Reviewed by: White Dragon Date: 11/16/2005 Summary: Unpleasant and mean-spirited, to say the least... Based on the notorious "Hello Kitty" murder of 1999, this one chronicles the last few months (primarily days) of embattled low rent prostitute and junkie Grace Li (Emily Kwan). Introduced to pimp Brother Hok (Wayne Lai) by her friend Gigi, Grace winds up stealing both money and Ice from him, provoking payback that is brutally sadistic and ultimately fatal. Over a period of a number of days, Grace is drugged, beaten, forced to eat faeces, burnt, abused and humiliated before OD'ing and ending up with her boiled skull stuffed inside a Hello Kitty doll. Cat III films had pretty much dried up by '99, and this was one of the last death knells for the "true crime" sub-genre. Good performances by Lai and Kwan are wasted and the film, as sensationalist exploitation, commits the cardinal sin of its ilk...it's a bore. Unlike Cat III films from the peak period (92 - 94), watching a woman abused before being mulched into so much offal-based bin-liner is stultifyingly dull. Initially the film provokes shock (the commensurate violence, plus the gratuitous killing of a small dog) but after a while it just becomes a deadeningly dull path to the (inevitable) newspaper headline. Meh...this was deadly dull and grossly repellent, no more and no less. NB: There is no optical censoring of the Kitty doll in this version of the story (ala THERE IS A SECRET IN MY SOUP), as when Grace's skull is found it tumbles out of a...Doraemon! Only to miraculously transform into a poorly-framed Kitty doll, after the fact... Reviewer Score: 2

Reviewed by: MilesC Date: 02/03/2001 Summary: Sickeningly exploitative. This film was rushed out shortly after the famous case it was based on, in which some criminals imprisoned, brutalized, killed, and allegedly ate parts of a woman, leaving her skull stuff in a Hello Kitty doll. Although it is not as repulsive as some have made it out to be- in terms of what is actually seen it is far, far tamer than say, The Untold Story- it is incredibly insensitive to the victims family to release such a film, particularly so quickly after the fact. The fact that the film is an artless, virtually content-free exercise in pointlessness merely adds insult to injury. The film consists mainly of police questioning, drug use, and Kwan Bo-Wai being abused. Production values are minimal, and people on the street stare at the camera. Even the subtitles seem dated, with near-dead phrases like "cut the crap" and "I won't give it a damn" being used left and right. There was a lot of speculation about problems that might beset those that worked on such a film; the gross was very low. Maybe superstition is good for something after all.

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