Most Western audiences first became aware of Wong Kar-Wai as a result of Chungking Express, but he was already a well-established creator at that point. Case in point: this bizarre oddity from 1987 penned by Wong along with director Jeffrey Lau. Combining vampire horror, buddy-cop action, mahjong strategy, political commentary, and most of all slapstick humor, the film flails wildly in its attempts to serve many audiences. Viewed now, it’s a delirious misfire that has some entertaining moments buried in its breakneck tonal shifts.
Buy The Haunted Cop ShopJacky Cheung and Ricky Hui star as the young and old cops paired together to battle evil spirits infesting a police precinct that was formerly a stronghold for Japanese soldiers during WWII. Chief among those supernatural forces is a Japanese ghost who rematerializes as a vampire with strong Dracula fashion sense, who quickly sets about feeding and raising a new army of the undead. There’s a pretty female cop (Kitty Chan) who gives the boys and ghouls some eye candy to ogle and fight over, and a bumbling vampire acolyte forever failing his boss, but the big face-off is between the star cops and the main vampire.
The film starts off as a broad, wacky comedy but never really settles into a genre, delving into light romance, nasty gore, and gun-toting violence at a dizzying pace. There’s a particularly prolonged scene where the acolyte attempts to win a big game of mahjong, likely hilarious to people familiar with the rules but tiresome for the uninformed. The actors are called on to make complete buffoons of themselves, aside from the menacing vampire, and they fully commit to the vision. Like many Hong Kong films of its era, the plot seems to be made up along the way, more a collection of scenes than a coherent narrative. Still, this isn’t the type of film anyone watches for story development, and there’s enough oddball madness to satisfy viewers looking for something well off the beaten path.
The Blu-ray from 88 Films features a new 2K restoration of the original negative. The image quality is fairly grainy, largely a product of its era and many night shots, but it’s mostly free of defects and boasts some surprisingly robust colors. Audio is newly remastered from the original Cantonese mono soundtrack and is also mostly flawless, while alternate audio is a commentary track by an Asian cinema expert. James Mudge provides insightful background on the film and its creatives as framed against the HK industry as a whole, a bonus feature that significantly enhances appreciation of the film. Other bonus features include alternate and extended shots, the original HK trailer, a reconstructed Tai Seng trailer, and an image gallery.
While there’s very little here that hints at Wong Kar-Wai’s later emergence as a legendary auteur, and its various genre tropes are blatantly unoriginal, the mad mix of so many diverse elements makes for a passably spooky and kooky midnight movie best enjoyed with your favorite spirits.
