Mang gwai dai ha

This is a HK ghost comedy where a troop of bumbling police rookies try to catch a ghost at a Hong Kong high-rise.

While a pretty intriguing-sounding plot, much of the movie is drenched in screwball comedy and attempted jokes that overshadows the ghost elements in the story somewhat. However, you still get some neat ghost-busting action with a fast-paced plot. Yet, there is little to no suspense.

Some might enjoy the screwy comic relief and some might actually get a scare or two out of what limited ghost action there is.

Grade C

Four female cops go undercover as club hostesses for a sting to stop a counterfeiting operation, but their choice of a meeting spot happens to be a haunted apartment building. The landlady had a Buddhist priest to rid the place of ghosts and to seal up the door in her basement where the spirits come from, but unknowingly one manages escape from him and this causes trouble for those who happen to be the building.

What lunacy! Every single aspect of this Honk Kong film is simply bonkers, though very amusing in its originality. "Operation Pink Squad 2" is a sequel to the original film (which I haven't seen) of the same name. It's a strange, ultra-loony and lowbrow supernatural horror comedy of the incredibly extreme and kinetic. Its loud and no-barred humour mainly drowns out the horror side of things. The comic jokes are crass, absurd and more often sexually orientated. Slapstick routines feature largely. Surprisingly even though it's quite goofy and screwball with its sense of humour, nonetheless its pretty effective because the script is immensely funny and the gags are very well timed. The off-the-rocker story sets up many impulsive shifts that feed off the central premise and director Jeff Lau's wacky, hundred miles per hour style works admirably with the light-headed formula. There are few flashy and neatly executed choreographed scenes of surreal action, but it's the farcical interplay that wins out. Special effects and make-up come off potently cheap and tatty, but manage to hold tight because of their limitations, so they're well used and kept on a leash. Well, except for one special surprise involving a head. Actually make that two. The bouncy camera-work leaves a fast, atmospheric imprint and there was some prominent filtered lighting to convey a sullen, dreary ambiance to the building. The jolts are pretty frank and underused, but the suspense doesn't seem to register and Lau might want it that way. Helping out is that the performances are done with a mock serious approach. Sandra Ng, Ann Bridgewater, Suki Kwan and Cheung Man perfectly make up the four undercover cops. Yuen Cheung-yan is excellent as the monk. Billy Lau, Woo Fung and Fui-On Shing get the laughs from their broad, madcap characters.

A neatly-handled and suitably outrageous comical farce.

Thunder Cops is a frenetic horror farce, way out on the edge of genre expectations for western audiences. It's a film characteristic of cut-rate Hong Kong exploitation cinema, where wacky comedy and slapstick farce frequently intrude into horror, even if the resulting films are sometimes brainlessly embarrassing. This blissfully surreal title succeeds against expectation, and is full of effective helter-skelter humour and bizarre knockabout invention. Its closest to the fast paced, ghoulish glee of such films as Re-Animator (1985) or The Frighteners (1996) and, although Thunder Cops looks much cheaper, its fast pace and sheer nuttiness makes these cult items seem lumbering beside. How Operation Pink Squad 1 (Thunder Cops' prequel, by all accounts a much more conservative film) triggered the excess on offer here would be worth discovering. What is certain is that the present film is so over the top, so barmy, that it would have made any more installments in the series redundant as pure anticlimax - and in fact this was the last one produced.

Thunder Cops' main narrative concerns a police sting, albeit organised in a haunted building, together with some matrimonial infighting. It's a slender set up, almost incidental to a narrative predicated around comedy and shock, rather than suspense and arrest. There are some familiar characters here, at least to those knowing this part of eastern cinema: the ridiculous husband who thinks he is a cuckold, the tough gangster, the brave Buddhist priest battling demons, the giggling coquettish women in supporting roles, and so on. As Min, the man who thinks his policewoman wife is working as a prostitute while sleeping with her commanding officer, Man Cheung is suitably outraged and cowardly. (Occasionally he looks like Anthony Wong, the Hong Kong actor famous for psycho roles, which adds to his persona nicely). Earlier there are some nicely judged moments as, after bugging his wife to learn of her adultery, he comically misunderstands some police business discussed between her and her officer 'lover'. Later he will be forced to confront his mistake - just as he will be repeatedly humiliated, for instance being forced to suck the toes of a female ghost to avoid death. Meanwhile, as his wife and the rest of the team set up their operation and await the arrival of a tough counterfeiter, a Buddhist priest and a landlady battle against ghosts in the apartment block. Gathering up evil essences in special ghost-buster sacks (to deposit them behind a convenient door to hell), one sack is dropped. As the police gather, a rogue female spirit begins to torment both them, the Buddhist priest, and the counterfeiter they seek...

Most of the establishing plot is just a pretext for the frantic comedy terror that follows. In these earlier scenes, the double entendres, broad sexual gags; wives hiding from husbands, etc. suggest humorous farce at play rather than evil forces at work. Even the Buddhist monk's initial encounter with a persistent ghost is punctuated by some comic misunderstandings and banter, in which the landlady of the building imagines that he is making a pass (in fact he is appraising and lunging at the spook just behind). Following this there are laugh-out-loud moments as the vengeful spirit pursues the unlucky undercover cops - at first with, then without, her head. Much of this tomfoolery is sustained by some excellent timing in the editing department, so important when dealing with action of this kind, teetering on the edge of the absurd. The special effects work is generally effective, although clearly done on the cheap. There are one or two touches of gore - especially when the chief ghoul meets her demise, and in suitably dramatic manner - but as befitting a category II film, these are fairly restrained. None of the performances are more than adequate, with the exception of the splendidly gruff-tough counterfeiter, but there again in a vehicle of this sort thespian subtlety is wasted.

The rest of the film contains some truly jaw dropping moments, notably when the ghostly head is chased up and down corridors by a surprise flight of model helicopters. (Yes, you read that correctly.) And there's the amazing finale too which, in its inspired lunacy, is not so far from musical madness of Takashi Ichii's Happiness Of The Katakuris) aka: Katakuri-ke no kôfuku, 2001). Thunder Cops is a film whose peculiarly eastern pandemonium deserves to be better known, and would stand repeated late night viewings. I recommend it.

With a title like Operation Pink Squad 2, I was fully expecting a Hong Kong 'girls and guns' flick, with a bevy of kung fu cuties kicking ass and engaging in high-octane shootouts. What I actually got was a broad farce/madcap supernatural comedy in which the 'pink squad'—four pretty female police officers—go undercover to catch a criminal but wind up coming face-to-face with malevolent ghosts. Only with the help of a Taoist priest can they hope to survive the night.

How much you enjoy the film will depend on just how funny you find Asian comedy. I have always struggled with the Chinese sense of humour, meaning that much of this very silly film left me distinctly unimpressed. The opening marital nonsense, the cross-dressing police officer, and the endless chase scenes featuring a ghostly flying head all failed to make me laugh.

Towards the end of the film, director Jeffrey Lau cranks up the craziness with an out of left field scene involving remote control helicopters, a pissing contest to see who will be castrated, self-detonation by the ghost head, and the arrival of a group of supernatural 'protectors', two of whom are women with beards. All of this is mildly amusing, but not enough to prevent the film as a whole from being rather tiresome.