Help!!! (2000)

Ekin Cheng in skin tight jeans and sparkly tight sleeveless top. Alternated with mechanic overals and hospital scrubs. What more do you need?This film prooves that Ekin can do far more than the young and dangerous triad boss or fantasy swords master. He has alot of variety in his acting, making him not just a pretty face. Jordan Chan and him make an admirable pairing.Weird black comedy with slapstick horror, but that's just chinese humour for you. The ending...I was in shock disbelief untill the 'twist'...the twist just made it perfect!Any Ekin Cheng or Jordan Chan fans' must have.

When I first sat down and watched this, I did not know what to expect, I had not read any reviews of the film, and so it had no hype behind it. My first impressions was it was pretty weird, a very black comedy. Note my review contains spoilers about plot details.The story is set in a busy HK Hospital, where all the Doctors, Nurses, Cleaners, etc are slackers, and to make matters worse they are being backed up by the high management, a group of shady looking individuals who you only ever see in the dark, apart from when they look out of there window blinds and you see there bloodshot eyes. Enter Celia Cheung as Yan a headstrong nurse who along with two other doctors, Ekin Cheng as Joe and Jordan Chan as Jim, decide to stop the rot and do everything themselves, from working on trying to save the patients, stocking up the medical supplies, fixing computers, cleaning the toilets, even doing a bit of spot welding on staff cars who need it. To begin with they get abuse from there fellow workers, but this slowly turns to respect and they decide to help out the heroic trio (no pun intended), then just when everything seems to be going well there is a blackout in Hong Kong and a large scale traffic accident which is the films end, sort of.This is basically the films plot, the humour is very dark and it kept me interested because I did not know what was going to happen next, there are loads of surreal touches like talking cars, a dead man who dies and becomes a ghost and chases the two doctors around the ward. There is also a running gag throughout the first part of the film concerning Yan (Celia) who saves a beggars life at the start of the film, he then keeps coming back to Yan saying he loves her, and she keeps rejecting him as he goes through some dramatic changes, until he is literally unrecognizable from what he looked like at first.The big question is will you like this film, I would say yes, because like the trash that Hollywood splurges out, year after year, its unpredictable, enjoyable, and dark, in a way only Asian cinema can do it, but be warned the humour is very Chinese and it may be too different in style to a conventional USA comedy film for example.

This is another quality production from Milkyway Images, directed by Johnny To.Normaly it's difficult to apreciate comedy in Hong Kong movies but this time they managed to pull it of! The story is about three young doctors who try to fight the burocratic system that causes chaos in the hospital.The movie is fast paced with lot's of weird situations that reminded me a lot of Monthy Pyton.So if you're into this kind of weird black humor this one is for you.And watch out for the surprise ending....

It looks like 2000 isn't turning out to be the year for Johnny To and Milky Way. Following the debacle that is "Needing You...," the company brings us the strange hospital farce, "Help!!!" Again, like "Needing..." it is admirable that To & Wai Ka Fai have elected to tackle another genre. This one is slightly more successful, but it's general premise never quite takes shape amidst a lot of chaotic elements. Ekin Cheng, Jordan Chan, and Cecilia Cheung star as a group of determined doctors who work at a hospital where the employees slack off and do nothing to help their patients. This, of course, leads up to some interesting slapstick, incl. a great sequence where a deceased patient's ghost reappears to haunt the physicians. A parody of the opening title sequence of "ER" is also quite successful as well as a 70's disaster movie climax with an overturned bus & a person caught between bamboo sticks (reminiscent of a certain scene in Spielberg's "The Lost World"). Unfortunately, that's about all that really works here and the game cast is left stranded with a couple of disconnected plot threads. Will Johnny To eventually return to the gangster/cop dramas that are his forte? Stay tuned.