Ever blind-watched a movie just because you recognized its supporting cast? Have you ever thought to yourself, “Hey, I know this person from the secondary roles they’ve played in internationally prominent films!” and used that as justification to check out the random, obscure titles they spend most of their timing slumming it in? If so, then Where Is Mama’s Boy? may be like catnip to you, though describing this thing merely as “obscure” is a negligent understatement. Like Leon Trabuco’s cursed stash of gold, Steven Cheng’s tragic comic misfire is a treasure that’s probably best kept hidden away from the eyes of man, but mere mention of the film’s star—American Idol punch line William Hung—pretty much guarantees immediate masochistic interest from any movie geek within earshot.
That’s right. Some sick bastard made a movie and decided to cast William Hung in the lead role, either unaware of Mr. Hung’s reputation as the subject of a million mean-spirited memes or possessed by a drive to capitalize on his notoriety. Cheng doesn’t have a particularly impressive résumé to call his own; you probably can’t name a single film he’s directed off-hand without consulting IMDB or Wikipedia, which isn’t a challenge or an insult so much as a simple statement of fact. Cheng is barely even a footnote in his nation’s movie industry. So if you’re moved to ask “Why Hung?”, the immediate, obvious response must be “Why not?” Hung isn’t funny, or charismatic, or compelling, or even talented, but of course laughing at his obliviousness to his own paucity of talent is sort of the point.
So Where is Mama’s Boy? comes from a place of potentially cruel intentions before the first scene plays. Maybe you’re too upright to chuckle at the sight of Hung making an ass of himself, or in this case of Cheng making an ass out of Hung. If so, you’re missing out. Where is Mama’s Boy? isn’t exactly William Hung: The Movie, for one thing. He features prominently in the film, sure, but he’s just one member of its ensemble cast, and arguably he is its least confounding element. It makes a twisted sort of sense that a rube like Hung might eagerly sign onto projects of this caliber, but seeing his veteran co-stars gambol about on screen like stooges feels akin to losing one’s sanity.
If you’ve ever seen Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle, then you’ll immediately recognize Tin Kai-man, Lam Chi-chung, Danny Chan and Wong Yat-fei. They collectively appeared in the former film as a ragtag band of erstwhile martial arts students, cajoled by Chow into pursuing soccer glory. Sans Wong, they each had significant roles in the latter, mostly playing villains. (Tin has himself shown up in other Chow joints like The God of Cookery and King of Comedy.) Put simply, they’ve been in better movies with better filmmakers at the helm, which suggests that on some level they should be shrewd enough to avoid movies such as Where is Mama’s Boy? like the plague. And yet here they are, serving at Cheng’s beck and call.
Maybe they owed Cheng a favor. Maybe he had embarrassing photos of them. Maybe they thought that Where is Mama’s Boy? sounded good on paper, or maybe they really needed the work. In a weird way, it’s sort of comforting having them around, even in such a humiliating capacity. At the same time, the fact that they deigned to lend their comic skills to Cheng’s cause is sort of heartbreaking.
Even without the presence of these actors, and even without Hung’s stunt casting, Where is Mama’s Boy? would be a baffling, relentlessly weird film. The plot revolves around Aunt Huan (Nancy Sit, who, like her male supporting cast members, also has less embarrassing film credits to her name), matron of the Music Paradise, a massage-and-song entertainment parlor where patrons are warned to keep their hands the hell to themselves or face the wrath of its lovely but deadly sirens. Huan’s grope-happy customers are the least of her woes; her sister (played by Tien Niu) has beef with Huan, a beef that runs so deep she hires a trio of bumbling wannabe roughs (our Shaolin Soccer expats) to make trouble at Music Paradise.
But what weighs heaviest on Huan is her search for her long-lost son, a quest she pursues when she’s not busy serving her customers and leading her girls in crummy song-and-dance numbers on a stage that’s so garishly bedecked it’d make Liberace puke, and so seasoned with glitter it’d make Edward Cullen jealous.
Enter the singing hawker Ma Chongyang (Hung), self-monikered as Siu Bang, which roughly translates to “little cake” (and which to the ears sounds an awful lot like “she bangs,” which, well, you can figure it out from there). Where is Mama’s Boy?’s cinematic grammar paints him as the most likely candidate to be revealed as Huan’s son. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t. On meeting him, Huan is so charmed by his unfailing kindness that she takes a shine to him immediately, which is precisely where Hung’s celebrity casting fails the movie on every level imaginable. He’s such a horrific singer that we cannot for a second buy into the idea that market crowds might actually enamored of his vocals. Cheng fashions the movie after wuxia period fare, dramas that are action-oriented and character-driven, and the joke of Hung’s presence is totally on him: we’re more likely to give a pass to Where is Mama’s Boy?’s utter disregard for physics than we are to accept Hung as the kind of crooner capable of enchanting an audience.
