Sound from the Dark
Director: Tony Leung Hung-wah
Year: 2000
Rating: 2.0
Have you ever felt
almost embarrassed to realize that you watched a film all the way through.
When the end credits of this one began rolling by I sat there smiling like
an idiot that I had just wasted 90 minutes of my life watching this thing
crawl by like a wounded animal wanting to be put out of it’s misery. Why?
I don’t know. It was just there. I put it on and watched. I have no excuses.
I have free will – but I sat there and watched. From the five-minute mark
I knew this had the spark of a cheap moldy piece of cardboard – but I sat
there as if a captive of a mind machine. Maybe it was Kathy Chow’s flower
bud pout or Joey Man’s delectable little mole above her upper lip that held
me there – it certainly wasn’t this film. The HKMDB has the box office for
this film as 27 dollars – that would be Hong Kong dollars. Normally,
I would assume this was a typo – in this case it may well be true ((adjusted
to HK$ 27,000 or USD 4,000).
These days Hong Kong is littered with low budget horror films trying to
find an audience and a bit of inspiration - but few fall as short as
this one does. Much of the film takes place on a near deserted beach outside
of Hong Kong where various characters come to stare despondently out at the
ocean. Whether their depression stems from having found themselves in this
film or because of the water ghost I am not sure. Yes, the dreaded water ghost.
There is some ghost in the water that feeds off the depression of people
and reaches out and kills them in various ways from pulling them down the
toilet to drowning them in their own car.
Various people have been dying around the beach area and journalist Kathy
Chow snoops around trying to find the connection. She comes across a dwarf
with talisman powers and the ability to spit nails. She also makes friends
with Stephanie Che, Wayne Lai and Joey Man who all have suicide on their mind
– and the water ghost hungrily eyes them up. Unfortunately, not soon enough
as we have to find out why they look as if their favorite pet ran off with
their lover.
This all doesn’t sound too bad now that I think about it – but the direction
by Tony Leung (no – this is yet another Tony Leung!) is so astonishingly inept,
the script so lifeless, the special effects so negligible and the scares
so lacking that the film should find a deep hole and go into hiding. These
actors certainly have some ability if given a script to work with but here
their only direction seemed to be to look miserable – no more miserable. If
they had only seen their performance in this film the director need not have
coached them. This all leads up to perhaps the most amazingly unexciting ending
that one could begin to imagine – and it was about that time that this silly
embarrassed smile crept over me.
