Review: Looking for gore, twisted murder, rape or pornography then you should keep an eye out for movies with the Cat III rating. Movies with this rating often fall into the twisted entertainment category, Dr Lamb is no exception to this rule. In fact Dr Lamb was one of the first movies in a "based on real life murders" genre. A year after its release The Untold Story was release which became a reference for this genre and also an icon to the nastiness of Cat III cinema.

What gives this movie its power is that it is based real life events that took place in 1982 concerning the case of the Taxi Cab Killer in HK. Deny it as you will, many people are curious about the gory details of these serial killers, they want to know what makes them tick and what made them do these terrible acts. Just in North America you have countless popular movies about serial killers and the whole investigation to catch them. Now if this movie is actually based on a true event then it passes the border of fiction and become slightly more interesting.

The story in Dr. Lamb is really straightforward, it is really just recounting the tale of this murderer. There is no intricate plot or weird twists but do not mistake that for a boring story. The story unfolds in a very comprehensible way and explains all the details clearly, there are a lot of flash backs but they are well organised so you don't have to worry about getting confused. I found that the story moved at a nice pace and there were no dull or boring moments.

The cast did a very good job bringing this story to life, Simon Yam's performance as the Taxi Cab Killer was excellent. The character seemed cold yet with a slight gleam of insanity in his eye, there was no over acting and the killer was really convincing. The rest of the cast was pretty good, the cops were interesting, even having only minor roles they had a memorable character affect. One thing that I found pretty impressive were the actresses that played the murder victims, they had to lay around as corpses while the serial killer did weird things to them. Each of the girls really looked dead and I am sure it was not easy to lay still like a corpse for so many scenes.

One can look forward to some gore in this movie, you see the murderer has to get rid of the bodies somehow. His method of choice is dismemberment for neat and easy disposal, but working with this dismemberment he picks up a new hobby, anatomy. I guess that is why the guy gets the name of Dr. Lamb. The quality of the gore is pretty good but you will not see any direct cutting of the flesh, these are after all live girls and if you start cutting them up this movie would no longer be Cat III but snuff instead. The gory scenes work a lot on imagination, you see the knife going towards the victim, then you see blood dripping or spraying and finally to see result on the body. You never actually see the knife cutting into the victim but still the scenes are pretty intense and well done. Also the gore factor is kept pretty serious, nothing seemed exaggerated or fake to me but then again blood spilling into the aquarium full of fish can be a little funny. Just a word of warning these scenes are not for those with a weak stomach as they are a little disturbing. There are some other pretty disturbing things that goes on with the bodies that do not include gore, I will let you find out for yourself what they are.

I found Dr. Lamb to be an interesting movie, it is a very good story of a serial killer. Along with a good amount of disturbing shock factor they really bring to life the story of this crazed murderer. I remember the first time I saw this movie, it was a couple years ago during Fantasia, I don't think there were too many people in the movie theatre. It was one of the funnest movies we saw, not just for the movie but for the fact that during the movie we were saying silly comments and laughing at all the crazy twisted stuff. Unfortunately not everyone shared our enthusiasm for the movie, there was this chick sitting alone in the row in front of us that was taking the movie all too seriously. In fact she got mad at our constant laughter but we really could not help ourselves.