Wai dor lei ah yat ho

"Dream Home" has been a title I've been waiting to watch since it's release. Most reviews I had read pinned it as a "darkly hilarious" satirical horror film with high levels of style and gore. The style and gore are there alright, but as far as humor is concerned, I was a little let down. The film does have it's quirks and witty lines, not to mention a few "so-bad-it's-good" effects, but it didn't quite live up to the reputation that I had known it for. That being said, the film is shot beautifully and uses a wide variety of creative shots and transitions. It plays with the time-line well and develops Cheng's character at a very nice pace. Many of the deaths are drawn out and disturbing, which would make this a difficult film to watch if the effects were done with more care. Some over-the-top gore may be humorous to some, but in using characters that the audience can relate to, it is more easily said to be horrific. All in all, though it fell a little short of the hype I've been hearing, "Dream Home" is a must for any Chinese or Asian horror fans!

This film is a fresh, entertaining, stylish and beautifully staged gore fest. The bloody mainframe of the film's structure is accompanied by an interesting side-story that serves to justify all the bloodshed and also to provide some social commentary, but all this is secondary to the rivers of blood. And God saw it was good.

Ho-Cheung Pang's "Dream Home" proves that well-made genre pictures satisfy a basic human need: they can focus our attention, for a while, to a sequence of events that entertains because we know, roughly speaking, what to expect, what kind of experiences are in store for us. Well, Dream House is an honest splatter. Victims are lined up to be slaughtered in the most inventive ways for our viewing pleasure. But the film also has elements of human drama, and these two aspects - gore and drama - play each other in and out very well. The overall result is an impeccably paced, brutal but surprisingly uplifting story, beautifully shot against the backdrop of Hong Kong's endless arrays of high-rises and apartment blocks.

The main character, played by an air of focused innocence by Josie Ho, has been saving up to buy an apartment with a nice seaside view, and she is working very hard to realize her dreams. Then things don't go exactly as planned. Lots of drama ensues. People die. Blood is spilled.

There is nothing much more to the plot than a general arch to justify the gore, but it all works out very well, and doesn't feel dragged out or phony or needlessly second-rate; in fact, the acting in this film is actually quite good for the most part, with the exception of the actress who plays the main heroine: she is VERY good. In addition to the action, there is some merit to the drama itself. It carries some weight, or, at any rate, enough to make the film seem interesting all the while. None of the social commentary is especially realistic or intelligent, but the splatter format can function as a kind of primal scream therapy, and thus bring some aspects of our repressed social anxieties to the bloody daylight.

Finally, one aspect of the film deserves special attention: the cinematography, editing and directing. The shots are beautiful, symmetrical, rich in detail. Whether inside or outside, the camera captures some beautiful scenes (and, let us not kid ourselves here, some beautiful people). Each frame could almost work as a photograph; each outdoors vignette of Hong Kong cityscape is hauntingly beautiful; each spewing of blood is swiftly and surgically captured on the screen.

The script is tight and the acting is sufficient. The editing is inventive and the staging rich in detail. Even the drama succeeds in never becoming boring and no single scene, or theme, overstays its welcome. The director-writer Pang has given us a good splatter film which is also a good film even outside its (criminally under-appreciated and depreciated) genre. I was pleasantly surprised by the craft involved. Did I mention it's also funny? Just wait for the moment when the... oh, never mind, just go see this bloody film already.

Snap judgment: Rivers of blood make for bloody good entertainment.

I sort of see Dream Home as a thinking man's slasher. What I mean by that is that it's a slasher film with a point, as it contains all the outlandishly kills from famous slashers like Friday the 13th (it probably goes further actually) but all the excessive blood and violence has a point, and a very valid point about the current house market in Hong Kong. Dream Home is also supposedly based on true events, I don't know how many of the events are true but I'm guessing not that many! Still, it illustrates the point of the film further as the age old issue of money has seriously taken its toll!

Dream Home has an interesting structure which I don't know if it entirely worked. You see it cross cuts from her current murder spree to her past, including early childhood, right up to the events that led her to do it. In its favour it did add a nice layer of mystery to the film, and also helped to balance out the drama-heavy scenes with the horror-heavy scenes, allowing us to take a break from the last gruesome massacre and look forward to how it's all going to pan out! However, I can't help but wonder if the film would've been stronger having the events be shown in chronological order. It may have built the suspense and the final killing spree would've been doubly intense! It certainly worked for May, although the characters were much stronger in that than they are here. It's an interesting thought, but I'm satisfied with the unusual cross-cuts.

