The Haunted Cop Shop 2 Film Review

The insanity, the pratfalls, the slapstick, the lunacy, the silliness and the vampires all return in the follow-up to the first Haunted Cop Shop from the year before (co-written by Wong Kar-wai but by this one he had become an obscure director). So do much of the cast and director Jeff Lau. Later on in his career, Lau slowed things down in such films as Treasure Hunt and Saviour of the Soul but early on (the HCS films were his first two films) his rule seemed to be the more the better and at the speed of light. Keep it frantic, keep it fun. Your actors doing nothing on the screen is death. If more than a minute passes without a joke, you have lost the audience. This made him a good match with Stephen Chow in their five films. But even those films are in slow-motion compared to these two films.

In the first film two bumbling cops played by Jacky Cheung and Ricky Hui have to battle an outbreak of vampires and through luck manage to survive. So now their supervisor (Wu Fung) considers them the expert vampire killers; not something they really want to be known for. In a pretty wonderful opening set piece, a vampire is back in the police station and manages to turn a few more. Wu sends Jacky and Ricky to track it down and kill it. It turns into perfectly timed chaos as all the cops try and escape and Ricky finds himself trapped with the female vampire (Meg Lam) and has to keep her sexually satisfied to stop her from biting him. Almost. This is more of an ensemble film than the first film with Jacky and Ricky sharing the screen with a bunch of others.

After this, Wu forms a squad of vampire and ghost busters and takes them to an abandoned camp for training. Besides Jacky and Ricky are Billy Lau, Sandy Lam, James Yi Lui and a few others. Of course, the camp happens to have vampires and zombies. The vampires are of the Western species, so no Taoist priest can help. There are a couple bits that don't work like prompting the chicken to lay eggs, but the final twenty-minutes is insanity set loose with a ravishing female vampire in red (Wan Lai-yin), another in white and an army of zombies. It is good fun, but admittedly I was exhausted by this time and could not really keep up with it. Like so much in Hong Kong films, these types of films are probably gone forever. Just pure nonsensical anarchy.