With its tragic romantic ghost story set in the 1940s, Fruit Chan's Finale in Blood clearly owes a debt to Stanley Kwan's Rouge (1987), but despite Chan's confident direction, which cuts back and forth through time via lengthy flashbacks, the film isn't as memorable as Kwan's classic, which remains the superior film thanks to its iconic pairing of Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung, its classic supernatural love story and a haunting sense of style.
Chan's movie opens with the death of a young woman, Fong Yan (Ruth Winona Tao), who takes a high dive out of a window onto the street below; how and why this happens is revealed later.
The director then introduces the viewer to the unlikely hero of his film, Cheng Ming Bo (Lawrence Cheng), who works at a radio station, broadcasting daily food prices. Wanted criminal Chan Chat (Bei-Dak Lai) convinces Cheng to help him shift contraband medical supplies, but the deal is raided by the police, and Cheng ends up in the water, where he is saved from drowning by Fong Yan's ghost, whose soul is trapped in an umbrella. In return for helping her seek revenge on those responsible for her untimely death, Fong Yan assists Cheng when he is given the opportunity to take over a coveted radio spot broadcasting dramas. Together, Fong Yan and Cheng recount the ghost's story on the air, which is told via a series of flashbacks.
We learn that, when alive, Fong Yan was the owner of a hotel, who fell in love with an undercover policeman Ma (David Wu). The romance is doomed from the start, however, Ma unwilling to give up his relationship with a hooker (Chikako Aoyama), probably on account of her impressive rack. Ma treats Fong Yan mean to keep her keen, but when the hotel owner returns unannounced from a trip to Macau and catches her husband in flagrante delicto with the prostitute, a fight breaks out, leading to Fong Yan plummeting down a stair well and exiting the building via the window.
The remainder of the film sees Cheng helping Fong Yan's spirit to possess her corpse, which has been hidden in a shallow grave by Ma, and take revenge - leading to a downer of an ending in which one bullet passes through three heads!
While not a worthless effort from fledgling director Chan, the lack of genuine romance in Finale in Blood prevents it from being a bona fide winner (Ma is a nasty piece of work, and Cheng's love interest - radio star Lui Sa, played by Josephine Koo - is only interested in our hero once he becomes a success).
5/10.
