Help!!!

Executive Producer: Catherine Chan
Producers: Johnnie To, Wai Ka Fai
Writers: Wai Ka Fai, Yau Nai Hoi, Ben Wong
Director of Photography: Cheng Siu Keung
Editors: Law Wing Cheong, T.L. Yun
Cast: Ekin Cheng, Jordan Chan, Cecilia Cheung, Hui Siu Hung, Lam Suet

Milky Way strikes again. Led by Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai (the brains behind THE MISSION), this production company—notorious for a classic spree of revisionist gangster flicks—recently muscled its way into fresh genre territory. The power move yielded immediate dividends last summer when two atypical Milky Way ventures commandeered the Hong Kong box office—the whimsical love story NEEDING YOU and the riskier hospital-drama satire HELP!!!

Irreverently crunching a season’s worth of emergency room crises and romantic entanglements into eighty-nine minutes that speed by at ambulance velocities, HELP!!! charts the progress of three doctors seeking to reform their hospital’s abysmal services. Between its demonization of a management which would rather downsize staff than purchase the most basic medical supplies and the constant barbs aimed at profit margins and patient neglect, this genre spoof rife with jokes both bedpan and deadpan elevates its game to a rare plateau: socialist entertainment with a healthy fun quotient and the revenue to prove it.

Kevin Sun