Bloody Beast 冷血人狼

In the prison of a small provincial town sits a criminal (Lawrence Ng), suspected of raping and murdering several girls. The guards taunt him as best they can, demanding a written confession, and one day the inmate decides to tell them everything. But he has one request — to be executed immediately after he signs it all.

Herman Yau's 1993 film The Untold Story forever changed the face of Hong Kong crime thrillers — the screen was overrun with murderers, cannibals, rapists and other criminal elements with pronounced psychoses. So many of these films were made that far from all of them managed to secure a place in history and in viewers' memory — even though they all performed equally well at the box office. For example, Bloody Beast grossed nearly two million dollars in cinemas, but today only a select few connoisseurs of the genre remember it.

There really is nothing for the eye to latch onto in the film — it is an utterly artless exposé, whose makers bank on a glut of shocking scenes rather than on interesting characters or a cleverly twisted plot. Lawrence Ng plays a hundred-percent "meek psycho" (probably the most popular character in this kind of cinema) — a modest, downtrodden quiet soul who peeps on his sister's lovemaking and pines for a beautiful neighbor. He has a stern father, and his sister's suitor bullies him, but one day he decides to take what he likes by force, and after that it's just a matter of technique. We'll be shown several bloody murder scenes (the psycho kills even children and rapes a corpse with a hammer!), and then the maniac is caught — that's the whole film.

The "spice" in the picture comes from Ho Ka-Kui's character — he plays a dumb and aggressive cop who first hounds the protagonist in prison, and in a flashback tries to catch him. His character is so thick-headed that the otherwise serious film instantly turns into trashy kitsch — yes, it becomes more interesting to watch, but not enough to secure Bloody Beast a place in your memory after the viewing is over.