Crew
Director – Ngai Choi Lam, Screenplay – Jing Wong, Music – Chun Hua So, Production Design – Oi-Man Fung & Oliver Wong. Production Company – Golden Harvest.
Cast
Jing Wong (Chu Bong), Joey Wong (Hsueh), Shui-Fan Fung (Fan Pien-Chou), Shu-Yuan Hsu (Judy Hsu), Joyce Godzeni (Ling), Wai-Man Chan (Tai Erh-lung)
Plot
At the opening of Fox Tower, one of the employees Judy Hsu becomes possessed after venturing into the bathroom. Chu Bong gets a job as a security guard at the tower. After encountering mysterious happenings in and around the building, Chu’s girlfriend Hsueh’s cousin Ling, an expert in such matters, determines that the tower’s feng shui is out of order and it will curse anybody who belongs to yang alignment unless it is corrected. Battling off various manifestations, they must venture in to confront the ghosts of Japanese soldiers.
The Ghost Snatchers was one of the entries that came out amid the blend of fantasy, martial arts and comedy that emerged in Hong Kong Cinema in the 1980s. The way was paved by works like Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980), Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), Mr Vampire (1985) and The Haunted Cop Shop (1987). The peak of the cycle was the delirious A Chinese Ghost Story (1987). After successes like The Happy Ghost (1984), there were a host of light comedy ghost fantasies, while other entries fell on the horror side of things.
The tone throughout The Ghost Snatchers is the mad slapstick hysteria that is familiar to Hong Kong comedy. Much of the film is dominated by this. The plot is all over the place. There seem too many different supernatural things going on and not one that coalesces into a single clear threat. There are three women leads and it often gets confusing trying to work who is meant to be who.
On the other hand, The Ghost Snatchers goes beyond the usual ghost comedy it ostensibly is and has its share of pure dementia. One of these is a tv set that sprouts hands and legs and walks around, beckoning people to come inside it – shades perhaps of the recent Videodrome (1983). In one particularly bizarre scene, we see a mah-jong game where Jong Wong is told that it is haunted by a mah-jong ghost that is affecting players’ luck, where he is given a sigil that allows him to see a shabby puppet as it perches on lamps and player’s shoulders.
Things are not above getting quite gory too. At one point, a security guard has his face torn off and then his heart pulled out. The climax features the heroes going through a bathroom mirror into some afterlife realm where they must fight the ghosts of the Japanese soldiers and animated skeletons, before the battle to get back up the chute to the mirror by climbing a magic rope.
Director Ngai Kai Lam or Ngai Choi Lam, also credited as Nai-Tsai Lan and Simon Nam, has made a number of other genre entries including:- the wacky horror film The Seventh Curse (1986); the revenge film Her Vengeance (1988); the Wu Xia fantasy Peacock King (1988) and its sequel Saga of the Phoenix (1990); Erotic Ghost Story (1990); the amazing splatter film Story of Ricky (1991); and the body hopping aliens film The Cat (1992).
Trailer here (no subs)
Full film available here