“Coffin Homes” Theatrical Poster
Director: Fruit Chan
Cast: Siu Yam-Yam, Paul Che, Tai Bo, Rachel Lee Lai-Chun, Cheung Tat-Ming, Wong Yau-Nam, Peter Chan Charm-Man, Candy Wen Xue-Er, Ai Wai
Running Time: 91 min.
By Paul Bramhall
As a director, Fruit Chan has always had the ability to take what appears to be standard genre fare, and give it his own unique off-kilter twist. This was on display in efforts as early as 1993’s Finale in Blood, and has continued to serve him well – from his feature length segment Dumplings in the horror anthology Three…Extremes, to more recent productions like The Midnight After. However that same approach resulted in a catastrophic misfire in 2019 when Chan decided to dip his toes into the action genre with Invincible Dragon, an incomprehensible mix of kung fu and fantasy that pitted Max Zhang against UFC legend Anderson Silva. Invincible Dragon was the kind of movie that makes you question if the director behind it would ever work again or, if they did, how on earth would they follow-up such an outlandish piece of work?
Thankfully for Fruit Chan the question has already been answered, and it comes in the form of 2021’s Coffin Homes. The title is a reference to the slang term commonly used for the tiny, subdivided apartments that provide a home for those squeezed out of Hong Kong’s fiercely competitive and expensive property market. Usually consisting of tiny cubicles fashioned out of makeshift partitions, and with only one bathroom to go around, the standard of living in such conditions is far from enviable. Of course it’s not the first time for Hong Kong’s property market to provide cinematic inspiration – in 1992 Jacob Cheung’s Cageman cleaned up at the HK Film Awards, a drama focusing on the lives of those living in caged apartments, which were very much a precursor to the coffin home setup.
More recently, in 2010 Edmond Pang Ho-Cheung clocked in one of the last legitimate Cat III classics with Dream Home, which used HK’s property market as a backdrop for an entertainingly gory slasher. Considering Fruit Chan’s eye for wry social commentary combined with his most recent output, Coffin Homes was always going to offer up something a little different, and from the opening pre-credits sequence alone, that could well be said to be an understatement.
Proceedings open on a scene of an elderly matriarch returning home from hospital, played by Hong Kong legend Siu Yam-Yam (Vampire Cleanup Department, Undercover Punch and Gun), joined at a dinner table by her four daughters and son. For Hong Kong cinema aficionados the scene offers up a rare opportunity to see five HK actresses spanning multiples eras of the territories output share the screen together, as her daughters are played by Candy Wen (Two Champions of Shaolin, Holy Flame of the Martial World), Bonnie Ngai (The Sword, The Super Gang), Teresa Mak (Sexy and Dangerous, Streets of Fury), and Loletta Lee (Pink Bomb, Crazy Love). After bickering breaks out over the fact Lee is entrusted with the deed to the mother’s spacious villa, Yam-Yam proceeds to rise out of her wheelchair, and turns into an Evil Dead style zombie, leaving everyone dead except for Lee and their resident Filipino maid.
Understandably audiences may be thinking they’re in for a low budget, high energy homage to splatter flicks using the HK populations property woes as its backdrop, but they’d only be half right. Perhaps even just a quarter. In typical Fruit Chan style, the title Coffin Homes actually carries a double meaning, as the focus of the plot becomes more about the ghosts who continue to live in the properties they died in more than the cramped spaces many find themselves living in. The ghosts here aren’t the type that linger in dark corners, or at least, that’s not all they do. Capable of chatting with the living, and even signing real estate contracts in the unfortunate case that deed ownerships were never transferred before they passed on. They also happen to be particularly violent to those who threaten to move into their now empty properties, or as is the case in Chan’s latest, the real estate agents eagerly trying to sell them.
There are several plot threads at work in Chan’s latest, all of which are loosely connected to each other. Wong Yau-Nam (Ip Man, Gallants) plays a real estate agent who uses the ‘death apartment’ (the phrase used for an apartment that somebody died in) he’s trying to sell as a place to sleep, going so far as to make peace with its former resident – the ghost of a butcher who murdered his own wife, chopping her up and hiding her in the apartment’s walls (he just can’t remember where). Played by Paul Che (Dangerous Encounter – 1st Kind, Port of Call), his tall gangly frame makes for a suitably ghostly appearance, and is responsible for some of the more gratuitous splatter scenes. Meanwhile Yau-Nam’s father, played by Tai Bo (Hand Rolled Cigarette, The Brink) runs his own coffin home setup, but finds himself constantly bothered by the ghost of a boy who died there from gas poisoning.
On top of that Yau-Nam’s girlfriend who works for a rival real estate company has gone missing, Loletta Lee needs to dispose of her sibling’s bodies, there’s an overenthusiastic buyer for the death apartment, and an Indian family who have moved into a coffin home aren’t happy with the conditions. What does it all mean? In truth it’s hard to tell. Coffin Homes lacks any kind of encompassing story or character arcs, and the tonal shifts that often take place in the same scene hark back to jarring days of 80’s Hong Kong cinema. They’re not the only part that feel like a throwback though, with the ghost kids’ makeup looking like he just walked off the set of Mr. Vampire II, and not in a complimentary sort of way. I get the feeling here that Chan wasn’t so much interested in creating a cohesive piece of storytelling, but rather a scattershot montage of scenes in which he weaves in jabs (both subtle and not so subtle) at the state of HK’s affairs.
At one point Yau-Nam encounters Yamaraja, the Hindu god of death and justice who’s responsible for upholding laws, who decrees that “the greatness of Hong Kong’s laws lies in their changeability.” The sarcasm may be on the nose, but it still amuses. Thankfully Chan makes the decision to go full-on gonzo with the finale, throwing out any sense of logic or coherence, and going for an all-out splatter fest involving ghost on ghost violence, severed heads being used as bowling balls, and geysers of multi-coloured blood being sprayed left, right, and centre. It’s sheer level of ridiculousness feels like it doesn’t really belong in Hong Kong cinema from as recent as 2021, and earns good will for its willingness to go all out, even throwing in a Thundering Mantis style homage that makes no sense whatsoever.
While the finale is to be admired, for most of Coffin Homes Chan struggles to find the balance between horror and social commentary. After the entertainingly gory start, the middle becomes bogged down with too many scenes involving the ghost kid, who enjoys joining in with the other coffin home kids to play human train with them underneath a bed sheet. Chan chooses to give both Yau-Nam and Tai Bo’s respective scenarios equal screen time, however in the end there’s nothing really that interesting about the kid ghost, and watching scenes of him playing together with other kids begin to feel torturous. Yau-Nam’s scenario on the other hand has him trying to find his missing girlfriend, secure himself as the exclusive agent for Loletta Lee’s property, and deal with angry debt collectors. It’s much more engaging from an audience perspective, and the pace lags whenever he’s not onscreen.
Despite not having the strongest production values, and its stop-start nature resulting in the 105-minute runtime entertaining only sporadically, there’s enough on display in Coffin Homes to indicate that Fruit Chan still has it. Dream Home remains the definitive horror flick about the Hong Kong property market, but if you’re looking for a decidedly different take on the same issues, then approached with low expectations Coffin Homes is certainly worth checking out.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5.5/10
