Dream Home
AKA 維多利亞壹號 (Victoria No.1)
(2010) 96 Min.
Rated: NR (Very Gory, Sex)
Country: Hong Kong
Director: Ho-Cheung Pang
Starring: Josie Ho, Juno Mak, Norman Chu
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★★☆
A young woman will do anything it takes to find her Dream Home in modern day Hong Kong.
Synopsis:
The film opens with a few facts about housing in Hong Kong. The average household makes $10k HKD per month but the apartments cost about 7 million.
A security guard is seen dozing in front of the screens from security cameras. A figure walks in and slips a zip tie around his neck while he’s asleep and then pulls it taught, choking him. As the man struggles to release himself he is able to get a utility knife. He tries to cut into the zip tie but also manages to deeply cut his throat repeatedly. He bleeds out on the floor and asphyxiates. The killer calmly retrieves two hard drive disks from the security camera computers.
Cheng Lai-sheung (Ho) works two jobs in Hong Kong. She has careless chattering co-workers who don’t think twice about signing up their clients to repay huge loans.
Cheng rents an hourly-rate hotel room to sleep with her boyfriend. Meanwhile he has a family she’s unaware of and leaves early before the night is over leaving her to pay the room bill.
Her co-workers talk on a bus of taking a vacation to Tokyo, but Sheung doesn’t want to spend her money. She dreams of saving up all her money and living in an apartment that over looks the Victoria Harbor. It’s a dream she’s had since her childhood.
A woman in an apartment hears the doorbell ring and goes to check it. The darkly clothed figure bursts in and drives a sharp point through the woman’s skull, forcing her eye out and killing her. The person doing the killing is Sheung and she gets a phone call distracting her momentarily. Sheung replies that she’s at work and tries to end the phone call.
A pregnant woman gets up from her room and sees the bloody mess and body on the living room floor. She hides and Sheung tries to find her, but the woman strikes first, cutting Sheung on the cheek. She falls over, however, and lands on her pregnant belly. She writhes in pain as the fluid leaks out from under her and Sheung takes this moment the drag her across the room. She puts a plastic bag over her head and seals it with a zip tie. The bag is a storage bag that has a hole to fit a vacuum nozzle. Sheung connects the vacuum and turns it on sucking the air out and eventually killing the woman.
Sheung looks out the window at the beautiful city skyline and there’s a flashback to her childhood in 1991.
As a child Sheung lived in the same area before the redevelopment into higher-priced apartments. Her neighbor friend Jimmy would talk to her about how they were being evicted and intimidated to move. Sheung wants badly to move to a place close to the sea so that her grandfather who was a sailor can have a better view. She prays nightly for that, but soon her prays are for her friend Jimmy to keep his home.
Gangsters are seen putting snakes into Jimmy’s house and keeping the gate chained up so that the people inside can’t escape. They are Protest signs imply that the government is hiring Triad gangsters to get rid of tenants.
Flash forward to 1997. The time of the murders.
The pregnant woman’s husband is coming home, but he gets a phone call from his mistress and assures her that he’ll return to her after his wife has the baby. Soon he enters the home and sees his wife dead with plastic wrapped on her face. He pulls it off and tries to breathe life back into her, but Sheung finds him and hits him with one of his own golf clubs.
Sheung and the husband struggle. He’s choking her on the floor, but she manages to grasp an iron and strikes him with it enough times to knock him out. He rises once her back is turned and tries to attack her again, but falls over, striking a coffee table under his chin and breaking his neck.
It’s 2004. Sheung is shown at a funeral for her mother.
1999. Sheung tells her mother that she wants to quit going to university to get a job and earn money.
Back in 2004. Sheung tells her deceased mother that she feels she is to blame for everything. She had promised to get her mother an apartment. A paper apartment is burned with Sheung urging her mother to take it in the afterlife.
Sheung and her brother check out a nice apartment. They go with a real estate agent who warns them that the price of the apartment is steep, but it’s a place with a nice view. Sheung says she’ll think about it. The agent also warns her that many clients are brought over daily to see the apartment, many would find the price reasonable.
Back at the murderous rampage. Sheung goes to another apartment. There is a party going on with two men and two women. They are all drunk and getting high off of various drugs. One of the ladies is sick and about to vomit. A drug dealer also stops by.
Sheung breaks in and slices open the stomach of the dealer friend. She then goes on to fight with one of the guys shoving a broken bong into his neck. She bashes the head of the sick girl into the toilet.
