You don’t tend to see a lot of wacky comedy in film noir. The Marx Brothers never appeared in Double Indemnity and Humphrey Bogart didn’t wear a rotating bow tie in The Maltese Falcon. That’s why it’s surprising to see broad comedy in Zhang Yimou’s remake of the Coen Brothers’ film Blood Simple. What is also surprising is the decision to move the action from a modern Texas town to 19th century China, which is what happens when the director of The Curse of the Golden Flower decides that it’s time to do something really weird.

The remake is called A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, which makes it sound like the solution to a game of Clue (suggested title for a sequel: Colonel Mustard, in the Conservatory with the Flying Guillotine). Zhang Yimou doesn’t remake Blood Simple so much as send it to Bizarro World; the results are kind of a mess, but an utterly fascinating one.

See that wimpy guy wearing the lady’s underwear, bright pink pyjamas and a floppy sock hat? Yeah, that’s not the comic relief character: That’s the romantic lead. The comic relief character is the fat guy with the enormous buck teeth, whose head is shaved except for a little curl at the top which is tied off with a ribbon like a cartoon baby. Come to think of it, most of the characters are broad comic relief types, which works against the suspense quite a bit when they all start getting murdered. Imagine a creepy locked-room mystery populated entirely with the denizens of McDonaldland, in which we investigate the brutal slaying of Mayor McCheese.

In the original Blood Simple, the Coens took the bare minimum cast for a suspense thriller (a cheating wife, her lover and a jealous husband) and threw in a treacherous private detective (the unforgettable M. Emmet Walsh) as a wild-card character who figures that if he’s going to start killing people for money, he might as well go all the way. Here, that character is a stoic cop (Sun Honglei), and he only turns up after the rest of the cast has thoroughly chewed through the scenery with their crazy antics.

In the opening scene, a flamboyant Persian traveller sells a handgun — a rare, bordering on anachronistic item given the setting — to the disgruntled wife of a wealthy noodle shop owner. The wife (Yan Ni) makes the purchase on a whim, but is toying with the idea of plugging her no-good husband and running off with a ridiculously wimpy co-worker (Xiao Shen-Yang, he of the previously noted pink pyjamas). Several minutes of weird comedy and acrobatic noodle-twirling follow, before the cop learns about the wife’s infidelity and reports it to her husband (Ni Dahong); he then bribes the cop to kill the adulterers. After that, most of the famous set pieces from Blood Simple finally appear, but they now seem utterly bizarre, thanks to the period setting and intentionally silly tone.

There are times in A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop when the new setting works against the source material so much that you wonder why Zhang Yimou didn’t just leave the story in Texas. The husband keeps his wealth in a wall safe with a combination lock in the shape of an abacus. The hectic finale is re-created, only with swords and arrows piercing the walls instead of bullets. Then there’s the gun, of course, which shouldn’t even belong in this ancient setting. However, it still works quite nicely as both an exotic curio and a baffling yet threatening MacGuffin to keep the story going.

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is a lot like finding a hot dog banana split on a restaurant menu, ordering it on a dare and eating it in front of your cringing friends. It’s a completely unique experience that you’ll talk about for days, and while the combination of clashing ingredients doesn’t really work, the fact that such an item is palatable at all is a noteworthy surprise.