Crew
Director – Stephen Tung, Screenplay – Sam Chi-leung & Tsang Kan-cheung, Producer – Ching-ying Lam, Photography – Cho On-sun, Kwan Chi-kan & Lam Fai Tai, Art Direction – Ho Kim Sing & Leung Bing Kwan. Production Company – Movie Impact Ltd/Millifame Productions Ltd.
Cast
Lam Ching-ying (Uncle Feng), Wilson Lam (Inspector Lam), Michael Miu (Sergeant No. 2237), Wong Mei-way (Lin), Wu Ma (Superintendent Ma), Michiko Nishiwaki (The Sorceress), Chi-Leung Chan (Eddie)
Plot
Police detectives Lam and Sergeant 2237 are involved in a case where they attempt to apprehend a woman at a restaurant who has a briefcase of drugs. However, the woman proves unstoppable until she is run down by a truck outside. Called in to consult is retired detective Uncle Feng who works out that the woman had been resurrected from the dead. Feng is placed on the case at the insistence of Superintendent Ma. Ma also orders that Feng and his niece Lin be billeted at Lam’s apartment. There Feng drags 2237 and the disbelieving Lam along with him to find the person who is using magic to resurrect the dead in order to transport drugs. This brings them up against a Japanese sorceress.
Hong Kong cinema between the early 1980s and late 1990s contained an unparalleled outpouring of fantastic cinema. (See Hong Kong Cinema). Hits such as Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), Mr Vampire (1985) and A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) created a unique and mind-boggling blend of martial arts and Chinese supernatural, while Mr Vampire and sequels added slapstick comedy to the mix. These created a great many imitators.
Magic Cop is a film clearly aiming for similar vibes to the A Chinese Ghost Story/Mr Vampire series. This is evident to the extent of it casting Lam Ching-ying, the Taoist master in Mr Vampire and sequels, as another exorcist – one whose eyebrows almost deserve their own separate star billing – and Wu Ma, who played the Taoist master in A Chinese Ghost Story, as Lam’s police captain. There is also Billy Chow, a regular from the Mr Vampire films, in a small role as assistant to the Japanese sorceress.
Director Stephen Tung is clearly having fun coming with nutty sequences with Lam Ching-ying’s magician detective in action. In the opening sequence alone, Lam deals with a spirit that manifests as a cloud of whirling ashes, using a candle flame to trap them in a bottle, before the spirit animates a chunk of brick wall that comes to life to pin him as though to a crucifix, whereupon he absorbs the green goo of the spirit in a cloth and buries it in an urn. This is followed by an equally nutty scene with detectives Wilson Lam and Michael Miu in a restaurant trying to stop a girl who walks out with a briefcase of drugs and keeps going despite half-a-dozen men piling on top of her and Miu handcuffing himself to her ankle and being dragged along, before she is creamed by a truck.
You end up applauding the visual inventivity of the magic scenes – like where Lam Ching-ying tracks the bodybuilder (Chi-Leung Chan) as he flees by putting detective Michael Miu in a trance in the middle of the street and placing a tray of sand in his hand and tracing out the path of the car using incense sticks placed in Miu’s mouth. The sequence at the house of the sorceress contains similar madcap pieces with Miu again placed in a trance with his body tilted in mid-air, while on the other side of the door the sorceress turns flower petals into cords to lasso and ensnare the body builder and begin manipulating him like a puppet on strings, which are sympathetically relayed to Min outside as Lam fights back with a series of whiplash acrobatic moves. Or a sequence at the morgue that involves vigorous slapstick sequences jumping between and hiding inside morgue drawers before defeating a risen corpse with an icicle impaled in its cranium.
As with much of the fantasy cinema to emerge from Hong Kong during this period, Magic Cop has a great deal of slapstick comedy. There are scenes that go on and on at the police station. In particular, there is an extended and none too funny sequence based around Lam Ching-ying and niece Wong Mei-way being required to stay at Wilson Lam’s modernist apartment (which for some reason comes with a toilet designed like a glass-sided phone booth) and living arrangement that involves hammocks and privacy curtains hung to separate areas.
Magic Cop was the directorial debut of Stephen Tung who had worked as a stuntman and an action choreographer on the likes of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Mr Vampire III (1987), as well as subsequent films such as Hard Boiled (1992), The Blade (1995), Hero (2003) and 2046 (2004), plus the English-language likes of Scooby-Doo (2002) and Bulletproof Monk (2003), among others. Tung also has a number of acting credits. He has made three other films as director with Fox Hunter (1995), Hitman (1998) and Extreme Challenge (2001), although these are regular action films with no fantastic elements.
Trailer here
Full film available here beginning