Abracadabra
Director: Peter Mak
Year: 1986
Rating: 6.0
This supernatural
tale that Cinema City spun out in the 1980’s is a bit of a mess and a bit
of fun. Most of the mess is upfront and most of the fun takes place in the
last 20-minutes. This definitely has the appearance of a “B” Cinema City
feature with none of the star power or budget of their Aces Go Places or
All the Wrong Spies/Clues films. This is most evident from their cast headed
by Mark Cheng, Charine Chan and Anne Bridgewater and a few others whose names
I don’t know. It’s the kind of film that mainly takes place in a shopping
mall in which not a single pedestrian is ever seen walking by. To be fair
though the money saved on this is spent on some special effects and a whole
cadre of ghosts.
This film has lots of dead things moving about from hopping vampires to
a dead bride looking for a live mate to a phantom taxi cab driver who likes
punk hair styles to a room full of exotic dancing patrons. Oh and the dead
exotic dancer as well. All this sounds convoluted and confusing – and it is.
The graveyard of hopping vampires and the dead bride have nothing to do with
the plot – but so what – you can never hurt a film by throwing in a few hopping
vampires and a blood thirsty corpse dressed up in her wedding gown.
The main plot revolves around two couples setting up their stores in the
mall. One is a hair dressing salon run by Mark Cheng and another fellow –
but no – oddly the film doesn’t take the opportunity to make them gay – usually
something a HK film would certainly do – and the other store is a clothing
boutique owned by Anne and her friend, Cici (Charine Chan). Their mirror breaks
and they obtain another one from the basement of the building that turns
out to be a portal to another world of ghosts. Not very nice ones either as
they are in need of sucking the life force from humans. Such a nasty habit.
So customers go into the changing room, never to be seen again. Not real good
for business.
Eventually, Cici gets dragged into the mirror and the other three – with
the help of the taxi driver – enter into the spirit world to try and bring
her back. At this point the film gets fairly entertaining as the hordes of
ghosts chase after them in the spirit world (which consists of an exotic dancing
bar and a bunch of caves). This is not exactly an obscure jewel but for those
into low budget supernatural comedies, this isn’t too bad. Ann has some nice
scenes – and looks great behind her glasses. Stay tuned at the end for some
out takes.
