Demoniac Flash

Year:2005

Anthony Wong takes up a new hobby
Director:Tony Leung Hung-Wah
Cast:Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Nicola Cheung Sun-Yu, Sam Lee Chan-Sam, Natalie Ng Man-Yan, Ken Wong Hap-Hei, Timmy Hung Tin-Ming, Jason Chu Wing-Tong, Elise Liao, Bella Zhang
Description:
Everyone in Demoniac Flash suffers from delusions.
If you picked up this DVD expecting some sort of quality
filmgoing experience, then you probably suffer from
delusions too. Director/writer Tony Leung Hung-Wah
follows up his underwhelming B-movie PTU Files
- Death Trap with a completely underwhelming horror
flick. This movie is so underwhelming that you will
likely forget what happened only moments after it
occurs onscreen. It's that uninteresting.
Anthony Wong leads the cast
as crippled fellow Mo, who became so thanks to tragic,
yet oddly laughable circumstances. In the opening
moments of Demoniac Flash, we witness the truly
awful parenting that leaves Mo in crutches. While
reading a paper, Mo let his son get run over by a
truck, and the resulting trauma of being such a lousy
father psychologically induces Mo to lose the use
of his legs. Thanks to Tony Leung Hung-Wah's direction,
you might lose control of your bladder. While it's
awful to watch a tyke get totaled by a truck, the
scene is staged so ineptly that A) you know the kid
is going to get run over, and B) you'll probably want
to slap Anthony Wong for phoning in his performance.
Ah, but it gets worse. Nicola
Cheung shows up as the comically delusional comic
artist May. Basically, everytime she falls asleep,
she either A) sees a person in a white shirt get stabbed,
or B) gets chased by a hunchback garbage lady. On
the bright side, May's nice guy co-worker Ken Wong

dotes on her like a lovestruck dope. Meanwhile, his
sister Natalie Ng is a shrieking social worker who
has delusions of getting sexually assaulted by one
of her female patients. She also runs around calling
May crazy, which would be all right if she weren't
so batty herself. All of these characters either live
in or wander around Rose Villa, an impressive condo
establishment that also houses Sam Lee and a bunch of his friends,
who are in town to work on a movie. Then someone dies,
a couple of gangsters show
up and overact, and things start to make even less
sense.
"Pointless"
would be the best description for Demoniac Flash,
though "interminable", "mind-numbing",
and "mystifyingly bad" could qualify too.
Tony Leung Hung-Wah assembles a massive cast of characters,
though some are so unnecessary that it's a wonder
they even made the final cut. Sam Lee looks to either
be A) visiting the set, or B) doing someone a favor.
Anthony Wong actually does appear to act on occasion,
though his character's ultra-nice attitude could merely
be the actor channeling his boredom. Nicola Cheung
is fetching but mechanical, and everyone else in the
cast either overacts or can't act at all. It's hard
to say who's to blame, the filmmakers or the actors
themselves. To be safe, we should probably just blame
everyone.
The killer to all of this:
none of the characters are remotely compelling, and
the situations are incredibly uninteresting too. Horror
should have some basis for affecting you, be it characters
who matter or situations that are unnerving in their
primal familiarity. That doesn't happen here. Though
the "scary long haired woman" does appear
once or twice to remind you that this is an Asian
horror film, most of the scares here are too character
specific to get under your skin. Even worse, 90% of
them occur in dream sequences. Too often we are introduced
to moments of mild horror, only to have the character
suddenly wake up. This probably happens only a dozen
times, but thanks to the miracle of filmmaking, this
"wake up after a bad dream" narrative device
seems to occur no less than 10,000 times. The lesson
here could be to never fall asleep, because if you
do, you'll see some wacky hunchback garbage lady goose-stepping
towards you in an abandoned warehouse. Either that,
or you could dream that you're watching Demoniac
Flash again. If that happened to me, you could
count on me staying awake until the end of time.