinating to ponder? Granted this is as good as people are now saying it is, how could it have possibly fallen between the cracks like it did and stay there for decades without anyone ever saying anything about it? I'd understand if it was nearly impossible to get your hands on all those years, but it wasn't. Despite what revisionist reviews are now claiming, it still wasn't. I just glanced at the opening paragraph of an essay on the film where the author makes the claim that it wasn't "given the chance back in the day" due to it "languishing in obscurity," which I find an interesting comment directed toward a movie that was widely distributed throughout Europe, Asia, North and South America and elsewhere. Literally millions of people viewed this film prior to Tarantino's endorsement and it hadn't managed to build up any kind of reputation whatsoever in all that time. 

I can't help it, this kind of stuff automatically brings out the cynic / skeptic in me, yet I was hoping this would at least somewhat live up to the hype. Instead, it ended up becoming my biggest disappointment of the year thus far. But, hey, the year's still young!

 

Following her mother's passing, Linda Stevens (Jacki Kerin) returns to her tiny home town in central Victoria for the first time in many years to take possession of the family mansion, which has been converted over to a elderly care facility called Montclare Retirement Home. Though she has the expertise of veteran nurse Connie (Gerda Nicolson), who practically ran the place by herself when the mother grew ill, at her disposal, it's still a big responsibility to take on for a 24-year-old. Linda isn't quite sure just what to do; sell the place or make it her permanent home / job. Seeing how it's been in her family for generations and she has already-established relationships with some of the staff and patients, there's a definite pressure to keep it. For the time being she'll stay, but doesn't want any new residents brought in on the chance she changes her mind. Staying also gives her a chance to rummage through her late mother's belongings, which include an old diary that she starts thumbing through page by page every night.

Since she's back, Linda decides to reconnect with an old fling named Barney (a wasted John Jarratt, of later Wolf Creek fame), who seems mostly interested in late night wham bam specials, drinking and partying, which probably also explains why he doesn't have his driver's license and has to be chauffeured around everywhere by a woman named Carol (Debra Lawrance), whom he appears to be dating. Also showing an interest in her is the more mysterious Kelvin (Robert Ratti), the son of one of the residents, Mrs. Ryan (Bernadette Gibson), who seems to be following her around.

There's a certain mystery surrounding Linda's mother's death, with chief physician Dr. Barton (Alex Scott) claiming that anxiety and high stress over money and the future of the facility led to her untimely passing. Still, no clear cause of death is offered up to her when she asks, and the doctor and Connie seem to be hiding things from her. Even stranger still, she has an Aunt Rita whose whereabouts are unknown. Linda is told by some of her acquaintances that she's passed away but that she's still alive by others. Barton's explanation is that she became dangerously mentally ill, was sent to live in an asylum and died there.

The entire first hour of this film deals almost exclusively with faintly odd, seemingly minor things that may or may not be supernatural / ghostly in origin, like windows being left open, lights going out, taps being left running, strange noises, etc., plus long time resident Lance (Charles McCallum) going to get in his bath and discovering the bloated corpse of another resident; the shock of which gives him a minor stroke. Linda notices a shadowed figure standing around watching her on several occasions and is haunted by slow-motion flashbacks / nightmares involving a little girl holding a red ball, which turn out to be her as a 4-year-old discovering, you guessed it, another drowned body in the bath. Seems there was an epidemic of similar deaths years earlier.

When it comes to the technical aspects of filmmaking, at least the aesthetic and sonic ones, this is strong on many fronts. There's really smooth Steadicam work and clever shots throughout courtesy of Gary Hansen, an interesting synth score from Klaus Schulze, who also did the memorable score for Angst (1983), effective sound design, decent art direction, moody lighting, etc. So at least you know you're in professional hands and this looks and sounds good most of the time. But technical proficiency is only part of the battle. We the audience need to feel something, which is where this almost completely fell flat for me.

The screenplay, co-written by the director and Michael Heath, is one filled with plot points that are often only partially explained, if they're explained at all, one where we're never quite sure if things are fantastical or conspiratorial and one where all of the principal characters behave in a secretive, suspicious manner, which sometimes makes sense in regards to the plot and sometimes doesn't and is simply used as a means to distract. That's all by design in an obvious attempt to create an air of distrust and paranoia around our heroine, but what's lacking here is a central focus of interest to bounce all of this stuff off of. Instead we're left with a bunch of cold, stiff, vague, lifeless and one-dimensional personality voids and a cast, many of whom are obviously talented, saddled with a script that refuses to humanize any of the characters they're playing because doing so would jeopardize the script's stubborn ambiguity.

Comparisons to Kubrick's previously-mentioned film are wishful thinking at best and, quite frankly, outright misleading at worst. While there are a couple of vague similarities, this isn't nearly as visually accomplished nor is it the least bit shocking, creepy or scary. I've also seen this compared to the works of Argento, Bava and Polanski which, again, are massive exaggerations. While this is stylish at times, it's nowhere near as stylized (or color-saturated) as the films of Bava or Argento. Similarities are mostly the director stealing imagery from their films, like the little girl with the ball (Kill Baby... Kill!) and the foot suddenly hitting a submerged corpse (Inferno). As far as Polanski is concerned, he could make ambiguous, multi-layered thrillers with not only complete precision but also with fully-realized characters, which is not at all what we get here.

The elder-heavy supporting cast turns out to be an apt one as the only thing that moves around slower than they do is this film's pacing. The term "slow burn" gets thrown around a lot these days to describe a film that's methodically sedate and restrained for the duration as a build up to surprise revelations near the end. The "slow" portion should be building up plot intrigue, suspense, atmosphere, characterization and / or tension until the release, but this doesn't quite hit the mark on any of these fronts. In fact, the content in the build portion is so muddled, bland and uninteresting that by the time action, plot twists and reveals come flying fast during the last 20 minutes, many people will have stopped caring. As for those final 20 minutes, while they're livelier and more entertaining than the preceding hour+, there's really nothing there most horror fans haven't seen elsewhere. Well, except for the sugar cube pyramid. That part was pretty sweet.

Though I'm not sure if this ever played in American theaters in the 80s or not, there were at least two VHS releases, from Media and Virgin Vision, and this was very much a video store staple here in the U.S. for decades. Recently, many companies have jumped at the chance to give it a restored Blu-ray release after its stock started rising, so now there are pristine copies available from companies like Umbrella, Second Sight, X-Rated Kultvideo and Severin. Many of these come with director, cast and crew commentary. The film is also sometimes screened on the Criterion Channel and is (at least currently) on Tubi TV to watch for free. 

Though you very well may enjoy this more than I did, I'd still absolutely recommend giving it a trial watch prior to purchasing. I almost blind bought due to the hype. Now I'm glad I didn't.

★★