A time jump occurs. It’s 2007 and Sheung’s taking her sick father to the doctor’s for his check up. She gets a text that says her boss is looking for her. Meanwhile some kids start fighting nearby and she remembers a time when her father was healthy and when she fought with her brother as children. Her father tells her to work hard so she can have a room of her own one day.
A doctor informs her that her father has mesothelioma which he got from being a builder for years and inhaling asbestos. He might need treatment and chemotherapy. The health insurance claims that he went to the hospital in 2004 and was aware of this pre-existing condition of which they will not cover since they switched to the new insurance.
She goes to her boyfriend to borrow money for the surgery. He asks her why she won’t use her saved up money, but she insists it’s for the new apartment. He claims he doesn’t know how to take the money from his savings without his wife raising questions.
She confronts her father about visiting the hospital and he admits that he did visit it, but at the time thought it was no big deal even though they found that he had the condition.
Sheung tries to talk to her boss about a loan for the apartment, but after doing the math he tells her that she can’t afford to pay back the loan.
One night she hears her father wheezing and goes to check on him. She turns on a ventilation mask, but stops. Her father weakly claws at her shirt, but she tugs her shirt away from his grasp and lets him die.
The film jumps back to the murders at the apartments. Two of the party goers are having sex in the next room. As the man is about to climax, Sheung stabs him through the back several times, killing him. She throws his severed penis by the girl and she screams and hides under the bed. Sheung removes the mattress and tries to stab the girl through the wooden slats. She misses and falls a bit through, dropping the knife. The girl is able to stab Sheung through her leg near her ankle. Sheung takes a sharp broken piece of board and shoves it into the girls open mouth, killing her.
Sheung pulls the knife out of her leg and carefully wraps a sock around the wound and a zip tie to hold it and add pressure.
We skip again to a time when Sheung is handing over the information for her father’s life insurance. After filling it out she asks when she’ll receive the money and he tells her in about ten days. After he leaves she calls the apartment and tells them she can make the initial deposit today and deposit the second payment on the 30th. She goes back to her rundown apartment she shares with her brother and tells him that she plans to move across the street.
Just when she has the check and is making her way to the apartment by taxi the traffic is slow so she arrives late and the sellers have changed their mind. They’ve raised their price and feel they can get 50% more.
As she walks back home she slowly loses her mind. Everything she’s worked for seems not to matter. She’s saved her life for this apartment. She has killed her own father for this apartment.
It’s October 30th, 2007. She sees the zip ties and her father’s tools and hatches a plan.
Back at the murder scene at the party, two police officers are investigating the noises and knock on the door. Sheung lies and says she fell asleep with loud music on. They see the cut on her face and ask to come in. Behind her the girl with the board in her mouth comes up with a knife and the officers push in and tell her to put the knife down. She lunges forward, slicing one of the officers throat with the board which causes the two officers to start shooting at her. One officer shoots the other by mistake and they both have shot the girl with the board. She falls face down, driving the board through the back of her head. Shueng gets the gun and kills one of the wounded officers as well as the disemboweled guy who is still alive and sitting on the floor.
She leaves the area.
Shueng is back at work. She’s smiling and happy at work. She calls the real estate agent and talks to the man about the property. The land owners are willing to sell for $3.9 million given that there has been a mass murder of 11 people at the apartments.
Her boyfriend shows up late and with confidence she breaks up with him.
The movers are bringing her furniture into her new apartment. As she watches the sea from her window she listens to a radio broadcast about the American mortgage crash and the difficulties as well as the lowering costs of housing.
Review:
This film is probably one of the most violent but also stirring films I’ve seen. It’s interesting to see how Shueng goes about her killings and the background of what drove her to become what she is. She’s a slightly sympathetic character. But only just a little.
Some of the gore ranks up there in explicitness. It’s an unblinking eye in over-the-top bloody deaths, a few played for laughs as well. This should well please any gore-hound, but might drive off other viewers who are more into chills rather than buckets of blood. Indeed, though it is horror and there is murder, there’s not anything much in the way of suspense. Only bits of tension in death scenes or the one scene in which Shueng may be caught.
The interesting background plot and commentary on Hong Kong’s housing market is probably not enough to make it a genuine recommendation to non-horror fans, but on the same note, if you’re into slasher gore and don’t mind a little bit of thought in your story… by all means seek this film out.