JANUARY 18 — Asian comedies are often an acquired taste, with our penchant for slapstick and somewhat pedantic sense of humour not particularly able to travel well within the international film scene.
To this day, even a legend like Stephen Chow remains an enigma to most other parts of the world, especially Westerners, who are usually confounded by the very Cantonese humour in his films’ dialogue, not to mention the slapstick antics in his films that some Westerners would even call dumb.
Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer are the outliers here, as even a simple dip into his older films like Love On Delivery or The God of Cookery will leave Western audiences confused.
And let’s not even get started on the bafflement that most Westerners will feel when trying to appreciate the humour of even more localised Asian comedy legends like Karl Maka, Sam Hui, P. Ramlee and Benyamin Sueb.
Even “Beat” Takeshi Kitano is more known in the West for the arthouse-oriented films he directed like Hana-bi and Sonatine rather than his side-splitting comedy game show Istana Takeshi aka Takeshi’s Castle.
This probably explains why a lot of Asian comedy hits have remained hits only in Asia.
Hong Kong, Chinese, Korean and Thai comedies have no problem converting their status as homegrown hits into regional or Asian hits as well, because not only are we Asians pretty much used to watching mainstream entertainment in other languages with subtitles since we’re young, but we’re also well attuned to that very particularly Asian sense of humour.
With January being a typically slow month when it comes to new releases in local cinemas, those who long for a fun night out at a local cinema have thankfully been gifted with a new Thai horror-comedy from the always dependable Thai film studio GDH, which has been home to plenty of regional hits like Bad Genius, How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, Pee Mak and The Con-Heartist.
That new movie is called 404 Run Run, the debut feature film from director Pichaya Jarusboonpracha, which stars popular actor Ter Chantavit, a face I’m sure many are familiar with from films like ATM: Er Rak Error, One Day and The Con-Heartist.
Chantavit plays Nakrob, a young real estate swindler whose modus operandi is to pick up run-down homes cheaply, masquerade them as something much better than they really are, then sell them to victims for an easy profit.
But it’s a small con game, so naturally the profits are pretty small, which becomes a problem when his long-time girlfriend is starting to expect to get married soon.
Things come to a head, and in order to make even larger profits, Nakrob and his merry gang of contractors decide to go big.
They come across an abandoned hotel in what looks like a remote tourist town, which he thinks will make a nice luxury/boutique hotel once refurbished, and can be sold for a very handsome profit.
This is where things are not as easy as it seems because it turns out that the hotel is haunted by the ghost of its original owner, Lalita.
That is basically the whole gist of the film, with Nakrob and the gang spending most of the second act trying to get rid of the ghost of Lalita, hiring all sorts of exorcists from all sorts of religious and cultural denominations to do the job.
It’s a very Asian second act, with the effectiveness of the humour depending on your comedy preference.
As someone who laughs at everything from the dumbest to the most sophisticated of jokes — because for me, there’s no such thing as “dumb funny” or “smart funny”, if it’s funny then it’s already done its job, which is to make you laugh — quite a lot of the jokes in 404 Run Run did make me laugh, and not that many of them failed to land, so it’s a pretty good batting average.
In fact, this movie reminded me so much of the comedy hits of the late great Mamat Khalid, where a lot of the humour comes from the mannerisms of the very well defined/formulated side characters, and there’s a pair of characters here played by a real-life father and son pairing that never fails to make me chuckle every time I see them react to something on screen.
But, this won’t be a GDH movie if there’s nothing else other than the jokes being sold here, and so it proved to be the case once we get to the film’s third act, which is where the payoff comes with regards to the relationship between Nakrob and his fiancée, precipitated by the eventual reveal of the reasons why Lalita became a ghost and has chosen to stay at the hotel despite Nakrob’s (and the previous buyers) best efforts to get rid of her.
As with most decently constructed horror films, there’s always a touching and painful trauma behind a ghost’s existence, and 404 Run Run’s sudden, but not entirely unexpected, bid at emotional depth is a welcome one, making it an entirely enjoyable mainstream horror-comedy, with all the required elements placed just enough and at all the right places to make this one a fun night out at the movies, especially for us Asians.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
