Oh! Yes Sir!
After watching this film, I have to wonder whether
Frankie Chan might suffer from a type of attention deficiency disorder.
He seems to have trouble focusing and this film is all over the map as
he comes up with a multitude of various plot lines only to leave most of
them hanging out to dry like a forgotten pair of socks in the washing machine.
For example, the conflict with the girlfriend – what ever happened to her
I wonder, the ghost that comes back for revenge – oops – forgot about that
thread as well and so on. The film is a complete mish-mash of action, comedy
and the supernatural and even Frankie’s action scenes are much weaker than
usual and are not nearly enough to hold one’s flagging interest.
Frankie plays Power Chan a short-tempered cop
who is jealous of his Cat III actress/girlfriend and thinks she is fooling
around with sleazy director Charlie Cho. After beating him up – Chan and
his partner come into conflict with the next door neighbor – a fortuneteller
with supernatural abilities. Eric Tsang plays this person – as a woman
– or perhaps as a transvestite and has his voice dubbed by a female. In
fact, there are some odd gender things going on in this film. His male
partner boasts about his sexual conquests with women – and one character
– a prostitute called Papaya – confirms that he was with her the week before
– but there is something out of kilter with this fellow. Did I see or imagine
that he seemed to have breasts? I don’t know – the film certainly never
reveals this to be the case.
Anyway, the main gist of the film is that the
two of them are after a weapons dealer who has three gweilo killers in
his employ – Mark Houghton, Jeff Falcon and Kim Maree Penn. The gun dealer
also has a specialized killer on his payroll – one who can take on the
looks of anyone – and disguises himself as Frankie and eliminates a witness
and a couple of cops. So Frankie and his partner are blamed for the crime
and have to go into hiding – sort of - as no one really seems interested
in catching them. Maybe the cops were as bored as I was. Frankie and partner
use the psychic abilities of Eric to track the fellow down and that leads
to a big brouhaha at the end. There are a number of fights in the film
– not badly done, but nothing exceptional either – and when the video finally
ran down I was more than a bit relieved.
In one of those “isn’t that a weird co-incidence”
moments, I later was looking through the film Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon
for some pictures of Karl Maka for the Actor Index section – and lo and
behold there was Frankie’s partner again – with a slight difference – he
was in a dress – playing Karl’s wife – and sure enough the name Wanda Yung
Wai-tak appears in the credits of both films!
My rating for this film: 4.0