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Wow, it's been a while since I wrote one of these columns. Lately, our Netflix subscription has mostly been used to catch some TV shows on DVD, and then there was about a month where the post office ate every single movie that Netflix sent us. Finally, we got some replacements and this movie, Ghost Ballroom, was amongst them. Ugh.
I don't even know where to start on how bad this movie is. I guess it's best to start at the beginning. Our titular ghost is still alive, laying on a fur rug in her apartment, enjoying some drugs and spacing out to the lights of her Christmas tree. Some guys break in, rough her up, and throw her out the window. She lands on someone's car. After a pause, a big blurt of blood gushes out. This causes us to giggle uncontrollably. It was the best laugh we had throughout the entire movie.
That wouldn't be a bad thing, except that Ghost Ballroom is one of those cheezy Chinese ghost movies that is intended as a comedy as well. Mr. Vampire did that well. Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind was hilarious. Ghost Ballroom... is lame. The only other laugh came from the size of the 1989 cell phones.
Basically, the plot concerns the ghost girl (Mei) coming back to get revenge on her jerk boyfriend (Condon) who had her thrown out the window. He murdered her because she was going to tell the cops about his dirty deeds - I think it involved drug deals and him pimping her out. Oh yes, and all the girls in this movie are "hostesses" at the so-called Ballroom of the title, except it's not much of a ballroom and they are the worst whores ever, turning clients down left and right.
The movie is ridiculously disjointed... at times it seems almost as if they filmed the movie, cut it up, and re-arranged some scenes completely out of order. Characters who should be aware that Mei is dead see her and assume she's alive. One character runs out of the ballroom screaming "Ghost! Run away!" and then in the next scene, he's back in there, pimping girls out like nothing ever happened.
There's a subplot in here regarding Gordon Liu (poor Gordon Liu) who's playing the bouncer at the bar. He pisses off the wrong person and several times throughout the movie, that person's thugs come to beat him up. This subplot is clearly only in here to provide the occasional fight scene. There's nothing about these scenes to make them stand out - choreography is competent but unexciting, and of course, there's the annoying 1980s fight scene sound effects, which especially get annoying when the bamboo rods come into play.
As lackluster as the action is, the attempts at comedy are worse. A common complaint about foreign comedies (especially those involving tonal languages like Chinese) is that the humor is lost in the translation. I don't think there was any humor here to start with - the majority of the jokes here are physical, and they just fail.
This movie does feature some Taoist magic, thanks to a monk who is helping Condon try to survive Mei's attempts on his life. Of course, because Condon is an utter jerk who had his girl thrown out a window, any attempts to build sympathy for his character fall flat. Throughout the entire movie, I kept hoping that Mei would off him already, and I was railing on the monk for helping him. Let the ghost have her revenge!
This movie also features some sex and nudity. It's nothing to write home about. In fact, the one scene where one character is sitting there miming the sex acts he hopes to perform with the ghost whore was downright embarrassing to watch. Aside from that, there's a skinny-dipping scene which turns into a pool sex scene - boobs abound, as do male and female butts, and then ghost girl comes along and breaks it all up.
I could go on and on, but I'll just sum it up simply: this movie sucks. We only kept watching it out of a sense of morbid curiosity... could the movie get any worse? The answer was yes. Then, like most Chinese comedies, it ends with one final attempt at humor, freeze-frames the moment, and the credits start to roll. And as for me... I was left to once again say "That was 90 minutes of my life that I won't get back."
You have been warned.
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