Tag: Wong Yau-Nam

Tales from the Occult: Body and Soul (失衡凶間之罪與殺, Frank Hui, Daniel Chan Yee-Heng, Doris Wong Chin Yan, 2022)

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The second in a series of horror-themed anthologies, Tales From the Occult: Body and Soul (失衡凶間之罪與殺) takes fairytales as its theme but truth be told none of the episodes has very much in common with the most well known version of their respective stories. What they do have in common is a rather grisly view of the nighttime city perhaps inspired by classic Cat III shockers though mediated through a strong sense of irony. “I like it a bit dark” one of the heroes exclaims and it’s certainly a sentiment shared by each of the three directors. 

The first instalment, Frank Hui’s Rapunzel finds former idol star Maggie (Michelle Wai) trying to prop up her flagging career while constantly written off as a has been best known for a cheesy pose in a dated shampoo commercial. Her manager sends her to an obnoxious rich kid’s birthday party where the women are so young they weren’t even born when she was a star and relentlessly mock the weird “aunty” and her “retro” movies. One of the guys sets fire to her hair which is even more of a problem for her because she’s supposed to have an important meeting with a producer in the morning and he’s not going to hire her with a less than perfect appearance. Maggie’s desperation eventually draws her into the orbit of a hair fetishist serial killer from whom she must try to escape while attempting to rescue her hair and save her career. A secondary strain of social community places the killer’s creepy all night salon in a building that’s about to be torn down for urban renewal leading him to be bullied by gangsters to move out but not wanting to for obvious reasons. Maggie meanwhile eventually makes a surprising decision in order to fix herself which is in its own way cannibalistic at least of the female image when it comes to the idea of perfect hair. 

You couldn’t say that Daniel Chan’s Cheshire Cat really has that much to do with the classic Alice in Wonderland character either, though Chan does throw in something like a Mad Hatter’s tea party and leave his heroine trapped in a cage suspended above the air. Nora (Cecilia Choi Si-Wan) works in a cat rescue centre and is particularly upset by the idea of people hurting her feline friends, especially as her own cat Bobo was recently murdered. After agreeing to rescue a kitten trapped under a van she unwittingly passes into a grim haunted house adventure with a death metal vibe. In a series of atmospheric shots, Chan frames Hong Kong in an angry red tint capturing the increasing resentment of Nora as she continues to take out her rage on those who would harm poor defenceless creatures. 

Doris Wong’s The Tooth Fairy perhaps ironically subverts its title while toying with the interplay of sadomasochistic fetishes. Dental nurse Sammi (Karena Lam Ka-Yan) is being relentlessly harassed at work by sleazy dentist Steve (Tommy Chu Pak-Hong) who won’t take no for an answer. On her way to the bank, she comes across a fight between two young men in which one bites off the other’s ear, and invites the biter to her clinic to get his swollen cheek looked at. Steve, however, does not take kindly to this after seeing he and Sammi flirt with each other, extracting a healthy tooth without anaesthetic as if teaching him a lesson, but clearly deriving sexual pleasure from his pain just like the sadistic killer on the news. In any case events soon escalate following some cake-related triggering and not just for its capacity to ruin your teeth. The killer may claim they’re setting people free from their earthly suffering but is clearly in part at least killing for the thrill. 

In any case, danger seems to lurk behind every corner with potential serial killers apparently all around us as the heroes find out during their various quests. Their stories may not have much in common with their inspiration but each have a strangely ironic quality curiously mimicking B-movie cinema in terms of colour palette and production design, Frank Hui eventually opting for a neon-coloured nightmare lair while Nora and the gang chase through a haunted Hong Kong and Sammi does her best to extricate herself from the unwanted attentions of her sleazy boss who is perhaps the real monster in the shadows. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Over My Dead Body (死屍死時四十四, Ho Cheuk-Tin, 2023)

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As the opening voiceover of Ho Cheuk-Tin’s darkly comic farce Over My Dead Body (死屍死時四十四) points out, the world is already quite an absurd place. A lot of us know that it’s absurd, but somehow we just roll with it without really asking why. If you stop to think about it, it really is absurd to spend every waking minute scrabbling for money to pay a mortgage on a flat you barely occupy because you’re always at work, but at least it’s less absurd than living with the constant uncertainly of arbitrary rent rises and sudden eviction. 

At least that’s the way it’s always seemed to the residents of 14A Seaside Heights, a swanky apartment block with all the mod cons and a touch of European sophistication. Technically the flat is owned by Ms. So (Teresa Mo Sun-Kwan), though home to daughter and son-in-law Yana (Jennifer Yu Heung-Ying) and Ming (Wong Yau-Nam) plus their small daughter Yoyo and Yana’s paranoid brother Kingston (Alan Yeung Wai-Leun) who is in the process of launching a “brand” selling a special “stealth suit” that can make you invisible to surveillance cameras. The obvious fact is, the flat is far too small for all these people and Ming and Yana want to move out not least so they stop having to sneak around like teenagers to get a little personal time. 

They have each, however, suffered amid the precarities of the post-pandemic economy with Yana losing her job as an air hostess when the airline she worked for went bust, while Ming’s removals business has taken a serious hit and is unlikely to recover as Mrs So points out with so many people leaving Hong Kong due to the ongoing political uncertainty. The young couple propose mortgaging Mrs. So’s flat for the downpayment on their own which they’d be paying a second mortgage on, which is why it’s incredibly bad news when they discover the naked corpse of a random man propped up against their door. 

The film plays with a minor pun in which the word for male corpse sounds like that for “Blue Ribbon”, a name for pro-government supporters during in the protests, the implication being you wouldn’t want one of those turning up on your doorstep either. In any case, any idea of calling the police or an ambulance is quickly abandoned on realising the flat would become known as a “murder house” and dramatically drop in value. The only thing to do is drag the unfortunate man to a neighbour’s door instead and let them deal with it. This goes about as well as could be expected with the whole floor eventually involved in the plan to move the body until they eventually hit on the idea of dumping it on a rundown social housing estate where people often go to commit suicide because no one’s going to notice one more corpse and no one owns those flats anyway so it doesn’t really matter if they ruin their property value. 

It is an incredibly dark and cynical sense of humour, but in its own cheerfully absurd in all the farcical shenanigans trying to remove the body from the building with no one really stopping to ask how it got there in the first place beyond connecting it with the mad streaker the security guard has been desperately trying to catch. Ho’s previous film, stylish true crime drama The Sparring Partner, had similarly had an absurdist vein of dark comedy running underneath it but Over My Dead Body does eventually rediscover a sense of hope if only in irony as it leans in to a New Year comedy-style celebration of family and community as the neighbours find themselves having to work together to protect their property investments. Even the materialistic Mrs So is forced to reflect that actually she’s lucky to be able to feel tired and frustrated, giving her blessing to her daughter and son-in-law to move out, while they in turn reflect that maybe it’s not that bad if they have to stay a little longer. It might seem like an overly saccharine conclusion for a biting satire about the rabid capitalism of a status obsessed, consumerist society but then again as an equally cynical ironic twist reveals maybe the residents are the ones who haven’t quite woken up despite their newfound solidarity. 

Over My Dead Body opens in UK cinemas on April 21 courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)