Blue Jean Monster (1991)

Shing Fui-On plays a cop who gets caught up in a bank robbery and is killed. Then a freak accident involving lightning and a cat brings him back to life as a revenant... who is nevertheless still a decent cop who cares deeply for his very pregnant wife. Gloria Yip plays a witness who runs off with the money from the robbery.

This is one of those films I've had for about 20 years and never got around to watching. I had it down as a CAT III nasty for most of that time, but when Eureka released it on bluray people started saying it was actually more of a comedy, and so it is. It's not unusual for Hong Kong to mash together the horror and comedy genres - in fact straight horror is probably rarer. This isn't a particularly good example of it though, the two aspects don't particularly mesh together or feed into each other... also it's neither particularly scary nor funny.

It is fun to see Shing Fui-On in a leading role though - possibly the only opportunity to do so, in fact. It's not exactly a typical "good guy" role though, since he is an undead revenant for most of the film. A sweet undead revenant though (unless you're one of the bad guys, who don't really get to see that side of him).

It's also fun to see Jun Kunimura as the chief villain. I wonder how he ended up playing bad guys in this and Hard Boiled, neither of which present him as a Japanese character. I guess the HK industry was booming whilst Japan's was not, and his distinctive features crossed borders easily enough.