it is late at night when sheung (josie ho) sneaks in to the apartment block, kills the night watchman, takes the cctv hard-drives and then heads up in the elevator. she heads to an apartment, where she breaks down the door and kills the maid by ramming a chisel through the side of her head, which inadvertently pops one of her eyeballs on to the floor, before she goes after the pregnant female occupant of the flat...

yep, the opening scene of 'dream home' is most certainly a bloody affair, which sets the tone for a large part of the film; i.e. the killing rampage of josie ho. between these sequences, are sandwiched the stories of the young sheung (vivian leung), growing up in a hong kong where developers are beginning to wield power, corruption is rife and yet the seed is planted in her mind, to own an apartment with a sea view. then we have the adult sheung, working two jobs, frantically saving, being the other woman to her childhood friend, siu to (eason chan), caring for her sick father (norman chu) and still dreaming of her dream home. is she really teetering on the edge of a descent into violence?

so, pang ho-cheung probably comes up with his most darkly comic offering to date: for some it will, quite simply, be too dark, too violent and too bloody. the cut-throat nature of the housing market and the behaviour of developers is explored and abstracted in (producer and star) josie ho's bit of the old ultraviolence, which might leave alex and his droogs staring on open mouthed.

still, it had me chuckling, both at the humour and levels of gore which hong kong hasn't really offered up, at this level, since 'the story of ricky', which ho sights as an influence on the production. the gore is of a pretty high standard, with only a couple of moments which don't look great in the execution and it's rare they fail to elicit a response.

all in all, i really enjoyed this but, for some viewers, this will definitely not be the case. the bittersweet tale of sheung's childhood, set against the depiction of her adult life and her obsessive struggle to buy an apartment in hong kong's ruthless and ludicrous housing market, interspersed with scenes of brutality, will not be to everyone's tastes, especially if you have gotten used to the softening of the shifting tones which was once so commonplace in hong kong movies.

good, but not for everyone.