The Transmigration Romance
Director: Wong Shu-tong
Year: 1991
Rating: 5.5
How do these scriptwriters come up with these ideas? Are they tied up in
the dark and fed chocolate bars and sugar smacks for three days until something
spills out like an alien creature onto a page. Then the director gets a hold
of it and thinks “well it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but why not”. More
likely there was no script and they just kind of winged it depending on what
was available. This film is mildly enjoyable – but it is idiotic.
A father and son are stuck in limbo Hell
- waiting impatiently for reincarnation. Neither led particularly exemplary
lives – in fact they were mass killers – so they fear that they may have
a long wait ahead of them or worse they may be reincarnated as a beast. But
one day the gatekeeper comes to them and after checking his laptop – strikes
a deal. Their granddaughter/daughter Jojo is scheduled to die in a few days
and if the grandfather – Carter Wong in a very strange role for him – can
convince her to kill the most masculine man in HK, then he will be reincarnated.
Or something like that.
Down below on earth we are introduced to Cynthia Khan a new police recruit
who has a kung-fu match against Sophia Crawford with Lin Wei and her female
supervisor looking on. After winning the match, the supervisor warns Cynthia
that Wei is upset with her and will make her life in the police force miserable.
One might be silly enough to assume that the film might follow through on
this plot thread – but the film never again refers back to Cynthia being a
cop or any of these characters. One has to wonder if this scene was in fact
plundered from some other film.
At any rate, Carter Wong comes down to earth, finds the most masculine man
with a magical leaf, accidentally (or not) kills his granddaughter and then
stops her spirit from being taken away by two punkishly dressed servants from
Hell. Instead he convinces her to seduce Cynthia’s brother – and then if
she decides that he is not a very nice guy – she will kill him by kissing
him. But of course they fall in love – but she only has 47 days in human form
before her body disintegrates (I hate it when women do that). It seems that
Cynthia is not only a cop (well maybe), but also very knowledgeable with
spells and such to fight evil spirits and ghosts. She takes on Carter to
fight for the life of her brother.
The first hour of the film is totally unfocused – its hard to figure out
what is the real plot here – but for the last thirty minutes it becomes rather
fun as Cynthia hurls star dust, spells and whatever else she can at Carter.
The fight choreography isn’t particularly good – but its always good seeing
Cynthia enjoy herself.
By the way, a few Internet sources include Moon Lee in the cast of this
film, but that is not the case.