Out of the Dark (1995)

[Drunk Monk]

An early Stephan Chow film and a NON-classic Shaw Brothers production. This was surely in the wake of the Hong Kong horror genre. Chow plays a mental patient who talks to his plant and believes himself to be an exorcist/ghostbuster. Wong Yat-Fei, his frequent comic accomplice, is a security guard at a typical Hong Kong tiled complex that combines a shopping mall below and tight living apartments above. And it's haunted. Karen Mok, who can often be annoying, plays an annoying sort of character and that works okay. It's mouleitai humor, Chow's signature style of incoherent comedy, and despite its random bizarreness, got a good laugh out of me with an extended sequence involving a security guard defending himself against a mad slasher couple using an already-stabbed punk drug addict. Ghosts allowed for ridiculous scenes - stuff like security guards trying to steal from a mall shop only to end up with the head of a grandma ghost in their booty bag when another security guard, jilted and drunk, find the headless body and get amorous. There was also a silly yet funny scene where Chow tries to train others to be fearless in a tragic game of Russian roulette with dynamite. The humor is so sophomoric, but sometimes, it really works.