Pseudo-gonzo horror-comedy isn't quite up to the bar set by last year's truly gonzo BIO- ZOMBIE, but does earn at least a couple of stripes for thinking outside the box in which Hong Kong genre outings have of late become increasingly confined. One the eve of its closure—indeed, on the eve of the millennium—the motley staff of an alluringly tattered old picture palace, tellingly located at 666 King's Road, must face off with a collection of delightfully, deliberately rinky-dink monsters unleashed by Satan (Francis Ng), who's grown tired of poor films and inattentive theatre owners and decides to put this little microcosm of oddballs to the test! Leading the charge, after dishy girlfriend Sherming Yiu is unpleasantly dispatched by the demon, is sheepish projectionist Simon Loui, jittery, goggle-eyed ticket vendor Wayne Lai (in a terrific performance) and sassy cop Pauline Suen. Meanwhile, chasing a turd monster (!) down the toilets in the upstairs washrooms are stoned rave punks Benny Chan, Angela Tong and Pinky Cheung. While allusions are frequently and rather obviously drawn to Lamberto Bava's DEMONS (1985) because of the locale and the trio of punks, the film's primary mainspring is very likely Peter Jackson's DEAD ALIVE (aka BRAINDEAD, 1992), from the emphatically saccharine romance between Simon and Sherming, to the squishy, rubbery, puppet-y quality of the shoestring special effects, to the blatant editing cheats that prolong some setpieces a bit beyond their sell-by date. To be sure, it's no DEAD ALIVE, but its makers have their hearts in the right place, and if their low-fi ingenuity won't stand up to careful appraisal, it isn't really meant to anyway: it's meant to wink at the audience along with the cast and crew, who clearly enjoyed being given free run of a theatre for a few days to craft something just a little bit...different.
