Chez n' Ham
 
                      
Director: Blacky Ko
Year: 1993
Rating: 7.0
What the hell. This Hong Kong 1990's comedy puts everything on the table. It is either one of the greatest films ever made or one of the worst. It is total lunacy, chaos, anarchy, an absurdity so silly that it is impossible to relay using language. I feel like I would have to act it out. In a Bow Peep outfit with a machine gun. Cross-dressing, vomiting, ejaculating, homophobia galore, breast grabbing, erections, idiocy, Amy Yip jokes, fart jokes and an action packed finale that only Hong Kong can do. This is not for the politically correct. Or even those with a speck of intelligence or taste. Thankfully, I qualify to see it.



If the idea of watching Eric Tsang at his most offensive and unsophisticated sounds worse than sitting on a cactus all day, definitely stay away.  He is at his most juvenile here and his partner dressed up as a young schoolboy trying to get free feels is worse. But it's often funny. I think my training of years watching Wong Jing comedies prepared me for this. But surprisingly it isn't Wong Jing but instead has three respected writers who must have had great fun scripting this together - James Yuen who wrote many of those terrific UFO films (He's a Woman, She's a Man), Joe Ma (Big Bullet, A War Named Desire) and Matt Chow (Bio-Zombie, Juliet in Love).  The director is Blackie Ko who also plays an assassin. Oh, it also has Joey Wong and Sharla Cheung-man in it, so I am not completely nuts. And Michael Wong who wears a paper bag over his head most of the time. A plus there.



Ham (Tsang) and his buddy Cheese (Dicky Cheung) come up with a great idea to make money. Call them up and ask them to get revenge and they will set a price. So, they throw a bag of snakes in a room, slap a woman (Kingdom Yuen King) thirty times in a restaurant and disrobe her, slap triad member Shing Fui-on as he is shampooed on a sidewalk (the big crowd that is watching or walking by are laughing), seduce Jamie Luk's girlfriend Janet and take a naked photo. Janet turns out to be a man (Natalis Chan) who prefers Ham of the two. Later Ham and Cheese have a lengthy discussion about why men are gay. As I said, homophobia crisscrosses the film like a lost child.



But then the next request by a dying man (Lau Siu-ming) is to kill the daughter of a dead enemy. They agree. She is Joey Wong and is incredibly lovable. But business is business. Cheese dresses up as a schoolboy to get close to her in a school she is visiting - but it all goes wrong and Ham ends up in the hospital where Kingdom Yuen is head nurse and Cheese is invited to stay at Joey's enormous house with Ng Man-tat as the security chief and Sharla as the nerdy maid. She is ordered to give him a bath. It isn't the soap that rises to the surface. Cheese has to continue to pretend he is a ten year old as he falls for her. Then Ham shows up as his girl cousin to finish the job. And Blacky to kill her as well. One time Ham sneaks into her bedroom to kill her and ends up humping Ng Man-tat instead. Don't expect it to make any sense or have any point - just a never-ending stream of crass undiluted humor.