Now horror fans are not going to be disappointed with the horror-heavy scenes! Dream Home showcases some of the most inventive kills I've seen on screen for a long time. Some of them are also quite heavy to watch, by that I mean distressing, which makes us feel less empathy for the character, making her well rounded. However, I think there could've been more evidence of her snappy psychological state in the past as she doesn't appear violent until she suddenly snaps. It does seem a bit over the top, but I suppose we can forgive it. There's plenty of blood and not only that, some scenes were actually quite suspenseful and thrilling rather than just a simple slash and dash.

The drama-heavy scenes are also not as boring as I've labelled them. I found it really interesting to find out how she got so fixated on that apartment she wanted, and her journey getting her. They really help to flesh out the character further so we can feel for her and her motives (occasionally). However, I also think that a little background on her victims could've been nice as well, so we get to see them as humans too rather than just prey to feed off! The film is also beautifully shot and directed which I didn't expect. There's some lovely cinematography of the high-rise buildings which could also be metaphorical as it seems so out of her reach!

Dream Home is a highly successful slasher and one that I'd be happy to revisit again. It doesn't hold back and also brings up various themes which have a place in today's society. I really enjoyed its entertaining violence and strong character build-up. You do care what happens to her in the end and it also makes a refreshing change to have a slasher film from the killer's point of view. I'd definitely go and check this one out as it doesn't seem that a lot have!

I saw this for the first time recently n in my opinion the filmmakers shud have removed the pregnant woman's turmoil scene.

The story is bah Lai sheung n thru mixed chronological order, we see Lai-sheung as a child whose family and friends are evicted from their low-rent housing so that developers can build expensive flats but she vows to buy her mother and father a new apartment, specially an apartment with a view of the Victoria Harbour.

As an adult she is working in a bank, having a relationship with a married man, taking care of his ailing father n a young brother. Due to bad circumstances, Lai-sheung goes into a frenzy where she goes to the flats and attacks people who live and work there, killing them without any mercy.

This film has shades of Inside (2007). It is one of the best slasher of modern times n the effects r amazing. The film is very very violent with some very heavy stuff which made me squirm.

This is pretty awesome for what it is. Remember CATIII films from some twenty years ago? The most gruesome violence, a seamy social underbelly, usually a plot involving revenge and some terrible crime spree; bleak, nihilistic, amoral affairs of a world abandoned to the most deviant whims and sexual appetites. On at least the matter of violence, this one is a slick return to splatterfests of yore. There is no body part that isn't horribly mangled in some way. The pregnant woman isn't spared. Police don't save the day when they show up. There is no safe moral center to pivot around.

This part works, is senselessly brutal and exciting. But every now and then we veer off into extensive childhood flashbacks meant to contextualize and explain. Backstory is gradually pieced together from that direction that allows us to discern pattern in yawning madness, minutely calculated obsession. Every wild stabbing of the knife is gradually imbued with purpose.

The idea on the part of the filmmakers was probably that this was drama and human interest that would trouble how we handled violence from our end. The shift in tone would unsettle: here is a perfectly innocent young girl, and on the other end a raging psychopath.

This would grace the whole with some complexity, even respectability. The film would not be easy to dismiss but would recast aimless slaughter as greater social consequence. We learn for example that government and land proprietor thugs are ousting poor tenants from their shabby apartment blocks, in order to flatten them and build luxurious high-rise towers in their place. Prices artificially skyrocket. This is brought full circle in the end with the first news as of '08 of the coming global economic crisis. The problem is this is not handled in terribly interesting ways. It's shoe-horned at the end of a bloodbath for some weight but only drags the superficial pleasures down.

So we just learn stuff someone presumed we would need to know. The whole is tied into something someone presumed would be relevant to us all. It is but I'd rather get this part from a newspaper. A newspaper doesn't have excellent gore. So every minute spent away from cartoonish carnage and into hamfisted drama and social commentary is a minute lost for me.

Being from Hong Kong, the makers perhaps felt it was their part to address all this. Perhaps the ire is honest and comes from experience. But as far as a horror film goes, I'm surprised they allowed the lesson of A L'Interieur go wasted: brutality even more sharpened by complete awareness of the present moment.

Still, it's pretty awesome for what it is. It just means we'll have to concentrate on what was clearly poured into the most effort; the slick, ultraviolent slasher film.