Huang jin dao shi

More of a straight comedy than a horror comedy, Mad Mad Ghost is much more concerned with daffy laughs and social issues than with scares.

Lam Ching Ying is a Taoist priest who, along with his bumbling disciples, moves into a house haunted by a ghost couple: a meek, traditional woman and her abusive husband. Lam helps her rid herself of the brute, and takes her on as a sort of teaching aid in order to help develop his students' ghost-battling skills.

Meanwhile, the easily scared ghost lady works on becoming a more formidable ghost, and also emancipating herself as a woman. None of this is as serious as it sounds, however, with the students constantly behaving in ridiculous, unpious ways and the ghost lady going shopping, visiting a disco, and taking on a new Madonna-inspired persona.

Another current running through Mad Mad Ghost is Chinese patriotism. Lam, in some of his introductory lecturing, explains that the ancient Chinese view of the universe has a "scientific" basis equivalent to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. European chess, he later adds, also has its origin in a Chinese game.

There's also a definite anti-Western feeling to the film. Two woodenly villainous men posing as missionaries wanting to rent Lam's house are actually only interested in a stash of gold buried in the courtyard. At the end, when the two of them start blasting the house apart with machine guns and calling everybody "Chinese dogs", one of them remarks that it's "as exciting as the Vietnam War."

A sometimes awkward mix of several styles and thematic concerns, Mad Mad Ghost isn't completely successful. The ghostly spousal abuse, for instance, while played as comedic, comes across as overly brutal considering the tone of the film. The laughs are hit-and-miss and almost always of the dumb, mugging variety. There's also some cheap and very visual toilet humor, which may turn off some viewers. For the brave, however, Mad Mad Ghost ought not to be a complete waste of time, as it does have an often infectious energy and somewhat likable cast of characters.