Troublesome Night 5 (1999)


	Troublesome Night 5		Return to Review Archive - T
	Year:	1999	Louis Koo gets a warning from Ben Ng
	Director:	Herman Yau Lai-To
	Cast:	Louis Koo Tin-Lok, Amanda Lee Wai-Man, Simon Lui Yu-Yeung, Lai Yiu-Cheung, Ben Ng Ngai-Cheung, Emily Kwan Bo-Wai, John Tang Yat-Kwan, Ng Chi-Hung, Lee Kin-Yan, Chin Kar-Lok, Law Lan, Wong Gei-Ying
	The Skinny:	Hey kids! Troublesome Night movies! Still going...they keep going and going...
	Review by Kozo:	It won’t go away, but nobody’s really asking it to. The successful Troublesome Night series continues its low-budget assault, and the result is the second best in the series. Like previous installments, a common theme ties a triptych of stories together. We’re introduced to Simon Lui and Louis Koo as taxi drivers who have the bad luck of picking up obnoxious spirits. In the first story, Lui can’t seem to escape passengers who either are ghosts or simply seem like them. In the second story, Ah Fa (Koo) enters into a pact with a tricky spirit (Ben Ng) who provides luck at the races in exchange for far more than Ah Fa bargained for. For the third story the film jumps ahead one generation to Ah Fa’s son (John Tang), who inherits a security post in a haunted high rise. The narrative for this installment is as enjoyable as the third, mixing stories of varying weight with intermingling characters and some effective human emotion. In this case, the characters grow older and their relationships with the deceased go full circle. The comedy is more plentiful than the mild scares, but the enjoyment in this series derives from the familiar casts and the fact that there are no real rules. Sometimes people die, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the deaths are moralized and sometimes they’re simply results of poor timing or chance. Each story goes its own way, either aimlessly or with some unrevealed intent - but the results are quite watchable. It’s strange that a cheap series of horror movies could prove so engaging, but these unassuming flicks have managed to do just that. (Kozo 1999)
	Availability:	DVD (Hong Kong) Region 0 NTSCV Widesight Entertainment Widescreen Cantonese and Mandarin Language Tracks English and Chinese Subtitles

		image courtesy of Widesight Entertainment
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