Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars (1985)

Director: Sammo Hung
Writer: Barry Wong, based on a story by Lo Kin, Barry Wong, and Roy Sze-To
Stars: Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao

Index: The First Thirty.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars may not be quite as varied as The Owl vs. Bumbo but it’s far more schizophenic. In fact, it feels like two different features were spliced together into a new one featuring a notable all-star cast.

Half of it is an action movie and this half is fantastic stuff, even if the story behind it isn’t particularly clear. Then again, it’s the third of seven films in the Lucky Stars series of movies and it’s been rather a long time since I last saw the first, Winners and Sinners. I remember that one a lot more fondly than I’ll remember this.

Sibelle Hu is Chief Inspector Woo Ba-wah of Special Unit CID and she’s after the MacGuffin of the movie, a letter sent by Ma in Thailand to Wang Yi-ching in Hong Kong right before he’s assassinated. That’s a memorable scene right there, because he’s parasailing at the time and the trio of assassins take to the sky too, merely armed with machine guns and bazookas. Most notably, one of them is Richard Norton firmly in extra-villainous mode.

So the location switches country and tone, with a colourful battle between Sammo Hung and half a dozen brightly attired female killers at a resort in the blazing Thai sun giving way to a gritty fight between cops and gangsters at night in a Pepsi warehouse on the Hong Kong docks. More names show up here, because the trio of heavily outnumbered cops are Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao and Andy Lau, all superstars.

This is also 1985 so during the heyday of the collaborations of Chan, Biao and Hung, three of the Seven Little Fortunes, who also starred in three far more consistent movies, Wheels on Meals, Winners and Sinners and Project A. I’d put the action scenes here after each of those but not by a huge distance. When this is an action movie, it’s excellent.

However, the other half of the film, maybe more, is a comedy and that’s substantially less successful. I fortuitously mentioned in The Owl vs. Bumbo that Hong Kong film comedy is a hit or miss affair for me. That was mostly a hit but this one is mostly a miss. It’s not only that the jokes tend to be unfunny, it’s that a majority of them are inappropriate.

The ones that are funny are often tied to the action scenes, most of them involving Sammo Hung, who also directed the picture. His fight with Richard Norton is characterised not only by clever cheap shots but with a running joke that neither of them can acknowledge pain. I laughed at that even as I thrilled to the moves. A little later, faced with an assassin wielding a pair of sai swords, he arms himself with a pair of tennis rackets. All this is good stuff.

What’s less good is pretty much everything with the Five Lucky Stars, unfortunately given that this is really about them rather than any of the people I’ve mentioned thus far, with the sole exception of Hung who’s arguably become their leader at this point.

I’m not sure what their character names are in Cantonese but translations vary, so they’ve had different ones across different movies and different releases. Here, Hung is Kidstuff not Teapot, Richard Ng is Sandy not Exhaust Pipe and Stanley Fung is Rawhide not Rookie. Eric Tsang joined in the second film, My Lucky Stars, as Roundhead, replacing John Shum as Curly—Shum returns here as a different character not one of the Lucky Stars—and Michael Miu joins this time as Pagoda, replacing Charlie Chin as Herb/American Ginseng/Vaseline. Kidstuff is pouty. The rest are insufferable.

The reason that Kidstuff is pouty is because he wants to woo Woo, but she doesn’t want to woo him in return. At least he has a focus. The rest just want women without any distinction at all. If a woman enters a scene, these puerile horndogs perk up and hone in like eight year olds whose only view of female parts is a porn magazine. And so this quickly gets creepy.

At the resort, while Woo rejects Kidstuff on the beach, the other four are digging a trench under a bevy of sunbathing beauties. After the guide tells those beauties that the Lucky Stars are rich men, they attempt to impress them at dinner, only to fail miserably with jokes awful enough to not even count as jokes.

Inappropriate but rather funny nonetheless is a running gag that kicks in when Sandy goes to a soothsayer. Of course, he wants a woman, so a ceremony is performed and he ends up as the owner of a voodoo doll that will allow him to make anyone he wants fall in love with him. He tries that on all four of the tour beauties at once, but they’re in on it and turn the tables.

Inappropriate and, well, nothing else really, is a sequence built around Rosamund Kwan as Yang Yi-chin. She’s the one who’s been getting letters from Ma in Thailand—remember him?—and she’s now a serious target while waiting for the latest, so Woo has her and her dumbass friend Wormgrass, the new character for John Shum, move in with the Five Lucky Stars, who promptly try everything they can on her with no success but plenty of cringe moments.

In this particular scene, they set a chair on fire outside her room so they can manufacture an escape in which they all strip off to make a rope out of their clothes. That fails, so they get her to soak herself because she’s clad in silk and that’s highly flammable. Roundhead faints at the sight of nipples under a wet nightgown, but then they have her lie underwater in the bath and breathe through a straw. Of course, she eventually realises that none of them left to get help, they’re just standing there ogling. This can’t have felt right in 1985 and it doesn’t remotely feel right in 2024.

If you’re wondering, after all this, when I’m going to tell you about Michelle Yeoh’s part in the movie, it’s because she only gets one brief scene that doesn’t arrive for over an hour. The Five Lucky Stars visit a theatre with Yang and Wormgrass, who are actors, for a practice run at a scene from Romeo and Juliet, and two take a side trip into a judo class.

Yeoh’s character doesn’t get a name but she leads that class, meaning that she gets to hurl Richard Ng around memorably before Sammo Hung hurls her around in a similar manner in return. It’s a decent scene, one that combines both the action and comedy halves of the film capably, but it’s over too soon and we’re back to cheap Three Stooges gags and juvenile lust.

To be fair, a lot of the cultural humour may be lost in translation, because the subtitles on my DVD are certainly problematic. It doesn’t help that the plot is also confusing and full of holes, so this becomes one to watch almost exclusively for its action scenes.