A Wicked Ghost II: The Fear
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.
My rating for this film: 5.5