Starring: Chrissie Chau Sau-na, Koni Lui Wai-yee, Lam Suet, Chris Lai Lok-yi Director: Dennis Law Sau-yiu Category: IIB (Cantonese)
With a title like that, and Hong Kong's most famous 'pseudo-model' Chrissie Chau Sau-na in the lead, expectations of guilty pleasure are not amiss. Just two months after his Bad Blood hit the screen, producer-director-writer Dennis Law Sau-yiu has crafted a tale dripping with the worst blood of unborn children. Yet despite its torrents of fetal plasma, the script is too anaemic to take it much past a pseudo-shock fest.
It's not that the triangular travails of nurse Zoe (Chau, above), caddish doctor Joseph (Chris Lai Lok-yi), and his beer-selling wife Winnie (Koni Lui Wai-yee) don't belong in the twilight zone. Theirs is a perverse relationship, with the handsome physician an unmitigated lout who two-times his surprisingly virtuous spouse for a sexy but strange colleague. Joseph is so self-absorbed that he has little inkling just how creepy his paramour's extra-curricular activities are, including a sideline selling discarded placentas to her fortune-telling father, Lok (Lam Suet).
The ingredients are there for an exploitation classic. Figuring in more than a few of these is Lok's foster child, an un-reincarnated fetus forced into doing his master's bidding. Zoe's embryonic visions also do credit to the genre, appearing at such innocuous moments as in the midst of frying an egg. The movie's death toll includes one whose exit is truly shocking for its unexpectedness.
Speaking of bad blood, the overall quantity of high-velocity vomit and other bodily fluids is surely greater than in any recent production, despite its relatively brief 88 minutes. In a cast containing a higher-than-usual percentage of cute starlets, Lui's performance deserves mention for managing to inject a hint of poignancy into the unsubtle onslaught.
That the narrative falls short of fulfilling its exploitive potential is chiefly due to a flatness in the characterisations and a plot in need of a few more twists. At times it's almost there, as when the lunatic actions of one principal suggest a psychotic rather than supernatural explanation. It would have served Womb Ghosts well if the line had been blurred, because the evidence on hand makes the ghostly premise almost as hard to swallow as the liquid Lok squeezes from a fresh placenta.