‘Oh My God!’ is Right
This movie is exhausting on every level.
Oh My Ghost! Oh My God!
Director: Soda Voyu • Writer: Soda Voyu
Starring: Soda Voyu, Esther Huang, Naomi Watanabe, Jasper Liu, Sakinu
Taiwan • 1hr 29mins
Opens Hong Kong October 1 • IIB
Grade: D
Here are a few phrases that go with “Oh my god!”: Oh my god, who wrote this? Oh my god, what were they smoking? Oh my god, why does this look so cheap. Oh my god, this is 90 minutes of my life gone forever. Oh my god, what is happening? So why bother mincing fuckin’ words? Oh My Ghost! Oh My God! | 怎麼可能我家的祖先是你家的鬼 has rocketed onto the list of worst films of the year. An alleged horror-comedy, it’s not scary. it’s not funny, and if it’s supposed to be some kind of break-out for co-star Naomi Watanabe, the self-described “Japanese Beyoncé” it’s not that either. And she’s not. She’s more like a slightly less grating Rebel Wilson. That’s never good.
Actor Soda Voyu (who probably peaked as an actor in Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale) makes his directorial debut reprising the character he played in 2018’s Hidden Treasures in the Mountain, Chen Wan-de, in Oh My Ghost! Oh My God! This time around, he escorts a Japanese pop star, Juliet (superstar Watanabe), to her mother’s birthplace (evidenty she was squeezed out in the bushes) in the mountains outside his small indigenous Taiwanese village. Shamanism runs in Wan-de’s family – though he’s shitty at it – and by the pricking of his thumbs he’s sure the mountain is dangerous with ancestral spirits. So he goes with Juliet, her childhood friend and his main squeeze Xin-lan (Esther Huang Jing-yi, GAGA, Sunshine Women’s Choir), Juliet’s micro-manager Xiao-luo (Jasper Liu Yi-hao, Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo), and for random reasons Zumai (Sakinu), The Gay Friend that’s a pre-requisite for these kinds of antic-based horror-comedies.
Hoping they get lost in the woods forever
Ghost/God feels like a cheap, slapped together tax write-off that makes no sense on a storytelling level, has little internal logic to get it off the hook and trades in retrograde jokes about sex and sexuality (and I use that term very, very loosely) that need to die a gruesome death. Xiao-luo is supposed to be some kind of catch, but he spends the bulk of his screen time being an asshole to Zumai, who has decided he needs to wear a silvery horse head in the woods. Because gay. Fine, whatever. But when it gets on his nerves Xiao-luo quite cruelly tosses it in the bush, which visibly hurts Zumai, paper thin though the character may be. Yeah, he’s a bit extra but it’s a mean moment that leaves a bad taste – especially after, what? 45 minutes of Xiao-luo verbally belittling Zumai when he’s not ignoring him. But I guess that’s to be expected from a movie where Juliet’s decision to take advantage of Xioa-luo when he was hammered and passed out is played for laughs. Voyu’s dumb script excuses her behaviour because woah! Xiao-luo likes her too! Sorry, but that’s straight up sexual assault in any jurisdiction, and jokes like that keep lawsuits like the new one against the so-called Cornell Seven coming. Enough.
Beyond his penchant for being draconian and irresponsible, it’s clear Voyu has only the flimsiest of grasps on narrative structure, jumping back and forth in time, and then back and forth within that back and forth, a device that takes a crazy level of skil. He probably has no grasp on space either, but it’s hard to tell because the majority of the action takes place in an non-descript forest, making it nigh impossible to see if Voyu and his “DOP” Ahoj Chao – who shot the histrionic Organ Child – bothered to move the camera outside an identical and fixed 10 square metres. My money’s on: Nope.
Naturally Juliet’s trek out to find her mother’s roots is just the conceit Voyu concocts to get the real story about Wan-de and Xin-lan’s complicated relationship, and Wan-de’s own unshakable belief that he killed his shaman grandmother (Vivian Hsu Ruo-xuan) when he was but a child. But if Oh My Ghost! Oh My God! had anything on its mind aobut the weight of secrets, regret and guilt, it hid them among the muddy images that stand in for atmospheric fog, felonious editing and bargain bin ghost effects. Where they are not hidden is among jokes. There are no jokes. The demonic possessions are laughable, as are Wan-de’s garbage exorcisms. There are no stakes, no jump scares, and absolutely no reason to spend time with these people. Huang has been better, just not in that gawdawful prison movie, and no doubt Watanabe’s massive popularity was earned elsewhere. Somehow. I’m told she’s a laff riot. Here she’s just shrill and forced. Better luck next time.