Troublesome Night 3
   
Directed by Herman Yau
Year: 1998
Rating: 7.5
A few months back I was passing through Hong Kong and went out shopping for movies to fill a few holes in my collection. Much to my disappointment very few stores were still around and most of those only had films from the past five years or so. It is like movies from what nearly everyone would agree were their best decades didn't exist. But I did locate one store off of Nathan Road that had piles of vcds. I am not even sure how many people are familiar with vcds any more, but once upon a time they were a very popular and very cheap option to dvds. They come in 2 discs and the quality can be ok to pretty bad with zero extras. I was surprised any company was still producing them or perhaps these were left over from times past. Anyway, among these vcds I found a slew of Troublesome Night films.



The series of Troublesome Night films lasted from 1997 to the final one in 2003. Much to my amazement there are 19 of them as I had lost track at around the TN9 mark. Nineteen of these. The store had a bunch of them so I swooped them up - at $3 a piece I could afford to. The series was begun by HermanYau who directed the first six in the series. Not bad for a guy who was already responsible for The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome. Each one of these consists of 3-4 tales of horror or the supernatural with a load of actors. I should stress they are more supernatural then scary and almost always with a twist at the end. They are reasonably entertaining and every now and then one of the stories will hit a nerve. But they were an opportunity for young and veteran actors to get some work in and after Yau left for some directors to get some time in too.



A few actors were in a bunch of them - Louis Koo was in the first seven, character actor Simon Lui was in thirteen of them but the winner was Helen Law Lan who was in all but two of them - she must have been on holiday for those two. Helen Law Lan is a legend of sorts - her first film credit was in 1939 though she didn't start acting regularly until 1950. She is still working and has accumulated credits is nearly 475 films! She is amazing and in the 1990's she became the go to person if you needed a grandmother type in a horror film - in this series and so many other horror films.



Troublesome Night 3 is one of the best in the series. It has multiple legs to the story but they are all tied together in a manner that creates empathy for the characters and there is so much more here than simply scary stories (which they are not) - friendship, drinking games, rituals, comedy and eventually a punch in the stomach that is surprisingly effective after so much goofiness that came before it. The film centers on a funeral home and the staff that comprises it - Louis Koo is the convincing salesman who is notified by a maid whenever someone is about to die at a hospital, Fennie Yuen and an assistant make up the corpses, Simon Lui organizes the ceremony and performs the rituals, Frankie Lee and Emotive Cheung are the bearers of the bodies and if needed criers at the funeral. They are one happy family - a real unit who find solace in one another because to much of the outside world their profession - the touching of dead bodies - is taboo. Bad luck. Bad karma.



From this stems the stories - a few of them over price performing the death ritual to customer Christine Ng and her dead grandmother (Helen Law Lan) comes looking for a discount in a great near Three Stooges segment except with baseball bats and meat cleavers. Koo admonishes them "Always respect the dead". Another segment is simply Koo selling their services as he goes through a litany of things from paper offerings (No Filipina maids please as the dead man spoke no English) to be burnt to official criers at the funeral. One of the assistants is a big fan of singer Beauty Chan and when she dies in a car crash she comes to him to ask him to make her beautiful again. He does in an unexpected way. The last segment is the kick in the stomach. All in all a nice mix of comedy, Hong Kong, tragedy and maybe one or two chilling moments. Also on hand is Shing Fui-on as a happy loan collector, Chin Kar-lok as a friend of the group and Michael Tse as a friend.