Officer Ching (Yau), who works for the police complaints division, is investigating Nam (Yen) to decide if he is mentally fit to carry out his police duties, but she is asked to team-up with Nam instead, to help investigate a serial killer case.

This murderer is not just some typical killer, however. He is called Judas (played in a full-on fashion by Francis Ng), he’s an envoy of Satan and he’s trying to track down the Devil’s Daughter, who he claims is a woman born at 6am on 6th June, 1969. To test if a woman is, indeed, the devil’s offspring, Judas ties his female victims to a cross and surgically removes their hearts: if one of them doesn’t die after this procedure she will be proven to be the true one. Though most of what happens is merely suggested, we do see Judas take a bite out of his latest victim’s removed heart.

Writer Wong Jing mixes too many comedy elements into the story, mainly centred around inept cop Ka-Ming (Chi-Wah), who is cowardly, terrible at surveillance work and a pathetic womaniser. Wong also inserts some throwaway dialogue about the impending Chinese takeover of Hong Kong into the movie, though this isn’t really gone into. He does put a certain amount of thought into how Judas locates his victims, revealing that Judas compels a woman working at a credit card company to divulge the details of all female customers born on 6th June, 1969, but, generally, Wong fails to keep the plot coherent and focused.

With Ching starting to realise that she might actually be the daughter of Satan (she can compel people to hurt themselves by saying “go to hell”) and Judas continuing to madly claim that he’s doing the devil’s bidding, you expect the movie to kick up a gear and become more horror-oriented, but SATAN RETURNS, also known as SHAOLIN VS THE DEVIL’S OMEN, remains unsure whether it’s a comedic police procedural, an action film or a supernatural story.

Ultimately, though director Lam Wai-Lun handles the occasional blue-lit set piece with a certain amount of verve, the film fails to be tense, funny, scary or properly exciting.

It doesn’t help that Donnie Yen, playing a hardboiled cop who tends to punch first and ask questions later, is underutilised as Nam. He just should have been featured in the movie more, rather than the useless and irritating Ka-Ming. Though it is a case of too little, too late, the finale does treat us to the spectacle of Nam first brandishing a chainsaw, to cut down some reanimated cop-corpses, and then using a nail gun to pin Judas to a toppled-over cross… before the villain is immolated with a Molotov cocktail!