The collaborative partnership between director Herman Yau and actor Anthony Wong is one of the most successful in Hong Kong film - right up there with John Woo and Chow Yun-fat or Wong Kar-wai and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. From the very beginning of Yau's career, Wong supported and encouraged him and the two have remained friends all these years. In total they have worked on twenty films together over almost thirty years. Their most famous collaborations were for the exploitation-horror films they made in the 1990's - Taxi Hunter, The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome. But there have been many others that are lesser known.


These three films made Wong a star though for a while they typecast him as crazy - and as he has said in interviews they allowed him to go places as an actor that he hadn't realized he had him in. He has of course gone on to become one of Hong Kong's finest actors (the best in my opinion) in so many brilliant films. Yau has had a prolific career - almost 80 films as of this writing - making some astonishingly varied films. Horror has always been a continuing mainstay with his Troublesome Night films, Walk In, Nightmares in Precinct 7 - but he also made some very serious films (From the Queen to the Chief Executive), comedy (Master Q, Papa Loves You) and even a late turn to martial arts with two Ip Man films. At one time not too long ago I was thinking of working my way through his filmography but when I saw how many films he had made, I said perhaps in my next lifetime. Of course, by then God knows how many films he will have directed.


The Sleep Curse is in many ways a return to his roots with clear echoes of The Untold Story within. It isn't anywhere close to those though in either shock value or narrative immediacy. There is plenty of gore - that comes quite late in the film - but the intervening 25 years makes almost everything less shocking - movies have taken his Untold Story gore and doubled it in the gore porn films of today. The overall story is rather interesting in its parts because there are almost three stories here that do hang together but could almost be independent of each other if Yau had wanted to go that way. It makes for kind of a narrative mush though and bogs down at times.


The film begins with a home video shot sort of in jump crude Blair Witch style of an insomniac going crazy over a period of time until he finally snaps. Lam Sik-ka (Anthony Wong) is a professor of the study of sleep and sleep deprivation. An old female friend of his comes from Penang to get his help. That video was of her father and now another member of her family has come down with severe insomnia. She fears that she will be next - is it hereditary or a curse. Take a guess.


But Lam Sik-ka has his own inner demons as well that he keeps well covered - we get a hint of this as he sneaks into a dead man's room and nonchalantly removes his brain for study. He also sees a ghost - one in particular - but he seems almost acclimatized to it. He visits a medium who connects him to his long dead father (also played by Wong) and as his father tells him his story this becomes the third leg of the film. A very unpleasant one. During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong he was forced to become an unwilling collaborator and he witnessed some awful things - in particular in the Comfort Station - comfort meaning lines of soldiers raping women - and mass graves. It is all tied together and in the final 15 minutes we finally get to the gore fest promised. The problem is it comes out of nowhere very suddenly and doesn't really go anywhere - kind of gore for gore sake - which is not necessarily a bad thing but it feels like Yau just didn't know where to take the story so he ends it in a pile of blood. And arms. And heads. And of course a penis.