Day That Doesn't Exist (1995)

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This horror-comedy anthology from Hong Kong filmmakers Wellson Chin and Danny Ko casts Dayo Wong as the eccentric detective Charles Chan, who investigates two cases of the supernatural. The first story is a variant of the familiar tale "The Monkey's Paw" starring Sheila Chan in a rare… More This horror-comedy anthology from Hong Kong filmmakers Wellson Chin and Danny Ko casts Dayo Wong as the eccentric detective Charles Chan, who investigates two cases of the supernatural. The first story is a variant of the familiar tale "The Monkey's Paw" starring Sheila Chan in a rare serious role as a young woman named Poon Ka-sze whose beloved fiancé dies in a car crash while on business in China. A month later, he returns to her as a living corpse, with ghastly throat and chest wounds but love in his undead heart. Unfortunately, he starts to decay fairly rapidly, and requires infusions of amniotic fluid to preserve his decomposing flesh. Reminiscent of Brian Yuzna's poignant Return of the Living Dead 3, the story effectively mixes humor, pathos, and grue in equal measure. The second tale is even heavier on "splatterpunk"-style comic gore. It stars Bowie Lam as a poor truck driver named Li Man-kit, who dies in an accident, then awakens to find his soul trapped inside the body of Raymond Shiu (Anthony Wong), who had an accident in the same spot on the highway. Li can't go back to his old life, because his wife doesn't believe that Raymond is him, so he decides to take on Raymond's existence. This turns out to be a huge mistake, because although Raymond lived an upper-class lifestyle with a beautiful wife, Jessica (Eileen Tung), he and his wife had decidedly unusual tastes. When Li discovers that he is inhabiting the body of a cannibal, he has quite a task explaining his lack of interest in flesh-eating to the bloodthirsty Jessica. These two stories juggle their disparate elements nicely, and although neither is actually very frightening, they are both entertaining. Yuen King-tan co-stars, and joined Wong in the 1997 semi-sequel, 24 Hours Ghost Story. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi