Movie Review: Blue Jean Monster/著牛仔褲的鍾馗

Let’s get weird.

In 1991, thanks to director Ivan Lai Gai Ming, one of Hong Kong’s greatest and most prolific character actors got his only leading role.

In The Blue Jean Monster/著牛仔褲的鍾馗 , aka Monster Wore Jeans, Shing Fui On plays a police officer and expectant father named Chu.

He interrupts a bank robbery and gets killed, but is resurrected by a black cat and some lightning.

Happens all the time. It’s just not widely reported.

So now this undead cop faces a number of challenges.

Anything he eats ends up falling out the hole in his stomach.

And feminine hygiene products do nothing to help.

He can’t smell anything.

His wife wants him to do things that he can’t do any more.

First, she thinks it’s because he’s gay.

She thinks it’s her fault for being pregnant and brings in a professional named Death Rays, played by ‘Queen of Bust’ Amy Yip.

And while some of his extremities no longer work, other parts work too well.

As Amy hilariously discovers.

But Chu has other problems.

He’s only got a limited time left, even dead.

He can recharge himself with a hot-wired iron, but that’s only a temporary fix.

He’s got two goals he wants to accomplish before the lights go out forever: he wants to see his baby born, and he wants to catch the bank robbers who killed him.

His only chance of finding them is a babbling dingbat named Gucci, played by Gloria Yip, who was their hostage but escaped with some of their money.

Only when you talk.

Simple enough. Just another undead supernatural police comedy.

But this isn’t just (another) spastic movie that runs through genres like an epileptic streaker.

It certainly is brisk, and weird, and low-brow in places, but underneath all that is a movie of some quality.

Shing Fui On does a really good job carrying the film, and it’s unfortunate he didn’t get other opportunities.

He’s good at going over the top, but he’s also good at convincing us that he’s really in love with his wife, a good husband, and a ded-icated cop.

Pauline Wong also turns in a really good, believable performance that almost seems out of place in the midst of all the lunacy.

And this film definitely goes full whacko by the end.

It’s Category III, but mostly (I would guess) because of the language and some pretty nasty violence.

If this was me, my sex life would be over. 

It’s the kind of movie you need to watch several times because some of it goes by so fast you’ll miss it.

But it’s good enough, in it’s own way, that you’ll have no problem doing it.