Haunted Office

Using a star-studded cast and a script written in haste, “Haunted office” quickly joined the new wave of horror movies that is sweeping through Hong Kong cinema.

So how ‘haunted’ is this office? Pat (Karen Mok) found a new job in an investment firm. On her first day at work, she listened to ghost tales exchanged by a group of women. There was a tale that exactly 9 people would die in the seventh lunar month of every year. Pat met her friend Ken (Stephen Fung), who also got a new job as a computer game designer in a company in the same building. Pat disregarded the ghost tales as amusing, but she encountered a girl dressed in white, crying in the lift. Ken found himself attracted to an alluring girl named Shan (Shu Qi) who is always dressed in red and worked in the same company as him. Pat later witnessed a woman talking and laughing to someone in the last cubicle in the bathroom. This woman later hung herself and number 1 was written on the wall.

Meanwhile, Richard (Jordan Chan), a mean boss of another company in the same building, wanted to get rid of one of his long-time employees. He went on a trip to Thailand and relied on his assistant to carry out the task. Things started to go strange from this moment as Pat saw her colleague, Karen, chatting to someone in the bathroom. Karen later died at the photocopier and was marked as victim 2. Ken and Shan fell in love but Shan told him that she could see the ghost and the ghost wanted her as a replacement. When Richard came back from Thailand, his friends sent him an e-mail saying that all his staff had died in a horrible car accident after he left. Yet Richard still saw them working in his company.

“Haunted office” is a cheap horror movie that relies mainly on the star power to sell it. It has all the trademark features of a ghost movie such as the flashing lights, an empty building at night, some weird people appearing and disappearing mysteriously, etc…However, even the star-studded cast could not save a badly directed and poorly scripted movie. There were so many flaws with this movie that you just could not simply ignore them. First of all, the creepy factor in this movie was a girl dressed in white appearing everywhere in the building. Did she want to save these victims or did she simply want to stalk and scare the crap out of everyone? Even in the end, when she revealed her real identity, you just have to wonder why she dressed like that throughout the movie, a real weird sense of fashion for a person in her position. Secondly, the stupidity of the characters left no room for tolerance. Take Pat for example. She was outright scared. She witnessed strange behaviors in two people before they died. Yet she still agreed to stay back and work at night in a place where two people had just committed suicide for unknown reasons. Furthermore, the lights kept blacking out in a really big and stylish building. Nine people died mysteriously in the building every year and no one bothered to investigate the reasons. People still went to work as if nothing had just happened or no one simply heard of the news that people died there.

Talking about acting talent, it brings more disappointment. No one seems to show any interest in the roles. Karen Mok could do nothing to improve the IQ of her character. I still remember one scene when she went into the tearoom to make coffee and the water came out red as blood, the wall started shaking and everything dropped. What did Pat do? Did she run for her life? Surprisingly she did not. She just stood there covering her ears. There was this “Oops, I’m so scared” expression on her face. Stephen Fung and Shu Qi had absolutely no chemistry, and Shu Qi’s acting was so fake. Jordan Chan played his usual role, a mean, selfish, bad-mouthed playboy with an insatiable sex drive. It would not be a complete horror movie if Law Lan did not make an appearance. In the end, the viewers don’t feel sorry for any character who got killed because the characters were so detached and so dumb for getting themselves killed in the first place. The ending delivered an interesting twist but that was only 5 sane minutes out of 90 minutes of sheer absurdity.

The ghosts in Hong Kong movies have really undergone a major evolution. In the 1980s, the popular zombies were dressed in Ching period costumes and did nothing more other than jump around at night. Then you had those bloodthirsty ghosts that only appeared during nighttime to kill numerous people for whatever-inexplicable-reason or because they felt like it. Now, ghosts dress in latest fashions and also go to work during daytime. What will be the next level?

Overall, the movie delivered occasional creepy moments and pleasant sights of young stars. Yet it was absolutely an insult to the viewer’s intelligence.