DVD Review: Rule # 1
Shawn Yue is Lee Kwok-Keung a Hong Kong beat cop who stops a car going too fast in an underground parking garage. The driver is acting suspiciously and Lee sees blood seeping from the trunk of the car. Upon his inspection he discovers the dead body of a teenage girl in the trunk of a car but the car's owner gets the drop on Lee and fires a few slugs into him. Before the driver can fire the fatal shot both men witness the dead girl emerge from the trunk and Lee manages to grab his gun and shoot the man dead. Upon his release from the hospital Lee learns that the man was a serial killer who killed a number of young women. However, Lee is asked if he wishes to amend his report of the incident; if he would reconsider omitting the part about the dead girl coming out of the trunk. Lee stands by his word and is consequently reassigned to a new department; the Miscellaneous Affairs Department.
Lee arrives at a delapitated and run down warehouse. In the far corner is a door leading to an office occupied by a lone man in a wheelchair playing Jenga. Lee sits and waits for someone to tell him something, anything. The phone rings, the man in the wheelchair answers, writes down a message and hands it to Lee. He is to report to a local swimming pool. The attendant there tells him that for the past week there have been noises and sitings of a young girl who drowned there. In the background we can see the ghostly image of her. As Lee and the attendant walk the length of the pool she can be seen swimming along behind them. Creepy stuff. Lee goes to the basement to locate the source of the noise and out of nowhere appears his supervisor, Inspector Wong, played by Ekin Cheng. He directs Lee to reach into the filter and pull out a large tuft of women's hair. As soon as he does the screeching noise stops.
Soon enough Wong explains to Lee what the role of the Miscellaneous Affairs Department is. Of the 190 phone calls the police get every night five of those calls are about there being something in the house. Those phone calls are answered by MAD whose role is to disprove these claims about something going in bump in the night. First, it is the hair in the pools filtration system. Next, the investigation of a room haunted by an old woman who turns her television on and off leads Wong to show that the man across the street is turning it on with his television's remote. Wong and the police department feel if the general populous knew that ghosts existed there would be chaos. So they keep stories about ghosts and hauntings to a minimum so to not 'spook' the general public.
But this duo is soon on the trail of an especially dangerous ghost killing young girls, making it look like suicide. Here's how it works in Kelvin Tong's movie. Ghosts inhabit our bodies and when they are done with us, absorbed our souls and what not, they can transfer into another host by touch, leaving an empty shell of our former selves. The only way to stop a spirit form moving from one body to the next is to kill it's host. Thus begins the cat and mouse game of ghost hunting as Lee and Wong try to stop this ghost from killing again and again.
Tong's movie starts off well enough. I thought it was sincerely scary and spooky with some good moments early on setting up the premise of the story and establishing the characters of Lee and Wong. Tong would seem to have studied ghost films enough to pull off some good and fun scares early on. Sure, I could have done without those atypical choruses of violin strings but the jump scares are staged well enough. While most of the early scares and jumps are well done Tong also knows how to play with his audience with some of them fully projecting to the audience that they're a coming.
Where Tong's film starts to falter though is once the cat and mouse chase begins. Once the chase begins we lose the chance to see the characters develop any further. And the chases themselves leave all sorts of questions unanswered. For instance, if the only way to stop a ghost is to kill its host then what the heck do you do with the bodies of these dead hosts? Lee and Wong are after all only two of three guys in the entire department, a department that is supposed to act in secret and would be unacknowledged by the police department should anything happen to them. So there they go around town shooting hosts. Who is picking up the bodies? Who is talking to the families? For now they are just two guys running around Hong Kong shooting people claiming they are inhabited by ghosts.
And once we move into this part of the story all suspense and thrill is, for the most part, lost. We move from a moody and scary film to the typical popular film pulp that has been clogging cinemas of late. No longer was this film a good spooky supernatural film and it lost the potential, I thought, to take up cause to bring together the natural world with the supernatural world, but it degraded to an okay ghost chase story the ilk of Shocker and Fallen. Early in the film we see Lee make contact with the girl from the pool and the grandmother from the group home but nothing ever comes from them. Talk about missed opportunities. Instead he is encouraged to forget about these tortured souls and instead focus on the living. Uh, aren't tortured souls the reason why we are here in the first place?
So Rule # 1 feels to add up to about 85% of a great movie. Early on it was hinting at greatness but it never took up those opportunities to establish itself as a very good supernatural film. Instead these missed opportunities are left aside in bewildering fashion and replaced by an okay supernatural thriller. Rule # 1 becomes very much like its victims, they started out fully fleshed but soon after the ghosts came they became former shells of themselves. Fitting that the story followed their example? Sadly, no. Good but not great.
