Ling qi bi ren (1984)

... aka: 靈氣迫人

... aka: 靈氣逼人

... aka: Ling hei bik yan

... aka: Occupant, The

... aka: Tenant, The

Directed by:

Ronny Yu

After having spent most of her youth in Vancouver, Canada, college student Angie (Sally Yeh) returns to Hong Kong for a three week visit to work on her Masters of Arts thesis paper on Chinese superstitions. Strapped for cash and unable to afford to stay at local hostels, she's then forced to deal with questionable used car salesman / Realtor Hansom Wong (Raymond Wong), who's one of those cliché "comic" characters in 80s HK cinema who's supposed to be charming in their pushiness, ineptitude at appealing to the opposite sex and complete lack of self-awareness, yet mostly just comes off as grating and obnoxious. He puts Angie up in a fully-furnished tower block apartment that hasn't been occupied in quite some time. The price is... curiously affordable, which is usually not a good sign. 

Angie's first night there, a heavy wooden table keeps moving to the center of the room, she hears a woman singing and a couple arguing through the walls and there's a frequent knock on the door, yet nobody is there. Someone leaves flowers and a weird note outside her door. She assumes they were from Hansom, but he denies it. Also, the strangely emotionless building caretaker Poon (Hao Ren) clues her in on something else interesting: She's the only person currently staying in the building.

After showing her around at a temple and taking her to see a psychic medium (Mama Hung), Hansom invites himself into Angie's apartment and ends up getting thrown out of the window onto a parked car by an unseen force. Though he's (regrettably) not killed or even injured, the police are still called and Inspector Valentino Chow (Chow Yun-Fat), who's recently been busy busting pickpockets, pimps and sex workers, is on the case. Well, actually, he's not officially on the case for very long.

Due to angering a high-ranking politician after catching him with an underage massage parlor worker, the force has temporarily let Valentino go on an extended "holiday" until things cool down, which opens up plenty of free time for him to assist Angie. Naturally, he too becomes attracted to her, which starts up a rivalry of sorts between him and Hansom, though the men are able to put their differences aside long enough to help Angie investigate.

The previous tenant in Angie's apartment was a popular nightclub singer named Linda Law (Kit-Man Mak), who shot her married lover Robert (Melvin Wong) dead and then committed suicide immediately after. Since she died a painful and unnatural death, Linda continues to haunt her apartment. Angie begins subconsciously taking on some of the dead woman's traits, like suddenly smoking and painting her fingernails red, and things are bound to get worse the longer she stays there. However, the non-religious Angie doesn't necessarily believe in ghosts or the supernatural despite all of the odd occurrences in the apartment.

Trying to knock some sense into her, Valentino takes her to his spiritualist friend, Mr. Chan (Lieh Lo), for advice. He talks about how, within a haunted space, the brain waves of both the ghost and the occupant can start to sync if meditation and other spiritual tactics aren't employed. To ward off possession, the person needs to become one with Jesus, Buddha or some other God so that there's no room left inside for an evil force to inhabit them. So what does Angie do immediately after hearing this? She returns home, lights some candles and calls forth Linda's spirit, getting herself possessed in the process. There's an exorcism attempt, but that only temporarily works. Angie's new friends then must try to come up with a way to rid her of the spirit before she goes back to Canada.

Considering the director and the presence of two charismatic lead actors, all in the earlier stages of their careers, this was a huge disappointment. It's low on action, conceptually and visually unexciting, extremely talky, doesn't feature any decent make-up or special effects (the "best" - and only - real attempt is a single cheap animated ghost) and can't ever seem to find a balance with its disparate genre hopping. The film's dramatic, romantic and supernatural elements all get sidelined as this leans very heavily into the comedy, which turns out to be a fatal mistake.

While Chow and Yeh do have a few pleasant / charming moments together, they're constantly undercut by Wong's endless mugging and camera hogging, which grow extremely tiresome early on, never let up and do the film as a whole irreparable harm. This character should have either been a small part of the film or cut from it altogether instead of becoming the primary focus. Not surprisingly, Wong had a hand in the film's production and financing, and is a "presenter," so that probably explains why he's given the majority of the film's dialogue and is stuck front and center most of the time.

