What starts off as a cheap looking badly acted horribly written action cop drama ends its first sequence with a phantom automobile that vanishes down a blind alley.

It's soon obvious that Possessed (Men gui chu long, 1983) is a violent-cop horror-story blend, two cheap exploitation themes for the price of one.

The cops kill a madman & are thereafter forced to cope with demonic hauntings. Toss in some supernatural rape & there should've been a nice little piece of entertaining garbage.

Unfortunately, it's not well enough made to be regarded highly, but apart from one face-rip, the violence & gore isn't extreme enough to rate highly even as the junkiest junk food.

There's a sequel but I disliked this one so much I couldn't imagine wasting time on the second one.


In Ghost in the House (Gut ook chon giu, 1988), old Zheng is now a pensioner & has cashed out his retirement to buy himself a house, the first he has ever been able to own. Alas it turns out to be haunted.

After the ghost makes him slap himself around, he hires some amateur exorcists to set off fireworks in the place, which just makes the woman's ghost appear to Zheng to ask if he really wants to get in a battle with her.

Zheng realizes the ghost just isn't ever going to stop harrassing him, so rents the place out to an unsuspecting family, feeling he has no choice, having put all the money he has in the place.

Turns out the ghost really likes the family that moves in, & takes a particular shine to the little girl, Anny. The parents soon figure Anny has an imaginary playmate, Yuki, who is a motherly or big-sisterly Japanese woman.

At first it's all very lighthearted & boring, but eventually the ghost does get dangerous (but still boring).

Yuki doesn't appreciate how the parents neglect Anny, as they're overworked & weary & do sometimes take it out on their daughter by complaining. When the ghost decides to take Anny away to the netherworld to keep as her own daughter, a bad-joke Taoist exorcist is brought in to save the child.

There's a long sequence when Yuki's sorrowful background story is shown in flashbacks. The main cast stands in the house apparently looking at the flashback playing on a movie screen. It's just about the most retarded editing technique for showing a flashback that I've ever seen.

This film can't decide whether to be a comedy-horror or a tearjerker romantic ghost story. It ends up being very bad in either category. When Ghost in the House tries to be funny, it's not; & when it tries to be scary, it's not. At base it's just a bad dumb movie.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl