A cliché of Category 3 Style ultra gore movies, in the image of ‘Untold Story’ series or ‘Human Pork Chop’, which fails to deliver on all levels, and is beyond disappointing.

Michael Wong, surprising, stars in this poor excuse for a movie, as the hard boiled righteous cop investigating the disappearance of a devoted wife ‘Maggie’ (played by Cherry Chan). His investigation leads to the arrest of five individuals, including Rocky (played Hugo Ng), his wife Pat (played by Angela Tong) and the psychopathic Joe (Gabriel Harrison). Basically the police raid an apartment complex in Kowloon and make the horrid discovery of a human skull inside a ‘Hello Kitty Doll’. They round the five suspects and begin their rough and decisive interrogation. Gradually in stage-by-stage flashback style of description (as in the ‘Untold Story 3’) they learn the gruesome truth. The skull belonged to Maggie, a local mother forced into prostitution in a brothel after being thrown out by her uncaring husband. Maggie inadvertently makes a fatal error of crossing the gang that run the brothel and this leads into her disappearance as well as her slow painful death. Simply, Maggie stole some money from Rocky and being unable to pay him back, was imprisoned, publicly humiliated, tortured and killed before ending up being cooked in a soup.

In a sense, this is the direct copy of ‘Untold Story 3’, where every suspect is given the chance of giving his personal opinion of what ensued in the form of flashbacks. Again the same mistake is made here, where little character emphasis is given on the suspects, with the sound reason of murdering someone so violently. Fortunately, not all is lost. Maggie gets most of the screen time, which allows her to explain her situation to the viewer and her unfortunate turn of bad luck, which ends her up as an addition to a home cooked soup. Most of the time the viewer will feel sorry for Maggie and sympathize with her former path of lifestyle, although at times these are so badly done they turn out to be vaguely insulting. Apparently, this movie (as well as ‘Human Pork Chop’, which was released at almost the exact same time) was inspired by a horrific local murder case, with the same basic plot as well as events, scene and structure.

Overall fans of Michael Wong, will be severely depressed after watching this movie, since he only gets about 10 minutes of screen time (fortunately not getting enough to time to execute his half-English / half-Cantonese dialect) and at best is eye-candy for the movie. The atmosphere of the environment the movie is set in is also depressing, with continuous night-life references and no-mans land shenanigans that simply do not help the movie at all. Also there is a somewhat explicit scene with a naked woman performing an over-the-top lap dance for Psycho Maniac Joe (whom you could probably point out is main instigator to Maggie’s Death); this was unnecessary in any case and only cheapened the general effect of the movie. It’s a poorly developed and boring mess that aims for both titillation and horror, but fails on all counts. Not even fans of blood infected Category 3 movies should bother with this one.

Overall Rating: 4.2/10