Director Yu made a number of other genre films like The Saviour (1980), THE TRAIL (1983) and Bless This House (1988) in Hong Kong before the international success of his The Bride with White Hair (1993) landed him in Hollywood. There, he's make the horror sequels Bride of Chucky (1998) and Freddy vs. Jason (2003), both of which were successful at the box office, followed by the HK / U.S. co-production Fearless (2006) starring Jet Li, which was also an international hit. This Cinema City release is the worst thing I've seen out of him yet, though it's not exactly terrible either. It's mostly just uninspiring and forgettable.

★★

Guntur Tengah Malam (1990)

... aka: Midnight Thunder

Directed by:

A. (Acok) Rachman

A dispute over an inheritance (money and a mansion) drives a wedge between Emma Gatot (Yenny Farida) and her stepson Rudi Sahyudi (Johan Saimima). Rudi and his teenage sister Ria ("Deasy Damasari" / Desy Ratnasari), who actually wants Emma to get her share despite Rudi's wishes and a court order giving them possession of it, end up getting everything while Emma is screwed over, has to move out and threatens to sue them. After several heated arguments, both siblings and Rudi's fiancée, Henny (Alba Fuad), are plagued by bad dreams, hallucinations and strange, ghostly occurrences. Henny has a nightmare-inside-of-a-nightmare where she's stalked in a lumber yard by a killer and then (in the film's best scene by far) locked inside a bathroom as the bath, sink and toilet start overflowing, water shoots out from between the shower tiles and the room quickly fills up with water. At the hospital where she works, Ria freaks out after she envisions a newborn baby is a Maraschino cherry-eyed mutant and then almost drowns after an invisible force levitates her and starts thrashing her around in the swimming pool. And Rudi has an encounter with a possessed wardrobe that knocks him to the floor with strong gusts of wind, pelts him with clothes and makes a photo of his late parents go up in flames. And that's just the start of it.

Blood miraculously appears on Rudi's forehead, which leads him to hallucinating pulling his entire face off. While watching her brother and his fiancée making out through a keyhole (?), Ria sees them as lumpy-faced ghouls. Henny, who's become reluctant to marry Rudi and move into the home due to the recent horrific developments there, is almost scalped by her hair dryer, pelted by floating figurines, levitated on the bed, scratched up, has her clothes shredded by an invisible force and is then left hung outside the window by her wrists.

When Henny is rushed off to the hospital, Ria and her boyfriend Johan get back from their date and head upstairs to mess around. Instead, he gets thrown out the window to his death while she's tossed around, rolled up and down the wall, menaced on a levitating bed and then dies after getting thrown into the ceiling fan. In a scene that directly rips off a similar scene from the previous year's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5, Rudi's buddy Broto (Alfian) is attacked by the own motorcycle he happens to be riding, which sticks wires under his hands, legs and face.

As it transpires, Emma has teamed up with a gigolo / criminal low life named Leo, who has hooked her up with some kind of black magician who's creating the "haunting" and killing off those standing in Emma's way of getting her hands on the home. To counteract that, Rudi goes to shaman Mrs. Resko for help and there's a minor white vs. black magic duel between the two the involves pink lighting, spitting up blood, someone getting crushed under a car and lots of crazy editing. A couple of detectives get involved and there's a scene at a discotheque, lots of Vaseline-smeared POV shots prowling around the house and an attempt at a Carrie-like shock at the end. For some reason (probably because this would barely be 70 minutes otherwise), five minutes of recycled clips from the film we've just watched are re-run at the end.

While many of the supernatural and horror scenes are pretty fun here, this spends too much time with corny, narrated romantic interludes plus a bunch of coy "sexy" scenes. You may think throwing in some sex here and there may not be such a bad thing, but you haven't seen just how long, pointless and drawn out it can be here. Besides, we can't forget that this is an Indonesian production from the 80s and their soft-core is almost always really soft as in there's a lot of bare shoulders, under the covers rolling around and close-ups of kissing yet no nudity whatsoever. Hell, Fuad even spends five whole minutes nude during her big shower nightmare but wears flesh covered pasties and underwear and the filmmakers shoot it in such a way that they never really show anything. The ladies are frequently clad in bras, panties, nighties and bathing suits and the voluptuous Yenny Farida makes for one sexy stepmom in her collection of body-hugging mini-skirts.

There were several VCD releases for this one in Asia, though it's never been made available in English. At least a decent quality widescreen print is now available, which was likely taken from some HD TV broadcast.

★★