Wai (Chien-lien Wu) is atop a large building and poised to jump. Police officer, Tommy (Chi Wah Wong) and his colleague and fiance, Laura (Li Yu) arrive to talk her down; yet Wai is adamant, because she has a plan: after her death, another spirit will "walk in" to her body, and Wai is very cool with that idea. Wai takes the plunge and smacks the concrete. To everyone's surprise, she eventually stands right back up. Meanwhile, Lo Bill (Yeung Ming Wan) and his cronies are waiting for Chicken (Danny Lee), who's going to be the wheelman for their next robbery. Chicken is an excellent driver but a stuttering buffoon with whom Lo Bill and his stooges are reluctantly working. The next morning, Lo Bill and his buttheads raid a crime syndicate's office and nab the loot. A bloody shootout ensues during the course of the robbery, and outside, officer Tommy is ticketing cowering Chicken. Lo Bill blasts a few cops on the way out of the crime scene and jumps in the getaway car. He pumps some bullets in Chicken's chest, since, hey you're kind of worthless, anyway, and violently hits Tommy with his car as he speeds off. Chicken and Tommy survive: Chicken's in a coma and a vegetative state, while Tommy's now a paraplegic. Perhaps another "walk-in" is in order? 
Despite the seriousness of tone and bloody violence of the initial exposition of Herman Yau's Walk In (1997), this film is very much a comedy. Since Walk In is also helmed by Herman Yau, it is also irreverent, unique, and a little dark. Pretty jumper Wai, possessed by her new "walk in" spirit, is now a local self-help guru. Her advice is often obvious and direct, such as "you're fat, eat less." Laura comes to Wai to help Tommy, who feels life is not worth living anymore since he's lost the use of his body below the waist. Wai tells him to accept the situation and move on but perhaps feeling a kinship because of the rooftop incident, she tells Tommy about how to "walk in" to another body. Tommy approaches comatose Chicken and promises for use of his body, he will avenge Chicken against the people who harmed him. Tommy also promises not to touch any of Chicken's women, and if he does, he hopes to prematurely ejaculate at the first naughty thought. Chicken agrees, and Tommy with help from Laura, drives a car off of a cliff and dies. Let the shenanigans ensue.
Immediately, at Tommy's funeral and in his new body, Tommy wants to have sex with Laura. In the most romantic place, the bathroom at the mortuary, Laura cannot get into the mood: Chicken's face is a little much for Laura, and she needs some time to get used to it. Tommy is also learning that Chicken was pretty low for a human being: he's racked up debts all over his small village outside Hong Kong and has two mistresses, one pregnant. In addition, Chicken has treated his very plain-looking wife poorly, both financially and emotionally, and has an estranged relationship with his very beautiful sister, May (Ada Choi). The new Chicken is now forthright and righteous: he lines up everyone and starts paying his debts off; Chicken gathers his mother, his wife, two mistresses, and May for many a sit-down to adequately sort out their relationships; and virtually starting from scratch, he begins to gather clues about Chicken's attacker. However, Tommy's relationship with Laura is seriously suffering. 
Some best scenes in Walk In involve Lee's Chicken and Choi's May. Of the six women who occupy both Tommy's and Chicken's "dual" life, May is the most enamored with the hybrid man. She learns of Tommy's body/soul switching with Chicken and becomes quite attracted to the new man. It doesn't help that May is also affectionate: more than once, she hops on to Chicken for a tight hug or a cat-like brushing up against his body. Danny Lee's character gives a ridiculously orgasmic face only to have to take a quick trip to the bathroom to clean up. "May, we can't have an affair," says Chicken/Tommy. "That's all right," says May. "Although it's my brother's body, I'm in love with the man inside." Despite his oath of premature ejaculation to Chicken, Tommy puts his foot in his mouth later when he promises to Chicken to be more diligent in his pursuit of his attacker: Tommy promises that if Laura touches him, he will prematurely ejaculate, as well. Soon after that promise, Laura warms up to Tommy's new body to Tommy's discontent. The low-brow sexual humor and the usually taboo theme of incest is creatively rendered, due in part to the performances by all of the participants and a well-timed and unique script. I love how Yau and company emphasize seemingly the most unsettling themes of the story by injecting them with the most ridiculous humor.
Tommy does find out the identity of Chicken's assailant, and Yau bookends Walk In with two fantastic action sequences. Herman Yau must have been born with low-budget exploitation in his DNA, because he executes it very well. The shootout at the beginning and the confrontation at the end is rendered with a lot more detail and nuance than expected. The editing is tight; the camerawork is tops; and the on-screen action is amazingly exciting. The final confrontation also involves a very dangerous-looking chase: two double-decker buses through the streets, colliding at times and going against traffic. The stunts are expertly executed, and I wouldn't be surprised if any of the stunt people injured themselves more than once. Often a ninety-minute or so low-budget exploitation movie offers little, yet Yau often offers packed ones. Rarely conservative, Yau goes where his contemporaries do not, and quite often, I'm the one who is rewarded. With Walk In, Yau impresses me again.
