Prostitute Killers (2000)

Tom (Mark Cheng), Wan (Simon Loui) and Chun (Gabriel Harrison) come from rough childhoods, each having lost their mother it seems. And that, we're to assume from a comment late in the film, has made them the way they are today.

The three are the killers of the title. They find their sex worker victims in massage parlours and nightclubs, with Tom taking each back to a home to satisfy his mates' thirsts for sex and killing. When finished with, corpses are stripped, boxed and dumped off a cliff in hopes the bodies will never be found. But when a box breaks open and a twisted body washes up on a beach, the police get on the case. Chun happens to be married to investigating officer Connie (Karen Tong), and he knows how the case is coming along. With the investigation ensuing, the three give thought to their actions. As Tom puts it: "I say, what we've done is not abnormal, but... a normal guy won't ever do such a thing".

The lads decide to lay low on the prostitute killing front until the police go quiet. And the down time will give them a chance to do away with an unpleasant gangster named Brother Shark. This guy makes up part of two sub-plots in the film. Shark originally turned up in a nightclub, taking a jade bracelet lost by Tom and becoming an enemy of the three lads as a result. The gangster is also on the case of debtor Brother Hong and his mainland wife. As the film continues on, the main lads do away with their rival and fall back into attacking women.

Prostitute Killers is unquestionably Category III, being the roughest Hong Kong film I've reviewed for this site, let alone seen released theatrically in the last few years*. Aside from the sexual assault element, there's also beheading, scalp ripping, limb breaking, acid attack and beatings. And necrophilia too. Some folks may dig all this but I just found it unpleasant to sit through - perhaps as the filmmakers intended.

Production standards are on the low side. Camerawork is amateurish, with an apparent difficulty with over- and under-exposure in the daytime scenes. Night scenes look better but, as is the case for much of this film, hold little or no flair to add any level of intensity to the proceedings. The sound is another dubbing letdown, with Hong Kong Night Guide-like cheap keyboard music and the occasional wolf howl added. The focus seems to be more on the nudity, violence and gore, leaving the script with much to be desired. Character background is minimal, providing little or no fodder for even speculating on why Simon Loui and Gabriel Harrison's characters are so bloodthirsty and sex-crazed respectively. Even an aspiring Hong Kong Cat-III shocker could benefit in this department - in this case perhaps making the film slightly more watchable.

DVD information: The Deltamac DVD for Prostitute Killers is a large letdown after their previous excellent Hong Kong titles. The main problem for foreign viewers is in the subtitling. Some lines and sections go completely unsubtitled while numbers come up as a series of unintelligible symbols (in what appears to have been a cross- platform word-processing problem). The font is an uneven serif typeface. Worse still, the subtitles are sometimes not correctly timed to the dialogue. The picture quality is as good as it can be considering the poor look of the film, but the print is clean. Subtitles come in Chinese and English choices while Cantonese and Putongua soundtracks are provided. A chapter menu is available but there are no other extras on the disc.

* Review written on initial DVD release in 2000.

** A note on names: The subtitles show unreliable variations with names. Simon Loui is both Har and Wan while a character named Winnie is Vanessa.

*** Prostitute Killers is the name on the film's opening credits. The title Prostitute Killer is used on the poster and for the VCD and DVD covers.

**** This review is based on viewing Prostitute Killers on the DVD edition, not a theatre viewing.

Credits:

Directed by Sam Ho
Starring Mark Cheng, Simon Loui, Gabriel Harrison and Karen Tong