Deathnet.com

                                                   
Director: Andy Ng
Year: 2000
Rating: 5.0
The worst thing about the J-Horror craze other than the American remakes of some of them was that it spread like a virus to the other Asian countries. They could be made cheaply and local audiences as well as the West were eating them up. Thailand produced a slew of cheap horror films, most of which will kill your brain cells with a few exceptions such as Shutter, Alone, P, Dorm, Rahtree, 13 Beloved and a few others. Korea on the other hand kept the production quality high with films like Phone, A Tale of Two Sisters, the Whispering Corridor series. Even the mediocre ones looked good. The virus also came to Hong Kong and hit Hong Kong during a very bad period when the entire film industry was in the dumps. Low-cost horror films came out like they were on fire. Most were truly dreadful, but like Thailand, there were some good ones among the dross - Horror Hotline, Inner Senses, The Eye, New Blood, Erotic Nightmare, the two Horoscope films and a couple of the early Troublesome Night films.



This was not one of the good ones. I was warned in the three reviews on the HKMBD site - that this was worse than a badly stubbed toe. Ya, but actually better than a bunch of the Hong Kong horror films that came out during those years.  Give Model from Hell, Sound from the Dark and Scaremonger a go and see if this is so bad. There are some good moments in this at the beginning before it goes off its wheels and it has Simon Yam (ok, he was in Model from Hell too) who even in bad films like this is great. He plays a mediocre cop who is part of an operation to track down some triad big shots. He follows two of them into a building but gets sidetracked by Angela Tong. And who wouldn't? She was in a lot of these low-budget horror films and I thought great - then she douses herself with gas and sets herself on fire and if that isn't enough, she jumps 15-floors down. So much for Angela Tong. Simon tries to talk her out of it but maybe asking for a light for his cigarette wasn't the best thing to do.



Meanwhile, the rest of the police group that reports to Officer Yip (Gordon Lam) get into a big shootout that was good but had nothing to do with the rest of the film. Instead, there is a flurry of suicides by various methods. Simon and his pretty subordinate Gigi (Lilian Chan) investigate why these are all taking place from people who seemed happy. That takes them to the Webpage of Death! The Webmaster coaxes people to end their lives and agrees to help them. In the final scene, he has six of them all tied up along with Simon and reads off their miseries before killing them. Not a bad scene. And keeping with tradition, Helen Law Lan makes an appearance as Gigi's mother who is suffering from Alzheimer's. This is only one of her 491 films.