The second half of my Joey Wong ghostly double-feature. This picks up Leslie’s adventures from the first film, even opening with a previously-on, but there’s no important continuity. Part one kicked off my Tsui Hark craze last October, and I’ve watched at least ten of his movies since then – he produced this while working on the troubled Swordsman. And this is really good, thanks in part to magician Jackie Cheung taking over the story. A pretty silly movie, it looks like it was made in a week, but by geniuses.

Wrongly-imprisoned Leslie escapes and lets people mistake him for his celebrity writer cellmate. He quickly antagonizes Jackie, meets the doppelganger of his late ghost-girl Joey and her little sister (Michelle Reis, hot alien of Wicked City), and the team fights various monsters trying to rescue her dad. They’re able to convince the elite swordsman Waisee Lee (star of The Big Heat) that dad (who played the evil tree in part one) isn’t a traitor, but when the swordsman explains this to the golden high monk (Wong Fei-hung’s dad) it doesn’t go over well, and the monk reveals himself as a massive demon. Fortunately the swordsman from part one is nearby (Wu Ma, also appropriately of Encounters of the Spooky Kind). He and Jackie get swallowed by the monster and explode it from within, Leslie and Joey run off together, and Jackie gets lost in the spirit world like Agent Cooper, but he’ll be in part three so I’m trying not to fret about it.

Temporarily bearded Leslie learns that life is unfair: