Tag: Peter Ngor Chi-Kwan

Finale in Blood (大鬧廣昌隆, Fruit Chan, 1993)

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A wandering ghost trapped in an umbrella sticks around to get revenge on her philandering husband while becoming an accidental radio star in Fruit Chan’s torrid answer to Stanley Kwan’s Rouge, Finale in Blood (大鬧廣昌隆). Inspired by a classic folk legend passed down through Cantonese recitative, the film uses the medium of a ghost story to examine the nature of love as, as someone later puts it, love doesn’t necessarily “possession”.

The witness to the tale is hapless radio announcer Ming-Pao (Lawrence Cheng Tan-Shui) whose job it is to read out food prices on a station that has become popular for its soap opera-esque tales of horror. Down on his luck, he agrees to help a friend who smuggles Western medicine complete a job only to find himself subject to a police rad during which he gets knocked into the harbour. Somehow he is saved by the haunted umbrella which turns out to belong to Fang Yin (Ruth Winona Tao), a recently deceased young woman who subsequently becomes attached to him and co-opts Ming-Pao into helping her get vengeance against her cheating husband, Ma (David Wu).

Ming-Pao ends up unexpectedly hosting the ghost story spot during which Fang Yin steps in to tell her own story, though everyone assumes it’s Ming-Pao mimicking a woman’s voice, and becoming a huge hit as the populace appears to sympathise with the various ways Fang Yin was made to suffer because of her husband’s poor treatment. The way she tells it, she came to Hong Kong to take over her father’s hotel, but found it quite a dull business before taking a liking to a mysterious guest who turned out to be an undercover policeman whose case she accidentally blows. Nevertheless, the pair enter an awkward courtship in which Ma seems to delight in introducing her to the seedier side of Hong Kong in its brothels and opium dens. Ma is evidently not a particularly diligent policeman, and has a kind of arrangement with a sex worker (Chikako Aoyama) who intensely resents Fang Yin and is confused about the ambiguous nature of the relationship she has with Ma.

Fang Yin also finds herself confused and humiliated as Ma often fails to return home, forcing her to go looking for him low places and often discovering him with his mistress. Ma meanwhile, defends himself claiming that it’s only natural for a man to stray and that he was just “on a moral holiday” when Fang Yin returned early from a trip and found the pair together. Ming-pao, meanwhile, is the total opposite of Ma. Though he may be a bit hapless, getting involved in his friend’s smuggling business, he feels sorry for Fang Yin and the way her husband treated her. Though he is originally irritated to have been saddled with a ghost, after that he tries his best to help Fang Yin, even digging up her body and placing it in moonlight so she can temporarily possess it. This does, however, place him at risk as Ma and his mistress begin noticing the similarities between the radio story and the murder they’ve committed.

In helping Fang Yin, however, Ming-Pao effectively uses the studio’s biggest star who has, against the odds, taken a likening to him mostly because of his performance on the radio show which is, of course, actually performed by Fang Yin. Though Sha-sha (Josephine Koo Mei-Wah) initially comes to the conclusion that Ming-Pao is the killer, she later sympathises with Fang Yin too and laments her situation as one third of an incredibly destructive love triangle. The unnamed sex worker is very possessive of Ma and almost boasts in claiming to have buried Fang Yin’s body herself. Ma is more equivocal, trying to placate Fang Yin though with a gun behind his back. Likewise, he eventually tells the sex worker that he never loved her and their relationship was always transactional. A coward, it’s never quite clear what his real feelings are, but only that this three-way relationship was always doomed to failure. Nevertheless, Ming-Pao’s smuggling friend diagnoses the problem as less one of Ma’s moral transgressions and more one of selfishness on the part of the women who should simply have learned how to be less “possessive” and share their man. Ming-Pao’s Hong Kong is though a more helpless place filled with a sense of despair and defeat. Chan lends the picture a kind of sleaziness, embracing the fetid atmosphere with rainstorms and sweatiness before ending on an ironic note of serenity as the three lovers are seemingly reunited for all eternity.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Ebola Syndrome (伊波拉病毒, Herman Yau, 1996)

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“I’ll fuck up whoever busts my balls!” snarls the protagonist of Herman Yau’s notorious 1996 Cat III exploitation film Ebola Syndrome (伊波拉病毒), seemingly filled with internalised rage in a sense of oppression as a little guy continually at the mercy of bosses who exploit and belittle him. Then again, Kai (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang) is not a nice guy and his various crimes are less those of an emasculated man towards an unfair society than a sociopathic disregard for conventional human morality. 

Even so, his first act of violence is a result of his attempt at petty class rebellion by sleeping with a mob boss’ wife only for the boss to come home and ritually humiliate him by ordering his wife to pee all over his treacherous underling before threatening to cut his bits off with a pair of secateurs. Kai, however, goes crazy and uses the shears to take out the boss, the associate, and the wife, pausing as he leaves to douse their terrified little girl in petrol in an ironic piece of foreshadowing only to be interrupted before he can light a flame. 10 years later in 1996, Kai is on the run working in a Chinese restaurant in Johannesburg where he is once again oppressed and belittled by the Taiwanese manager and his wife not to mention further displaced by the complicated racial politics of mid-90s South Africa. 

A minor comment on colonial corruptions in the anxiety surrounding Hong Kong’s imminent transition, Kai and his boss Kei (Lo Meng) find themselves in a difficult position in facing discrimination from all sides. Needing meat for their restaurant, they decide to strike a deal with the local indigenous community after being insulted by a white butcher but on their arrival walk into some kind of ritual conducted over the bodies of numerous locals who each have bloody welts all over their skin. On meeting with the leader, the pair immediately rip him off while he plays a grim joke on them as they discover two human bodies in place of the pig carcasses they’d intended to buy before he returns to set them straight.

This early moment of foreshadowing has its own dark irony as Kai will eventually end up once again murdering three people he accuses of busting his balls before mincing them up and turning them into “African Char-sui Bao” hamburgers. By this point Kai is already a “super spreader” having unknowingly contracted the ebola virus after raping a near comatose indigenous woman at the waterside who vomited white liquid in his face as he climaxed. In another instance of cruel cosmic irony, Kai turns out to be one of small amount of people effectively immune recovering quickly from what seems like flu but almost certainly having infected Kei and his wife and through them anyone who ate the African Char-sui Bao which is how ebola winds up in the city and eventually travels all the way to Hong Kong after Kai cuts his losses and goes home to live the high life on Kei’s savings. 

Yau does not hold back on the gore nor on the very real terror of the ravages of ebola as a doctor gruesomely dissects a human body remarking on the disintegration of its internal organs. At this point, Kai doesn’t know ebola’s what he has or that he’s passing it on but it’s unlikely he’d care. When the truth is finally revealed he runs anarchically through the streets with a meat cleaver shouting “ebola for everyone” and spitting at passersby as if taking his revenge against humanity itself. Yet he’s ultimately a wild animal trapped in civilised society caring for nothing other than the satisfaction of his immediate needs aside from his desperation to affirm his masculinity, not to be looked down on or bullied. We see him impassively chop up live frogs and witness the heads being torn off live chickens for others to drink their blood seeing him for what he is, an urban predator with no sense of conventional human value systems. 

Even so, the film seems to suggest this breed of malicious selfishness and amorality cannot be exorcised from the contemporary society while the infection continues to spread exponentially, the film’s bleak conclusion implying that the innocent will continue to suffer while the systemic causes of the disease go unexamined. Then again, Yau approaches his material with absurdly dark humour that implies that this really is some sort of cosmic joke in which all you can really do is laugh at life’s immense cruelties. 

Trailer (no subtitles)