Ren xia ren

The excellent physical humour of Sammo Hung really comes through in this supernatural comedy of escalating errors. Complicated, or if you like to say messy plotting thick with a conspiracy narrative (which as a viewer you're in on it watching Sammo's Fat boy trying to put the pieces together of his friend's death - Wu Ma. Then finding himself in an even worse predicament). This is where the laughs are centred around. Eventually it does change course in the last half hour where the over-top-eccentrics meets the atmospheric spirit world. Cartoonish fx, glowing greens and levitating objects. That's when the imagination comes into the picture. After somewhat of a less interesting set-up. The film's energy sorta comes and goes, and it's noticeable whenever Sammo is not on screen. Some scenes can linger on too long. As for hoping for some martial arts. It had its moments. Cue in the slow motion, but mainly its put on the back burner in favour of the buffoonery and last minute FX.

This is a rough one. I've sometimes described Hong Kong action movies as "a sequence of things that happen." That problem is among the worst in this movie. It takes a solid half of The Dead and the Deadly to finally have anything even remotely resembling a real plotline (a life insurance scam).

The whole entire first half is just a collection of scenes featuring Sammo Hung as he pals around town doing random things. He pretends to be a mannequin, he gobbles down aphrodisiac, he rebukes a clingy would-be wife, and he gets into trouble at the funeral home. None of it ever really feels like its in service of any kind of over-arching story or even much character development, it's just 45 minutes of a guy kind of doing whatever. It wasn't particularly funny and there's not a whole lot of fighting to be had.

Even once the actual life insurance story finishes out, the movie still keeps going for at least another ten minutes. The whole thing is just a total pacing disaster. At best, it leans on a very small handful of pretty decent special effects, but it's all limited to a handful of shots in the last act. The same goes for fight scenes -- there's maybe three action set pieces in this whole movie, and all of them are brief and come very late.

I think you've gotta be a big fan of Sammo Hung to get much out of this one.

this movie was funny at times and the few fight scenes were actually well-done. one of the things i really liked about this movie was its strange and original story line. if you are into strange comedy movies, check this one out.

This film is just hilarious and definitely worth the two times me and my little sister have stayed up to watch it at three in the morning (or whatever daft time Channel 4 - UK tv channel - have put it on at). My only wish is that I could get a couple of copies of it on video so that me and my sister could watch it whenever we wanted for the rest of our lives. This film is excellent and if it's on a tv near you...WATCH IT!!!!

What the hell is this all about? Here's a choice cut of dialogue "you have to catch him, then wrap him in, turn around, (whispers) a sanitary towel!" What? I think that they make these things up as they go along!