Set Up
Director: Billy Chung
Year: 2005
Rating: 5.0
Considering the names
behind this film, one would expect something that had a much higher profile,
but this Charles Heung/Wong Jing produced work came and went like a small
mouse in the night with barely anyone noticing. It certainly isn’t one of
their “A” films – and was clearly never intended to be - not with actors
whose time has clearly passed and who were never even big stars back when.
The main male actors are Michael Tse and Roy Cheung while Christy Chung is
the major headliner. It is almost like they discovered this film in the vault
from ten years ago and went “oops we forgot we had this” and proceeded to
dust it off and put it out. Christy hasn’t made much news since she tried
resuscitating her career in 2001 by showing her charms in Jan Dara and following
this up with a steamy pictorial book and a video. This low budget effort
won’t get her back on track and it may be time for her to keep a sharp eye
out for a prospective wealthy husband – the refuge of many former actresses.
Director Billy Chung hit his high watermark in the early 90’s with the nasty
gut-churning film “Love to Kill”, but is still around popping out films with
some regularity – and though these are considerably toned down to match the
taste of today’s audiences, he has put out a few quality “B” films like “Paramount
Motel” and “Shiver”, but here he misses the mark. The plot ingredients for
a solid thriller seem to all be here and there are a few good moments and
images (one seemingly borrowed from the Japanese film “Freeze Me”), but the
sluggish direction just isn’t very inspired and lacks any narrative drive.
The film is basically a mishmash of the Hong Kong film “3 Days of a Blind
Girl” and the Audrey Hepburn film “Wait Until Dark” about a blind woman in
desperate danger.
Christy is getting married in a few days to Michael Tse but oddly decides
this is just the perfect time to have Lasik surgery to correct her vision.
She is a well-known fiction writer called “The Queen of Horror” with her
novels about fighting vampires (don’t get excited about the first scene in
the film which is her imagination at work on her latest novel and sadly looked
a lot more fun than this turned out to be!) and at her bachlorette party,
instead of the usual sex toys her friends give her a spear gun and a set
of sharp wooden stakes. They in fact come in much more useful than a vibrator
in the days to follow. After her surgery she is unable to see and told that
it will take about three days for her vision to clear up and so her sister
(Winnie Leung) takes her to the home Christy is going to move into after
being married – a large remote house with lots of room for the dead bodies
that begin accumulating there.
Four robbers steal gold and in the escape one of them is killed. They have
an appointment to meet their buyer in a few days – at what had seemed a deserted
house but that now has the two female occupants. Roy Cheung is the leader
but he is having trouble controlling the mandatory psycho in the group (Tony
Ho) and the quiet suspicious one (Marco Lok). They find the sister but she
refuses to divulge the fact that Christy is healing up in a small hard to
find room and soon bad things begin happening all around with gory results.
Christy eventually wakes up and figures out what is going on – the dead bodies
are a good hint as is the blood dripping on her forehead (“don’t tell me
the house has a leak already”). After the panic hits and then leaves, she
somehow manages in her blindness to set up a complicated and rather fun pulley
system of ambushes with dead bodies and her spear gun and waits in the dark.
This should have been better – and its hard to pinpoint why it generated
so little tension or so few shocks – maybe it was Christy and her less than
convincing performance (having to talk out loud so that we can figure out
what she is thinking didn’t help matters) or maybe it was just on a budget
that forced it to be shot too quickly and didn’t allow the film to live up
to its potential.
