Reviewed by: metamovie Date: 07/18/2001 When the first release of a new production company called SWAT went into works, production notes claimed: "The movie will be mostly a horror." Actually, it isn't THAT bad. Granted, we are dealing with a no-budget movie (only "HK $ 3 million"), but at least it has an attitude. The filmmakers did try for something different: although there's too much humor (did we really need another Viagra joke and a double-take expanded to a "double-five-take"?), it works well in other, more subdued scenes, and some traditional HK horror cliches are given a nostalgic nod in passing-by. Read more at http://www.metamovie.de/film/14.html

Reviewed by: ryan Date: 11/21/1999 Summary: Fourteen Days Before Suicide (1999) With the poor condition of Hong Kong Film industry, insiders are finding ways to survive. One of the method is to make the production budget as low as possible. In this line, 'Fourteen Days before Suicide' seems to be one of the examples. They hope the movie can bring them revenue. In fact, this is the first production by Film Swatch, which aimed to make several low-budget movies in the market. Though the budget for 'Fourteen Days before Suicide' is a low budget film, the casting is okay. The story starts in a commerical building which with a ghost Autumn (Amenda LEE Wai-men), who worked in a company owned by Mr. & Mrs. NG (LAI Yiu-cheung and Christine ENG Wing-mei) before she died. Simon LOUI is a lift technican for that apartment while he found the apartment is quite unusual. In fact, there are lots of strange things happened in the apartment. Guard 'Monkey King' (Sunny CHAN Kam-hung) has been misunderstood by his girl Pinky CHEUNG Man-chi for trying to find his new girl Funlito (Sherming YIU Lok-yee) which leads her initiative to commit self-suicide ...... Frankly speaking, the plot for 'Fourteen Days before Suicide' has tried its best to make use of the limited budget. Most of the scenes were taken in tje same apartment, same lift, same guard stand, stairs and toilet. This supposed to be very boring for the whole movie. Script writer LAU Hau-wai tried his best by putting the lines for Sherming YIU and Simon LOUI to link up the whole movie. He also tried to put the relationship between Sunny CHAN, Sherming YIU and Pinky CHEUNG to make it with some love and romantic elements. This is well done to make the latter part of the movie more fruitful. Unfortunately, it seems that the director has done the filming in a typical way which failed to present the ideas of the scripts. The continuous tricks of using colored cinematography is okay but seems to be excessive which lowered the expected effect of horror. The lack of scenes has also limited the presentation of the topic. Definitely, if the budget for the movie can have an extra $ 0.5 million, the effects can be much better. Another problem of the movie is the dubbed voice. It is known that using the voice direct from the scene may cause more. However, for horror movies, dubbed voice will greatly depreciate the original feeling of scare. In terms of performance, I consider most of them has been in several movies with the same genre and they have done their jobs well. Simon LOUI has done a good job to make the movie impressive. His role is quite important as he links up the whole movie. On the whole, 'Fourteen Days Before Suicide' is a low-budgeted movie. It has got a good scripts which has made the best use of its limited resource. Unfortunately, the direction seems failed to present what the scripts expected effectively. Luckily, the good performance of actors and actresses helped the movie a bit.