Director – Clifton Ko Chi Sum, Screenplay – Ko Chi Sum & Raymond Wong, Producers – Karl Maka & Dean Shek, Photography – Bob Thompson, Music – Mahmood Rum Jahn, Production Design – Raymond Fung. Production Company – Cinema City & Films Co..
Cast
Raymond Pak-Ming Wong (Stewart Pik), Bonnie Law (Bonnie Lam), Loletta Lee (Juliet), Saan Saan Lam (Venus Koo), Teresa Carpio (Sister Lee), Sui Gong Ng (Joe), Gai-Keung Si (Fatty), Raymond Fung (Principal), Brenda Lo (Twiggy)
Plot
A group of girls from a boarding school are at the beach when a storm blows their tent away. They and a group of guys who were tenting alongside take refuge in a nearby temple. While they wait the storm out, they challenge each other to tell ghost stories. Afterwards, Bonnie Lam picks up an old rope she finds to tie her things. Back at the school, she is startled when the ghost of the scholar Stewart Pik manifests in her room. He tells her how he hung himself in the temple and his spirit has been embodied in the rope. He uses his invisible presence to aid Bonnie against a bullying rival from another school on the athletics track. Bonnie’s friends Juliet and Venus demand to know who she is talking to. After she introduces Stewart, the others want to use him to help with cheating on exams.
Hong Kong Cinema was at a peak in the 1980s. This period saw the growth of an exhaustingly madcap form of slapstick comedy called mo lei tau. There was a surprising number of ghost comedies made during this period, including high-profile works such as Mr Vampire (1985), A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) and The Haunted Cop Shop (1987), among others.
The Happy Ghost falls very much into this form of mo lei tau comedy. It is heavily based around slapstick routines. All of the performances involve characters – girls and guys alike – screaming hysterically and running around as though they were chickens with their heads cut off. People trip over and this is accompanied by cartoon whee and whistling sound effects.
There is an extended slapstick section on the athletics track that involves Raymond Pak-Ming Wong’s ghost invisibly humiliating Bonnie Law’s rival – causing her discus and javelin throws to fall flat, holding her back from the finish line or causing her to run on the spot and so on. It is a sequence that feels as though it has been borrowed from a Disney comedy of the 1960s/70s, which usually had some comedy antics on the sports field – one is reminded in particular of Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968).
Bonnie Law and the ghostly Stewart Pik (Raymond Pak-Ming Wong)
There are some very silly sequences with Saan Saan Lam and the nun teacher (Teresa Carpio) throwing chalk at one another in the classroom. At the height of inanity, we have Raymond Pak-Ming Wong’s ghost trying to dress modern and coming out as a Boy George lookalike. It is all incredibly silly and frenetic.
In all of the silliness, Bonnie Law proves a likeable presence. Surprisingly, she only ever appeared in a handful of other films (ten in all), then quitting the industry to work in finance before her death of a heart-attack in 2016 at the age of 47.
The film was a popular hit and followed by a string of sequels Happy Ghost II (1985), Happy Ghost III (1986), Happy Ghost IV (1990) and Happy Ghost V (1991).
