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Lou xia de fang ke (2016)
Embarrassing for everyone involved
I saw this at the New York Asian film festival and I wish I hadn't. I'm here to warn you off so you hopefully don't lose an hour and fifty minutes of your life, like I did. Where should I begin?
This movie has no plot. Really, there's actually no goal, dilemma or problem for a character to solve. There's not even a protagonist. The movie just wanders along aimlessly.
The basic premise is that it's a story about a landlord who spies on his tenants, but the plot doesn't extend much further than that. At first it seems like it's about a serial killer, but then it just drifts away from that and rambles into a seemingly endless series of disgusting, tired, juvenile jokes.
There's about seven or eight different scenes of men masturbating, including one where a guy masturbates in bed with his child daughter while she sleeps. Because jacking off and child molestation is so shocking and hilarious!
A gay relationship subplot is memorialized in a sappy, bizarre, off-key, montage. Tokenism at its most tasteless. That subplot, along with everything else in this movie stinks of someone trying desperately to get attention by being "edgy". There's literally not a shred of originality in this turd.
This movie is clearly meant to be a comedy but for some reason includes scenes of graphic torture. All part of an ongoing identity crisis in this movie that sprawls continuously wider as the movie rambles along. Some other highlights include:
A man being drugged and raped with a dildo until his ass bleeds. This is supposed to be funny. It isn't.
A reoccurring police interrogation sequence that's supposed to serve as a narrative, but it only appears sporadically and does nothing to enhance the story.
Loads of pointless CGI and product placement throughout, including one scene that actually looks just like a coffee commercial.
Highly derivative aesthetics which are basically just recycled motifs from Park Chan Wook and Wong Kar Wai.
A massive, contrived, reverse American Psycho thriller ending with a twist. Which doesn't really work because there's no plot and the ending still doesn't make sense. The landlord and the killer work together! ...or wait, is the narrator actually the killer? Or is the policeman the killer. Good lord what a garbled mess.
There was a Q and A with a leading actresses after the screening but I had to jet because I couldn't bare to look at her after seeing her perform so many graphic sex acts on camera. It would've surely been worth it to torpedo her career in China if the movie was great like say, Lust, Caution, for example. But this movie was awful so I just felt embarrassed for her because she put so much of herself out there. There's actually full sex scenes in the movie. They just go on and on. Different positions, oral sex with jokes about cum in the mouth, etc. It was so excessive, tasteless, boring and irritating that I wanted to slap the director, who was sitting not too far away from me. I resisted the urge.
Unless my description of this film sounds appealing, I highly suggest you skip this movie.
Ghost Phone: Phone Calls from the Dead (2011)
Totally unknown, sadly
At the time of this writing, this film has no critic reviews, no user reviews and only 15 votes on IMDb. Basically, no one has seen this. I dug around and tried to find something about it online, but the only thing I found out was that it used to have a different title of "Callers," which is obviously a much better title than "Ghost Phone: Phone Calls from the Dead". The current title sounds like "Death Bed: the bed that eats people." The current title combined with the atrocious cover art would scare any reasonable viewer away. But since I was already binging on B movies on Amazon Prime I figured I'd give it a shot and I was pleasantly surprised.
This film closely follows Will Pierce (Nelson Franklin) whose girlfriend (Melissa Ordway) dies in a car accident and immediately begins calling him on a red cell phone, even though she's already deceased. The narrative has dueling time-lines as it is told retrospectively from a mental hospital, so we watch the events unfold as they're told by Will to a psychiatrist, waiting to figure out how he was finally apprehended for his "insanity."
Shortly after hearing from his girlfriend, Will begins hearing from other people in his life that have died, including his father and a secretary at his father's office. All of the dead people contacting Will have a favor to ask, usually involving him doing something that might help bring them closure, but which also makes Will look completely insane. Not to mention that a couple of the people died under suspicious circumstances and eventually Will ends up in the middle of a criminal investigation for having information about their deaths that no one else has.
It's an interesting film because it rides a fine line between a supernatural mystery and the ramblings of man having a psychotic break after the death of his girlfriend. It's not convincingly one or the other so it keeps you guessing until the end. It has a light tone and rather poppy, slightly annoying soundtrack. I wondered if it would've been better had it been given a more serious, dramatic treatment while still retaining some of the comedic undertones.
The acting is generally competent, but make no mistake, this is a low-budget movie. Technically, the movie is a pass. The definition and lighting quality are certainly passable but the audio leaves something to be desired. While it's not often muffled or too uneven, there's a lot of buzz and irregular room tone that needed some cleaning up.
I'll warn you about one brief, but terrible scene in the movie that felt completely out of place. The entire movie stays closely with our protagonist Will's perspective, until randomly, near the end we for some reason see the psychiatrist at home taking a pregnancy test and trying to talk to her mother on the cell phone. It was awful and unnecessary. I suppose they wanted to convince us of her sympathy for him, but It was simply weird and clunky. However, don't let that scare you off, it's only an odd minute in an otherwise even movie.
I'd recommend it. It zips along nicely, it's funny and dramatic, and the writing is a huge cut above what you would normally get from one of these low-budget indie movies.