General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Spooky Bunch (撞到正)

The Spooky Bunch (撞到正) is a 1980 Hong Kong Cantonese horror comedy directed by Ann Hui (许鞍华), written by Joyce Chan (陈韵文), and produced by and starring Josephine Siao (萧芳芳), about a Cantonese opera troupe haunted by ghosts during an engagement on the island of Cheung Chau.¹ It was Hui's second feature, made the year after her debut The Secret (1979), and it reworked the ghost story into a lively comedy rather than a thriller.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	22 May 1980, Hong Kong; Cantonese dialogue; production company 高韵 (Hi-Pitch)³
Running time	93 minutes per the Hong Kong Film Archive's 2015 listing; the restored DCP version runs 94 minutes¹^•⁴
Principal cast	Josephine Siao, Kenny Bee (钟镇涛), Kwan Chung (关聪), Lau Hark-suen (刘克宣), Tina Lau (刘天兰)¹
Crew	Director Ann Hui; script Joyce Chan; cinematography Tony Hope (何东尼); producer Josephine Siao; production manager Choi Po-chu (崔宝珠)¹
Festival history	Screened in the Berlin International Film Festival's 1981 Panorama; won Best Foreign Film at the London Film Festival in 1981⁵^•⁶
Place in Hui's work	With The Secret (1979) and Visible Secret (2001), it forms what the Hong Kong Film Archive calls Hui's phantom trilogy⁶
Restoration	Restored in 2001 by Triage Motion Picture Services, Los Angeles; a 4K digital restoration premiered at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Story

The film is set in the world of a Cantonese opera troupe. Ah Gee (阿芝), a second-lead female role player (二帮花旦) played by Josephine Siao, is promoted by the troupe's financier, Master Ma (马老爷), to sing the lead role when the troupe opens on Cheung Chau for the first time. The promotion is a scheme: Ma wants to join Ah Gee in marriage with his grandnephew Ah Di (阿迪, played by Kenny Bee) in order to break a curse that has afflicted the Ma family for three generations. Before the plan can begin, a group of wronged ghosts is already waiting on the island, and the troupe repeatedly "bumps into spirits" (撞魁). The troupe's star, Lung Tin-yat (龙天一, played by Kwan Chung), is repeatedly possessed by ghosts mid-performance and made a spectacle of, and Ah Di finally calls in a Taoist priest to subdue the ghosts and resolve the crisis.¹

The Hong Kong Film Archive's synopsis of the restored version supplies the backstory: during the War of Resistance, Master Ma had cheated Ah Gee's grandfather into selling fake medicine that poisoned many people, and the grandfather, indirectly killed by the affair, cursed the Ma family with extinction before he died. Ma hoped to marry the descendants to each other and dissolve the feud, but the ghosts would not let go, and the small island becomes a world of phantoms.⁴

Production and creative team

A female-led production. After the commercial and critical success of The Secret, Hui and Chan were invited by Josephine Siao to make the film the following year.⁸ The Hong Kong Film Archive notes that the film's entire creative team of director, scriptwriter, art director, and producer was female, a one-of-a-kind status in Hong Kong cinema, and the crew also included the British cinematographer Tony Hope.⁹^•² The film scholar Gina Marchetti of the University of Hong Kong places the production in the context of the Hong Kong New Wave, in which women who had come through university education and television, such as Hui, found new opportunities in a film industry previously run through a male-dominated apprenticeship system.⁵

The cast mixed generations in the same way the film mixed old and new. Veterans Lau Hark-suen and Cheng Mang-ha, whose careers first flourished in the 1930s, appeared alongside younger performers including Tina Lau, who also served as the film's production manager, and the pop star Kenny Bee.² The martial arts choreography was by Ching Siu-tung (程小东) and the art director was Rebecca Lee (李乐诗).³

Style and themes

The film's distinctiveness lies in its fusion of Cantonese opera with a present-day supernatural tale. The South China Morning Post's Paul Fonoroff wrote that scriptwriter Joyce Chan's offbeat integration of the opera tradition into a fanciful contemporary story combined the traditional and the modern in a way that helped redefine a fading genre, at a time when Cantonese opera had long been in decline from a peak of popularity nearly two decades earlier.² The Archive's account of the restored print describes how Hui drew on the troupe's traditional customs and folk superstitions and used the island's rustic outlying-island scenery, with its opera makeup, costumes, and stage performance, to create an eerie atmosphere, producing encounters between people and ghosts that are both tense and funny.⁴

The Archive's 2015 program note adds a qualification: technically the film is less stimulating than later Hong Kong comedies built on dense gags and action, but the strength of Chan's script lies below the surface, in character-driven humor and a childlike spirit that runs through the troupe members. Siao's neurotic comic performance is described as slightly over the top but full of comic energy, and the possession scenes played by Kwan Hoi-san and Lau Hark-suen are singled out as highlights.¹ The writer Yick Yee-man's retrospective on Joyce Chan records that when the script was filmed, time and technical constraints left many details underdeveloped, so the finished film, though lively, shows rough patches.⁸

Reception and legacy

The film was shown in the Berlin International Film Festival's 1981 Panorama, which the film scholar Gina Marchetti describes as Hui's entry into European art film circles.⁵ The Hong Kong Film Archive records that it won the Best Foreign Film award at the London Film Festival in 1981.⁶ The Archive also credits its box-office success with helping give rise to the action-comedy-thriller genre later associated with Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung.⁹ It was later included in the Archive's "100 Must-See Hong Kong Movies" series.¹⁰

A troubled release. Before the film opened, Kwan Hoi-san objected to a nude scene showing his buttocks, which he said had been filmed without his knowledge, and asked Josephine Siao to cut it; she insisted on keeping it, and Kwan sent a lawyer's letter alleging damage to his reputation. After a secret midnight preview on 3 May 1980, Siao tried repeatedly to settle privately, but in the end the scene was cut. After the general release, Kwan learned of the cut and the two reconciled in public at a charity basketball event on 18 May 1980.¹¹

Restoration history. The film print was kept in safe storage, and extensive damage, including serious scratches and tears, was only discovered in 2001 when a new copy was needed for a festival entry. Siao contacted the cinematographer Tony Hope, who introduced a restoration company, and the Los Angeles firm Triage Motion Picture Services, which specializes in restoring Hollywood classics, managed to salvage the dilapidated negatives.⁶ A further restoration based on the 35 mm original negative and track held by the Hong Kong Film Archive was later carried out by Cineric Portugal for related Hui titles in the Archive's restoration program.¹² A 4K digitally restored version of The Spooky Bunch received its world premiere as the opening film of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department's "Fantasies in Reality: A Cinematic Journey" program at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, with Josephine Siao attending; the restoration aimed to recreate the audiovisual quality of the original release, much of whose story is set at night.⁷^•¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Comedy horror films › 20th-century comedy horror films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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