At the local police station, a young woman (
On paper, The Untold Story III reads as a compelling police procedural, including the recreation of the crime leading to the trial. However viewer, that ain't what you're going to get. The film's irreverent director is one of Hong Kong's most creative and interesting working, while its producer, Lee, and writer, Law, bring back the disturbing and bizarre hybrid tone of the horrific and the humorous of the original Untold Story. The end result is The Untold Story III being compellingly watchable and intriguing, if just alone for its imaginative execution. The sequences vary in the extreme in tone: from slapstick comedic to very dark and intense, sometimes very close in proximity. One of the most disturbing aspects of the original Untold Story was the juxtaposition of ridiculous and nonsensical comical scenes (often with Danny Lee) with scenes of dark and sinister violence (with Anthony Wong). Like Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972), the comedic scenes don't balance the film's horrific scenes, creating a more easy-going experience for the viewer; rather, the inclusion of the sometimes very light comedy made The Untold Story even more disturbing with its drastic shift in tone during scenes. The Untold Story III doesn't match its original in terms of violence (it's Category II, like a "hard" R-rating), but there are multiple shifts in tone to accompany its multiplicity of treatments: the scenes go from slapstick comedic, to dramatic, to horrific (both supernatural and real-life), often changing tones within the scenes. 
The first time the viewer sees the four young men, they are wandering the streets in a daze, almost zombie-like. They are looking for a new apartment or looking to buy paper offerings to burn for Ma. Apparently after the murder, none could sleep or eat. Yau doesn't show many supernatural scenes but just their effects on the alleged perpetrators: the viewer can't tell if its paranoia or guilt or Ma's ghost which is plaguing them. Sleep deprivation and hunger leads the four into psychosis, so as their fear builds they actually start believing in the hallucinations that they start seeing. The four spent the money that they borrowed from Ma on partying, and these scenes are laughably bad and fun. They look like bad pop-music videos or teenage clothes commercials, accompanied by the most vapid imagery in dance clubs and in the street. The even weirder sequences follow in the events of the evening after the murder, as the four go to play Mah-jong or shoot pool ("We needed to relax," says Hau). When one of the four has a perfect hand in Mah-jong, they take it as a bad omen and split. 
Danny Lee's Inspector Lee was a ladies' man in the original Untold Story, and his scenes often involved him sashaying into the police station with a lady under each arm. In this film, Lee's character is dressed like a Japanese high-school student with a jarring affectation, a Sherlock Holmes-ish pipe. In one scene, during the police confessions, Lee is summoned from a party and he arrives wearing a ship captain's outfit, as if he just disembarked The Love Boat. It's completely nonsensical, and perhaps the humor is an intentional commentary on the crime: it's almost mind-boggling that four could be convicted of a crime absent any direct evidence, let alone proof of the corpse. The police are often depicted as inept and misguided, as in the opening scene with Ma's sister, and even their investigation is far-fetched and ridiculous. For example, the four admit to dismembering the body and dumping it in the trash. The police can only speculate that the body is in a local landfill; and their solution is to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to comb the landfill, perhaps for months, to find the body. Of course, in a unintentionally humorous sequence with Lee, the prosecutor finds this idea, and the whole "case," ludicrous. 
Danny Lee is perhaps best known to Western Asian cult film fans for his role as the police officer who becomes Yun-fat Chow's reluctant ally in John Woo's The Killer (1989). In the 1990s, Lee produced (and often starred as a police officer) in some truly nasty Category III productions, such as Billy Tang's Dr. Lamb (1992) with Simon Yam, The Untold Story, Parkman Wong's Portrait of a Serial Rapist (1994) and Shoot to Kill (1994). Lee is just as infamous as Yau and Billy Tang in the 90s HK Category III scene as anyone else. His performance in the film is just bizarre: there is no adequate way to describe it, as if Inspector Lee doesn't seem to flow from logic and deduction, but....somewhere else. Sam Lee is a great actor and has appeared in numerous films. He can perform comedy as well as any other young actor and can play intense just as well (see Wilson Yip's Bio-Zombie (1998) and Pou-Soi Cheang's Dog Bite Dog (2006), respectively). Sam Lee is called upon by Yau to perform at both ends of the spectrum here and he succeeds very well. This is one of the last performances by the Shaw Brothers' greatest cinematic villian, the charismatic Lo Lieh, and he shines in his few scenes. Herman Yau, as I've stated on this blog before, makes exciting cinema, period. When Yau is nontraditional, which is often, he is without equal. The scene in The Untold Story III where the four plan and practice the murder of Ma is brilliant. I could watch it over and over. Yau owns low-budget cinema, primarily because of his imagination and his innovative visual style and risk-taking. The Untold Story III is so bizarre and unusual that it feels original and unexpected. When film makers can accomplish this feeling, they have earned a fan, here, for life.