Haunted Road II

怨灵II

China, 2017, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 83 mins.

Director: Li Yongchang 李勇昌 [Ryon Lee].

Rating: 5/10.

Well-mounted ghost story is let down by a feeble solution and too much back-end explanation.

STORY

Malaysia, the present day. While on secondment from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur for a month by the steel company they both work for, couple Bai Ling (Sushar Manaying) and Wei Jun (Li Chuan) visit Genting Highlands during a public holiday. After winning big at a casino, they have difficulty finding a hotel room in the area but eventually manage to find a room at Amber Court, where they end up with the last room available, 1174. Bai Ling thinks the room’s numbers sound too similar in Mandarin Chinese to “die one by one” 一一去死 or “die together” 一起死, as well as adding up to unlucky 13. Also, on the way in, they had passed the body of a women who had just fallen to her death. The nervy Bai Ling keeps seeing ghosts, though she’s calmed a little when Wei Jun proposes to her in the room. In the middle fo the night she waked to find him missing; she eventually finds him, but then a man in the next room tells them their room has been unoccupied since a woman jumped from it. Bai Ling and Wei Jun manage to change their room to 709, though when they enter it they find they are back in 1174. When a woman rushes past them and jumps to her death, they can’t find any body in the courtyard below. Deciding to check out, they collect their money from the room, during which they are attacked by ghosts, one of which looks to Bai Ling like Chen Yi (Lu Yang), a jealous co-worker in Beijing who always fancied Wei Jun. They manage to escape by car but then run out of petrol. While Wei Jun goes in search of a petrol station, Bai Ling is rescued from a ghostly attack by the hotel’s secrity guard Chen Dashan (Chen Liqian), who has followed them. However, his car then crashes while trying to avoid the headless ghost of Wei Jun. Bai Ling wakes up in a hospital where the police say they can’t find any evidence of what she claims happened.

REVIEW

Haunted Road II 怨灵II is a well-mounted budget horror – set and shot in Malaysia but funded by Mainland companies – that collapses during the final stretch under an excess of explanation and flashbacks. Until then, Chinese Malaysian writer-director Li Yongchang 李勇昌 [Ryon Lee] keeps the pot bubbling with plenty of unexplained ghostly events and the heroine’s attempts to find out what on earth is going on. Too bad that, in this his sixth feature, Li couldn’t come up with a better explanation than he does, as the film is mounted with some care.

In the Mainland Haunted Road II made RMB11.4 million, more than the usual couple of million that budget horrors manage though still less than the RMB19 million clocked up by Haunted Road 怨灵 in 2014. The two movies aren’t related in any way apart from sharing the same production company, Zhejiang Hewen TV & Film. The first film, directed by the Mainland’s Tong Yijian 佟亦坚 (see poster, left), was an above-average psycho-thriller set at a deserted motorway service station in Hebei province that, despite having a wooden lead in South Korean actress Hong Su-a 홍수아 | 洪秀儿, managed to sustain its idea to feature length with plenty of thrills and spills along the way.

With a completely different crew and creative team, plus a story that is more Haunted Hotel than Haunted Road, HRII hardly seems to deserve its English title (the Chinese one simply means “Resentful Spirit II”). However, like the first film, it does star a (re-voiced) non-Chinese actress playing a Chinese role – in this case, Thailand’s Sushar “Aom” Manaying สุชาร์ มานะยิ่ง, 30, known in Chinese as Li Haina 李海娜. Famous for being in Thailand’s first lesbian film, the ingenuously frothy Yes or No: So, I Love You. Yes or No: อยากรัก ก็รักเลย… (2010), the petite Manaying is simply too inexpressive here for what is the central role; but she’s carried along until the latter stages by the slick technical package of Thai d.p. Teerawat Rujenatham (Raging Phoenix จีจ้า ดื้อ สวย ดุ, 2009) and editor Liang Zunjie 梁尊杰, plus some serviceable VFX. The rest of the key cast, apart from Chinese Malaysian Chen Liqian 陈立谦 (a Li regular) as a weirdo security guard, are largely from the Mainland, with actor-presenter Li Chuan 李川, 28, making a personable lead opposite Manaying until he’s whisked off by the plot.

The weakness of the script, by Zhou Wei 周唯 (Campus Mystery 笔仙魔咒, 2015) and Li, could be seen as all the more surprising considering the latter’s previous experience – both as a writer (on hits Woohoo! 大日子, 2010, Great Day 天天好天, 2011, and The Journey 一路有你, 2013) and as a director (including two horrors, The Transcend 超渡, co-directed with Chinese Malaysian producer Huang Zhiqiang 黄志强 [James Wong], and Seventh 守夜, both 2014). But the first two films’ biggest strength was their utter simplicity, and the latter two were merely solid genre items in a career that’s so far spanned all types. Li has made a prominent mark on Malaysia’s Chinese-language film industry the past seven years but has yet to establish himself as an especially notable writer-director.

The film was partly shot at Amber Court, a never-finished complex in Genting Highlands, northeast of Kuala Lumpur. The site has its own haunted myths that the story freely exploits.

CREDITS

Presented by Zhejiang Hewen TV & Film (CN).

Script: Zhou Wei, Li Yongchang [Ryon Lee]. Photography: Teerawat Rujenatham. Editing: Liang Zunjie. Music: Chen Yanhui, Chen Xinhua, David Gary. Art direction: Yang Jingjing. Styling: Huang Juqing. Sound: Yang Lihui, Traithep Wongpaiboon. Visual effects: Lin Junyu (Mirage Works).

Cast: Sushar Manaying (Bai Ling), Li Chuan (Wei Jun), Chen Liqian (Chen Dashan, security guard), Song Ci (Bai Ling’s mother), Ni Musi (Zhang, nurse), Lu Yang (Chen Yi), Lin Jiajia (Bai Ling’s mother), Azman Hassan (shaman), Nadia Aqilah Bajuri (crazed Malay woman), Zhong Qinhua (hotel receptionist).

Release: China, 12 Oct 2017.