[KFCC] Horror Hotline Review

Story: A TV journalist and her crew are in Hong Kong to do a report on radio shows. They choose to follow Horror Hotline, a radio show who focuses on supernatural things that happen to ordinary people. One night, while the crew was interviewing and filming the radio show, a man called to recount a story that happened during his childhood. The strange story happened to him and to his six other friends when they were in elementary school. One day, while playing around the school, they found a big head monster baby in a small abandoned warehouse. But strangely, right after the call of this man, the radio show began to receive other calls from unknown people who also saw or heard a story about a big head monster. Ben, the producer of the show and Mavis the TV reporter decide to investigate more on this strange story. But every time they begin to be closer to discovering the true, strange deaths and unnatural events begin to occur.

Review: I begin to really believe that Hong Kong should stay away from the serious horror genre, especially after having seen Horror Hotline. In this case, the approach of the movie was surprisingly good, the acting was decent, but damn the story was stupid. I don't know who came up with the idea that a Big Head Baby would scare people, but I found this to be the stupidest idea I have ever seen a horror movie based one, well maybe since Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!

The directing aspect of the movie was especially good. The movie starts with a very cool creepy credit intro and from that point never stops to be interested. Using some weird camera tricks, exploiting the ambiance and the atmosphere of a room as much as they could, frankly I was very impressed, but unfortunately the story was not there to support the visual. Being uninteresting was not the only downside of the story; it was also very hard to follow. In a way that all the details and the hints that they found during their investigation of the monster, were hard for the audience to connect together. Even with the conclusion of the movie, which was also one of the worst ending of a movie I have ever seen, the story was left completely unclear and didn't make any sense. About the ending, well they tried an ending a la Blair Witch Project but I didn't find that it fitted in the movie at all; they should have opted for a clearer finality to at least answer our questions. It's not even like an open ending that we could have interpreted the way we want because there's nothing left to interpret at all.

It still amazes me to find such good actors as Francis Ng, Sam Lee and Josie Ho in a small gauge like this. It reminds me that Hong Kong actors also need to do quick cash some time to pay their taxes. Most of the main actors were good but since the story was not there to support their performance, their characters were uninteresting to follow. Francis Ng plays the role of the producer of the radio show, Josie Ho plays the TV reporter and Sam Lee has a small role as one of the witness of the big head monster. There was also a couple of white English guys who played the TV crew with Ho. Usually I found the acting of English people in HK movie really bad and unsupportable but it was not the case in this one. The three guys were maybe not very good actors but at least they were supportable, but it didn't stop me from having a feeling of joy when they begin to get killed.

Being a horror movie, the film still has some good creepy moments. You have a couple of great ghost apparitions and other suspenseful scenes all along but unfortunately most of these moments didn't get anywhere as that is was hard to make a clear connection between all them. As for the principal monster of the movie, which was a Big Headed mutant baby, it was completely stupid. There's some background story on the monster but at the end we are not even sure what it was exactly and don't expect to see a clear shot of the monster. I was expecting to finally see the creature, at least at the end of the movie, but not at all. Maybe that someone from the production probably woke up someday and realized that the monster was too stupid and laughable to be showed on screen, who knows?

I really think that if the movie had a better script and a real frightening monster, this movie could have worked. The director and actors have done what they could to make this work but unfortunately since the story goes nowhere, the monster is unconvincing and the ending is total crap, this movie just fall flat on the floor. Even if you want to watch this movie with other people to have some fun, you will end up very disappointed. Don't loose your time on this one people, there a lot of better Asian horror movie out there than this one.