Minor horror-comedy from director Wilson Yip, who went to to direct actual good movies. 01:00 AM is a typical Hong Kong horror comedy, which means there are three stories related by a single thread. In this case, they all take place at 1:00 am, and involve ghosts of some sort. Periodically, people get scared and a variety of mild hijinks occur. Sometimes, there really isn't much to get scared about, and it's merely the characters reacting to imagined stimuli. In some ways, the events of this film are not dissimilar to those at a junior high school slumber party.

In story one, nurse Veronica Yip must safeguard a comatose popstar (Anthony Wong Yiu-Ming), but she starts seeing him and some strange girl wandering around at 1:00 a.m. every evening. Story two involves Anita Yuen, a psychology student who sets out to interview a ghost. Armed with her trusty tape recorder Ka-Ming (the name of Leslie Cheung's character in He's a Woman, She's a Man), she proceeds to the site of a rumored ghost girl who wears her hair in a queue. Unfortunately, Yuen's car breaks down, whereupon she spends the next twenty minutes scaring herself silly. Story three is the one with a logical payoff, and features Tsui Kam-Kong and Jordan Chan as buddy traffic cops with a malfunctioning radar camera. What they discover is that some old lady appears in the pictures. Not surprisingly, the two freak out and worry themselves silly.

Another horror-comedy in an industry overrun with them, this ultra-mild spine-tingler is neither scary nor overtly funny. The threat of death or physical maiming is minimal; people may get scared but there's very little actual dread, and there's never the sense that somebody's going to get majorly screwed over by the roving spirits. Without any actual suspense, any and all interest must be sustained by the stars' personal charisma and the hope that whatever onscreen worrying they're doing will actually be interesting. The film partially succeeds, but with very little character or tension, the exercise just hangs limply, like a wet rag. Watching 01:00 AM is like noticing that one of your shoes is missing a shoelace. Sure, you wonder where your shoelace went, but is that enough to get you all freaked out? Most likely not. And if it does freak you out, then I suggest counseling. (Kozo 2003)