Once Huan meets Siu Bang, all of Cheng’s disparate elements slowly begin metastasizing into a story. Chan, Lam and Tin engage in a boneheaded campaign to bring Music Paradise to its knees. Each attempt is invariably foiled by Huan, who literally turns into a kung-fu badass during rainstorms, which makes about as much sense as anything else in the movie. (And that’s literally literally.) Apparently, the loss of her boy struck her with an illness that causes her “fighting techniques to become superb” when she hears the sound of thunder, which comes in handy more often than not.
The downside of her ailment is that she loses her senses and forgets who she is. We can hardly blame her—during these sequences, Huan takes on the guise of popular characters from countless, superior movies, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Kill Bill.
Which, of course, necessitates that Lam don a referential costume from the same film, though his winds up be unflattering by comparison.
Hey, every Beatrix Kiddo needs a Gogo Yubari, right?
Even in a movie, this kind of joke might not work. In the interest of fairness, it’s worth pointing out that most of Lam’s dedicated punchlines in Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle hinge on his body type to at least a minor degree. The difference is that when Chow wrote gags about, say, Small Brother’s weight gain, he wrote them into a character arc that’s surprisingly empowered. Lam’s character in Where is Mama’s Boy? is treated more or less as a dumb fat guy. Where his compatriots fear more conventional forms of torture—like, say, face branding—he’s afraid of being tormented by food that’s kept just out of his reach.
Granted, the bird of his imagined torment sure does look delicious. I would probably be in hell if someone taunted me with the denied promise of a perfectly crispy fowl, too. But the joke doesn’t really land, but, fair warning, you’ll probably laugh at the scene in spite of yourself, if only because it’s the most outlandish and unnecessary wisecrack imaginable. (And because Lam is a pretty funny guy, even when he’s wading through material this astronomically bad.)
But the moronic threesome’s activities have attracted the attention of three actual big bads, who they happen to resemble in passing, which spells trouble for Music Paradise. The crux of all of this, though, is the truth of Huan’s motherhood. Is Siu Bang really her son? This is the sort of question you’d expect to have answered in the last act, but Cheng decides to just get it over and done with less than forty minutes in. It’s easy enough for Huan to figure it out, after all—her kid has an identifying mole on his foot, something she habitually checks for throughout the picture. You kind of have to admire her determination. She’s so resolved in her quest to find her son that she’ll take a gander at a stranger’s foot in the middle of a wirework battle.
The painful truth is that Siu Bang lacks the mark on his sole, and therefore can’t be Huan’s son. He’s just a congenial dolt, much like Hung himself. Woe is Huan. But Siu Bang is such a nice dude that he pretends to be her son for a little while. If the movie wasn’t so damn stupid, this sort of development might have been sweet.
For what it’s worth, we do discover who Huan’s child is, and if you bother to watch the film after having read this far (respect), you’ll probably be able to figure it out pretty easily. Is it strange, though, that the entire plot might have been more successful if Siu Bang was the boy of the title? The climactic discovery doesn’t come out of nowhere, but it’s associated with a fringe character we don’t get to know particularly well throughout the movie. Hung might not be good here (or anywhere, really), but the midway epiphany renders the remainder of the story even more unsatisfying than it might have otherwise.
Which is to say that it still wouldn’t have been any good. Look, if Where is Mama’s Boy can be described in a single word, that word is “unabashed.” This is a film that completely, shamelessly abandons all anchors to reason, to respect for craft, to narrative cogency, to visual coherence, and even to good taste in favor of doing pretty much whatever the hell it wants for about an hour and a half. That laundry list of wants also happens to be pretty long, and includes a climactic shot involving a veritable tempest of bird shit.
The turd storm apparently drives Huan’s evil sister crazy—crazy for her husband, anyway. It’s not the worst punishment ever to befall a wicked movie villainess, though Tien probably never thought for a second that her career would eventually lead her to a sound stage where she would have to dramatize the ignominy of being doused in dookie.
Hey, she comes out ahead compared to the aforementioned big bads, who frankly don’t really have a purpose here other than to be twisted into human pretzels while Nancy Sit cackles at them in the background.
And yes, that’s Huan dressed as Gandalf the White in the background.
Boston-based critic Andy Crump has been writing about film for the web since 2009, and has been scribbling for Paste Magazine since 2013. He also contributes to Screen Rant, Movie Mezzanine, and Badass Digest. You can follow him on Twitter. Currently he has given up on shaving.