I had completely forgot about the first part of the film when I had finished the film, if so, the rating would've been better. Like other reviews pointed out, the second half is definitely better, because that's when there's actually a story going on. I listen to this podcast (The Asian Action Cast) where one of the hosts once said (not about this film) that after watching many HK films from the 80s, you begin to see a pattern about the film making. Usually it's lots of different ideas and then they try to stitch the whole film together with these ideas, which probably results in uneven narrations like this film.
The film centers around two police officers that seems to be more troublemakers than officers and their stupidity gets tiresome quickly when all they do is to make mistake after mistake and act like two goofballs, like Dumb and Dumber, usually in other films, the goofball is often the sidekick, but here the film decided to make the two leads both instead. It does change up a bit towards the second half when we get introduced to Kitty Chan's Madam, who is the cool/badass officer at the police station, which sadly ends up being quite useless when the evil threat starts to haunt all of them. But still, Madam was the only sane person in the film, even if she was scared about most of the things happening in the film, I wish her character could've been more developed and not just become a damsel in distress towards the end.
What is even more sad that Kitty Chan didn't have a bigger career in the film industry after this film, I would've love to see more from her. According to imdb she only starred in 11 films between 1984 to 1988 and this film is the biggest one.
Both the title and the cover is misleading, because there's not many haunted cops, nor is it that much horror, it works more as a parody, like the haunted bar scene is a direct copy of the bar scene from The Shining and towards the end of the film, the police chief (Fung Woo) tries to talk his way out of a scary encounter with the baddie, referring Sammo Hung's horror films and also asking where Ching-Ying Lam is. I think that's what this film needed, some of that Ching-Ying Lam, the cool supernatural fighter, but we still got Fat Chung in a nice "extended cameo" which I would have liked to have seen more of.
This was co-written by Kar-Wai Wong too, which is a big surprise, because there's nothing about this film that resembles his other works, so don't approach this film if only for that, it's early in his career before he started to make films of his own. If you like slapstick humor, dumb people falling over stuff and mistaking the bad guys for their friends (cartoon-style) then I guess you could give this film a try. Or see it for Kitty Chan if nothing else, an actress that deserved more than just this film.
