Director – Fruit Chan, Screenplay – Fruit Chan & Lam Kee To Jason, Producers – Fruit Chan & Doris Yang, Photography – Chan Ka Shun, Music – Tsui Chin Hung, Visual Effects Supervisor – Tony Tang, Makeup Effects – Ryan Wing Li, Art Direction – Leung Tsz Yin, Action Director – Jack Wong. Production Company – Nicetop.
Cast
Wong You Nam (Jimmy Lam), Tai Bo (Cheung), Paul Carr (Beanstalk Ghost/Butcher Ghost), Li Hoi Lam Marek (Li’l Keung/Kenny), Chelffy Yau (Lily Wong), Susan Shaw (Mother Leung), Lung Tin Sang (Mr Yuen), Adora Pagara (Amy), Ai Wai (Boss Wong), Bonnie Ngai (Wai Ling), Candy Man (Wai Chan), Teresa Mak (Wai Yee), Abdur Rehman (Father Singh)
Plot
Real estate agent Jimmy Lam is having difficulty in offloading a Hong Kong apartment because its owner died there and buyers are superstitious. Jimmy is currently using the apartment to sleep in. He brings rival realtor Lily Wong back for the night. There she receives a visit from the ghost of the previous owner, a butcher. Jimmy then finds Lily has taken a loan out with him as guarantor and has gone missing. Debt collectors give him twenty-four hours to pay up. Back at the apartment, Jimmy finds that Lily is now a ghost. However, when the debt collector’s thugs pursue Jimmy to the apartment, they are killed by the butcher. At the same time, Jimmy’s family have moved into a tiny, subdivided coffin apartment only to find it is haunted by a ghost boy.
Hong Kong director Fruit Chan emerged in the 1990s with films such as Made in Hong Kong (1997), The Longest Summer (1998), Little Cheung (1999), Durian Durian (2000), Hollywood, Hong Kong (2001) and Public Toilet (2003). Chan entered the horror scene with the standout Dumplings (2004), which was simultaneously released in condensed form as one of the episodes of the anthology Three … Extremes (2004). Chan next came to the US to make the flop of the English-language Don’t Look Up (2009) and subsequently returned to Hong Kong for the cryptic Last People on Earth film The Midnight After (2014) and the non-genre likes of Kill Time (2016), Three Husbands (2018), The Abortionist (2019), The Invincible Dragon (2021) and subsequent to this an episode of the horror anthology Tales of the Occult (2022).
Fruit Chan is a director who leaves me divided. I really enjoyed his Dumplings but I have looked through his films since then for something that returns to hit those heights again. The major problem with Coffin Homes is that it is a confusing watch for at least the first half-hour as it follows an inordinate number of characters where it is not clear until some way in which of these are supporting characters and who you are meant to be following as all get the same amount of screen time. This does eventually even out into two major plot strands whereupon the film becomes far less confusing.
The film is focused around ‘coffin homes’. In Cantonese, the title is actually a pun where ‘coffin homes’ refer to both a storage space where dead bodies are placed before burial and what are referred to as bedspace apartments, areas that are subdivided up into living quarters that are little bigger than 4×6 feet and surrounded by a cage. The film is focused around that and the larger problem of rental real estate and its attendant social issues in Hong Kong. Much of these concerns are local in nature such as realtors dealing with assorted superstitions about the apartment of a departed person being haunted by their spirit.
Paul Carr as The Butcher Ghost
Certainly, the film opens with a kick on a deranged family dinner as a hundred-year-old woman suddenly comes to life and slaughters the people around her – stabbing them, sending her foot the length of the dining table to impale another, and an OTT scene where she and one of the daughters keep producing bigger and bigger blades to hack at one another.
Things get equally outrageous when Chelffy Yau spends the night over at the apartment with Wong You Nam and wakes up with the butcher ghost (Paul Carr) leering over her and going on about being glad that someone is here. Things get quite gory, in a comic way, when the various thugs are killed. There’s also the image of the ghost boy (Li Hoi Lam Marek) sitting over the father’s stomach as he sleeps, cutting him open and then tearing out intestines.
The opening sets a tone that leaves you thinking that Coffin Homes is going to be Horror Comedy. You think for a time that maybe Fruit Chan is aiming for the madcap supernatural antics of 1980s Hong Kong films like Mr Vampire (1985) and The Haunted Cop Shop (1987), but apparently not. The scenes with the old woman, for instance, peter out and get forgotten, while the rest of the film never goes in a comedic direction beyond these isolated scenes.
