X-Imp
Director: Kenneth Lau Hau-wai
Year: 1999
Rating: 2.0
All you really need to know about this film is that most of the budget clearly went into designing a fairly creepy and memorable poster (above). Other than that this is one of the absolutely worst horror films – no just make that films – to come along in quite a while. Its incompetence was nearly mind boggling in its totality. You could give a camera to a high school student and they could make a better film than this – it even makes The Blair Witch Project look like a work of genius by comparison. This is no exaggeration – you are warned.

Here is a film in which the two highest billed actors have at most ten minutes of screen time. And one of them - Michael Wong - often speaks in English – as he is wont to do – but get this – they have someone dub his English dialogue – and the dubber can barely speak English!


The other star – Diana Pang Dan only appears from time to time for a minute or so – looks scared – laughs like a crazy woman and vanishes again. This is especially irritating in that with this title and with Pang Dan in it – one might logically think that it is connected to her “classic” 1996 film The Imp, but such is not the case. Oh I get it – this is what the producers hoped for – that suckers like me would fall for this – I think I am starting to understand this movie business!

Not only that – but how quickly time has passed – it seems only a short time ago that Pang Dan was a HK sex siren and now she is playing a grandmother! Since Pang Dan looks to be in her late 20’s and the grandchild is about eight years old – it is a little difficult to compute. Anyway Pang Dan is caring for her grandchild while the parents are on vacation. She is a teacher at a summer school in which a handful of students (Simon Lui is of course one of them - what would a HK horror film be without him in the cast!) are staying for the summer. One night she hears noises and goes out to investigate – and by the time she gets back the kid and her dog are frozen dinners in the refrigerator. Pang Dan does her best Edvard Munch scream and pretty much does a disappearing act for the rest of the film. If only everyone else had.


Pinky Cheung replaces Pang Dan and a new student comes as well. Soon very strange occurrences start taking place – dog head soup for dinner, basketball players with no heads, a poke in the eye and so much more. Its all ghastly – the movie that is. At one point one of the students says "I think you have seen too many horror films" and I couldn't agree more.
 

The acting and direction in this film is so bad that I think it would behoove all of them to pool their money – buy this film – and destroy any evidence of it – pretend that it was all a bad dream. From films like this, it doesn’t appear to take much to be a HK producer these days – a pocketful of change, an empty building and some actors desperately in need of work. Anybody want to move to HK with me and give it a go?!