Serdar | Genji Press

Comedy’s hard enough, and mixing comedy with horror is even harder. Leave it to Tsui Hark, one of Hong Kong’s best directors for decades, to combine the two effectively and even enjoyably in We’re Going to Eat You. This was only his second feature film, but he crammed it with so much energy and insane invention that you’d never know. It manages the tough trick of being both funny and gory without falling down too far on either side.

If I had to guess, WGTEY is probably what happened after Hark saw a few late-Seventies Italian horror productions and decided he could either pay homage to them or go one better. He has in fact done them one better, partly because many of those productions were humorless and stodgy (not counting unintentional humor, mind you), and had only the barest germ of a plot to see them through. Eat, by contrast, is blackly funny from start to finish, has a plot that’s about twice as involved as it would need to be for a movie like this, and even manages to sneak in some sly social commentary as well.