Taan shiu hung chow

1st watched 6/15/2002 - 6 out of 10(Dir-Hin Sang 'Billy' Tang):

Surprisingly good, scary ghost story despite silly-sounding premise and an even sillier name for the movie. I was expecting a gross-out overdone and gory mess, but instead was presented with a transparent scary being that was not really seen but shown through wonderful camera work and blurred visions without much gore but real scary situations with actors and actresses who really do a good job of showing their fear in this unusual situation. This is basically a haunted house story but actually ends with a moral message about judging people who commit suicide. We don't find this out till very near the end and are basically scared out of our wits until this time. Despite the fact that I usually have a hard time with these kinds of movies, this one kept me enticed until the very end and had me looking around corners after it was over. That, if nothing else, is a good sign that this scary movie succeeded in what it wanted to do and for that alone it deserves some credit with the avalanche of scary movies that we are presented with each year that gross-out rather than scare us.

I loved the English language title,Dial D For Demons. The movie? Not so much. The movie starts quite goofy, more like a teen comedy than the movie gets dark, super dark. The tone being kind of all over the place is not uncommon for Hong Kong cinema as a whole. But that is only one problem and as a whole is a hard watch as the storytelling is all over the place and not fluent at all. If you watch until the end, everything is explained and it all makes sense. There is some good stuff here, Jordan Chan is cool and once the film goes full tilt, it does deliver supernatural terror(and when it doesn't) it goes way over the top and is really funny. Some of the CG effects are really bad. But really, the story is good, but the process of putting that story on screen was not done well. Dial D For Demons could have been much better, but also is still a watchable, but very flawed film. I have seen better Asian supernatural horror movies and this one is not very recommended.