Proud husband and father-to-be Cheung Ging-Keung (Charlie Chin) is determined not to rely on his businessman father-in-law for employment; instead he takes a job as a night watchman at an industrial complex that, unbeknown to him, is home to a malevolent spirit who plans to be reincarnated as his son. A Taoist priest warns Cheung of the danger that he and his family are in and tells him that his only hope is to go to his workplace and banish the spirit before dawn by placing a magical talisman on the navel of the spirit's corpse. Of course, doing so ain't that easy
80s Hong Kong horror movies appeal to me because they are often so unlike anything that Western cinema can offer, delivering the weird and the wacky in spades. Unfortunately, The Imp, from director Dennis Yu, is nowhere near the most original nor the craziest Asian horror flick I have seen (that would really take some doing), offering up only a few mildly bonkers moments amidst an excess of smoke, strong green lighting and things randomly bursting into flames, whilst playing out at a frustratingly measured pace with a surprisingly serious tone. To be honest, there's barely enough of the wacky stuff to make it worthwhile for fans of Asian madness.
The best that the film can offer is a guy choking on a bone while eating dog soup, with the consequent operation on the aforementioned man providing most of what little gore there is, plus a couple of other random supernatural deaths, including one guy being suffocated by a newspaper(!), and another bloke named Fatty being waylaid by supernatural fog before getting burned in his car. Towards the end of the film, Yu picks up the tempo a tad, chucking in a few cruddy zombies, and ends proceedings on a unexpectedly downbeat note.
For me, however, the strangest (and therefore most memorable) sight is that of Fatty sporting his bright red, English slogan t-shirts: the first has the somewhat perplexing phrase 'Am I A Girl?' written on it in big white letters, while the second one exclaims 'No! I Am A Man'. Now that is weird!
