The Spooky Bunch

From the aging rises the New. In The Spooky Bunch, the traditions of Cantonese opera, which had fallen out of vogue in the 1970s and 1980s, provide an evocative dramatic context for the youthful New Wave. After flirting with the supernatural in The Secret, director Ann Hui and writer Joyce Chan dive straight into the spectral dimension with this uproarious horror comedy, setting the story in a Cantonese opera milieu. Taking up a notch the New Wave's penchant for local culture, Hui and Chan use the island Cheung Chau as a giant backstage for the opera, a confluence of the new and the old, the living and the dead, the young and the elderly, the real and the theatrical, the yin and the yang … Josephine Siao, who produced the original and restored this print of the film out of her own pocket, is brilliant as an actress of wacky energy, a ‘kidult' ahead of her time. She is supported by an outstanding ensemble cast, including Cantonese cinema veterans Lau Hark-suen and Kwan Chung. And Hui, whose career is still going strong thirty plus years later, is at her stylised best here, skillfully channelling Cantonese opera's iconic qualities to realise the titled spooky mood.