Ren xia ren

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.

A man( Wu Ma) fakes his death in order to steal his family's funeral treasure. When the treasure is instead bequeathed to Ma's unborn son, his co-conspirators kill him (for real this time). His vengeful spirit seeks out the help of his friend (played by Sammo Hung) and together they seek revenge on his murderers.

Sammo Hung stars in this rather unusual but colourful tale that is in vein of Mr Vampire et al, but there's no hopping vampires in sight. Only a vengeful ghost in the form of Wu Ma and a trio of gremlin like creatures. The production is really good, the cinematography is top notch and the Chinese culture and its ritual is brilliantly done. Performances is great from all, especially Wu Ma. The fights are rather good, though few and far behind. Only sore spot is that it gets tedious towards the end. But it's still a good film.

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!!!!

Bonkers chop-socky that is part satire of ludicrous Hong Kong supernatural martial arts films, and part brilliant example of how it should be done. A rare wheeze that actually does have something for everyone:

Excellent slapstick comedy - the hero is pompous and fat, not lithe and Jackie Chan-like; getting into daft, self-generated scrapes, he is kicked about by every one, and guards a dead friend who isn't really dead in an hilarious scene that has him fending off curious gold thieves. He is repeatedly buffeted by otherworldly menaces, first his mischievous friend, then Satan's minions, who turn him into a lime-covered bug.

Action - Choreographed with great skill, played mostly for laughs, but there is one sequence - the friend's murder - that is filmed with rare beauty.

Horror - Again, mostly comic, with a remarkable use of somewhat cheap special effects.

Historical costume drama - not very precise, but the costumes and set-design are an immense, guilty, Orientalist pleasure.

Satire - under all the laughs is a serious study of repressive social and gender codes, and the last scene is spectacularly subversive in its implications.

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.