Bodyshop

(Scud, Hong Kong, 2022)

Ghosts just want to have fun! At least, if they are as horny as the queer phantom (Adonis He) who merrily traverses the globe and stalks his past lovers in Bodyshop.

This was announced as one of the final films by Scud (Danny Cheng Wan-Cheung), an artist of the Hong Kong underground who has provoked and entertained diverse audiences across ten features.

Clips from a previous work, Adonis (2017), are intercut here in order to provide a blurring between documentary and fiction, the actors and their roles.

Scud is interested in the overlap between traditional and modern, spiritual and technological ways. He offers his ghost characters as phenomenal reality, but also as a potent metaphor for the lingering effects of sexual and political trauma.

The style of Bodyshop is, on the one hand, defiantly offhand, and its narrative moves are proudly trashy. On the other hand, the film exhibits the slickness of a TV commercial, thanks to digital cameras and a syrupy soundtrack.

With this disconcerting combination, Scud dares us to think the unthinkable. As a wacky montage of uninhibited sex, touristic montages, musical interludes and social problems (including cannibalism), Bodyshop conjures a type of cinema that intermingles Pier Paolo Pasolini, John Waters, Gregg Araki and LGBTQ erotica.

© Adrian Martin 6 November 2022