A Wicked Ghost II: The Fear
Director: Francis Nam Chi-wai
Year: 2000
Rating: 5.5
Ooh The Fear. Ooh
scary. Ooh very scary. Ooh not really. Actually confusing would be closer
to the truth. This one had been sitting on my shelves collecting dust for
a very long time but the other night I could hear it calling out to me in
a mournful angry voice. Play me or I will haunt you – I will possess you
and kill your neighbors or have you jump to your death or even begin wearing
paisley colors. This last one was the final convincer and so I hurriedly
tore off the plastic – in sort of the same way that some guy gets his lower
torso ripped off in the film – and tossed it into my machine and waited for
the scares to begin. I’m still waiting but at least I am not wearing that
paisley tie I got for Christmas three years ago.
Actually it’s a bit better than a lot of the low budget HK horror films
that take up space in many of our collections – and it has a cast that is
fairly high in the babe factor – always an important incentive when watching
one of these Blue Plate specials. They also have great names – there is Alice
Chan as Peanut, Angie Cheung as Coffee, Joey Meng as Blue and Joyce Chan as
Clever. Wouldn’t you love to know someone called Peanut or Coffee? Between
the four of them, the occasional mutilated body and the mix of blue and green
eerie lighting, I managed to keep my finger off the fast-forward for most
of the film. It was only when the woeful Ken Wong, who looked like he couldn’t
believe his agent had signed him up for yet another film that no one would
see in the theaters, came on the screen that my itchy finger hit the remote.
Ken Wong and Alice Chan are cops and lovers – not that you could easily
discern either by their behavior, dialogue, surroundings or chemistry. The
supposed police station they are in consists of a room with three desks and
they don’t really seem to do much other than annoy one another. Their basic
police skills aren’t in much evidence either – at one point Alice Chan is
used as bait for a “pervert” (you know this because he licks his lips a lot
and wears horn rimmed glasses) and when he attacks her she falls apart and
has to be rescued not once but twice. Another item that points to their lack
of smarts is that Alice has a picture of her Great Grandmother and Great
Grandfather on her living room cabinet – but the two of them don’t seem to
notice that they are exact doubles of them – something that might make me
a little queasy about having sex with this person (gee could we be related?).
As you would expect, this has a bearing on the story – which is about a
very pissed off ghost that seems to dislike everyone. The “pervert” is soon
missing his lower body, a woman has a sharp broom stick stuck through her
head (but you could see that coming as she wasn’t as good looking as the
other actresses and clearly was the most likely to die first), another woman
is having her aborted children calling out to her, a member of the press
jumps to his death and a fellow cop has his dead wife making him do bad things
(sort of like Hilary and Bill). And amazingly it never is explained
what their relation (if any) to the pissed off ghost is! For a 75-minute
film they still needed a lot of filler to find apparently.
The yummy Angie Cheung is a journalist looking reluctantly into the story
and the long-legged Joey Meng (who is normally fighting vampires on TV) is
a psychic who can sense that something is wrong – ya like the scriptwriter
was on drugs and the lighting was awful. Oddly the film didn’t seem as bad
to me when I was watching it as it does now when I am thinking about it. So
my advice is - if you are to watch this film by mistake don’t spend any time
thinking about it afterwards.