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Everything on the back of the box is in some form of Chinese, but there are
photos that feature our star in his taxi and sitting at a table with some
severed body parts. He is also "shhhh-ing" us for some reason. Don't sweat it
buddy, I won't tell anyone to buy your movie. 1992, 90 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
You know, I can never get enough of these movies about deranged Hong Kong taxi
cab drivers banging corpses. There's just something life affirming about
knowing that our country is not the only cesspool capable of producing these
animals. Besides, with China's birth control policy, the population over there
has become unbalanced, leaving lots of deranged taxi cab drivers whose best bet
for a date is the streetwalker-fare they just strangled to death in the back
seat of the cab. "Mother is the invention of opportunity" is probably how the
rudimentary English subtitles would no doubt put it. And that really would be
your only reason for actually seeking this one out (though the relatively cheap
price is a close second). The movie itself is a tireless bore, straining
unsuccessfully to be at times shocking and by turns slightly amusing with
Three Stooges-style slapstick comedy (though I don't recall the Stooges ever
tossing around a severed breast at each other, but then again, I was never
their biggest fan and could have missed that particular short which was
undoubtedly entitled something like "Breast Friends"), but only managing to
evoke "get on with it already" and "is this all the gore there is" reactions
from the degenerate types that would have actually gone to the trouble of
buying this movie. I think that this is as good as time as any to lodge my
usual complaint in cases like this that the cover of the DVD is completely
misleading and that nowhere in the film does a guy with a chainsaw menace three
scantily-clad hookers. He uses a power saw and it's only on one chick at a
time and
they're already dead when he does it, so this one was starting out on my
bad side right from the get go. In the movie's defense, there wasn't anyway to
tell that this one was going to have a good dose of necrophilia in it, so that
element came as a nice surprise and kind of made up for the lack of
hooker-cowerings.  Now this guy who is dating these corpses is a taxi cab driver whose name is
Lam Gor-Yu and this is allegedly based on some real serial killer in Hong Kong
back in the early eighties who bumped off and then pumped off four or five
hookers. Those of us in the States are yawning right about now. Uh, killing
four of five hookers isn't even going to get you mentioned at the local
Neighborhood Watch meeting. You're not going to get any kind of attention until
you hit double digits and then to go national you'll probably need to expand
beyond streetwalkers (unless it's sweeps week or something and Dateline needs
an excuse to visit the red-light district of whatever burn-out city you're
terrorizing). So, you'll have to excuse us veterans of big time serial
killers, if we write this tale off as being page two stuff. There's also a
cultural divide at work with this movie as well. Whereas in the far east, taxi
cab drivers are seen as depraved sickos that would just as soon hump the
stiffening, cold corpses of their fares, over here in America our taxi drivers
are looked upon as heroes as evidenced by the hit CBS show Hack (which may have
been cancelled by the time you read this) where every week, a disgraced
cop-turned-cabbie helps people out who are all jammed up. I would also direct
you
to another taxi driver superhero featured in a movie about a taxi driver by
Marty Scorsese but whose name escapes me. I don't recall what exactly that
taxi driver did, but I seem to recall that it was something pretty heroic and
un-psycho (not like this Dr. Lamb sickie). And finally there is the Sega
videogame Crazy Taxi which just proves my point because it was made in the far
east and portrays taxi drivers as guys that smash into stuff and drive real
fast. Aren't you glad you live in a country that treasures its cabbies? I
just don't understand how a country could function if its call girls couldn't
depend
on cab drivers to get them from one john to the next. This is probably one of
the socio-economic reasons that China finally took over Hong Kong. You might
not have any freedoms, but at least the hookers can get where they're going
safely.  Directors Billy Tang and Danny Lee (who plays the lead cop in the movie also
named Lee by some strange coincidence. I just pretended that he was playing
himself, but then noticed in his filmography that he has played guys named Lee
a total of thirteen times. He probably has problems remembering his character's
name or something, so they just use his real name. Either that or he really is
a Hong Kong cop and all these movies are dramatizations of his ickiest and most
exciting cases.) show us over and over that they really have no idea how to make
an effective serial killer movie (and anymore the best way to do it is simply
not to do it at all - I think I speak for all of us when I say that we are
currently suffering from what Medved or Falwell or one of those family-friendly
film critics that I trust with my life would call "serial killer fatigue").
This is
apparent right from the beginning when they serve up the obligatory prologue
that is supposed to show us how little Lam became such a twisted freak that a
Category III Hong Kong movie needed to be named after him. It's mish-mash of
parental neglect, abuse, and his own dirty thoughts that mold him into the fine
young loner he eventually becomes. Lam's the kind of kid who wants a little
pudding (I really mean pudding here - he is, after all about ten years old at
this point, so cut out the potty thoughts!) and tries to earn twenty cents by
pulling his sister's pants off. And to think, I spent my youth setting up
lemonade stands and stealing from the old lady that lived next door. He has an
evil step mother who hits him and a father that doesn't see anything wrong with
whatever little Lammy wants to do. Lam misses his real mother, who is dead,
but he tries to keep her memory alive by peeping his dad and step mom when
they're doing something that adults do when they love each other very much,
i.e. screaming that they're about to orgasm. Somehow this makes Lam into a
crazed loner that lives at home with his family doing strange stuff like
complaining about how he hates "the dirty women" and pre-ordering the Babylon 5 DVD box set (and I always had him pegged as a fan of Farscape).  The movie sacrifices all its drama when it's told in flashback by Lam while
he's in custody at the police station. I'm the kind of guy who once a
confession has been beaten out of suspect, would just as soon have them sign a
statement the cops have filled out for him and pack it in so that I could be
home in time to see that Jim Belushi sitcom that all of America (real Americans
that is - not the "too cool for school" types that pretend like they don't
watch it) has fallen in love with. Not these guys though. We have sit there
and watch the flashbacks where he strangles chicks, hacks them up (mostly off
camera, so don't get too excited - though red liquid sprays all over a few
times), serves them up his leg of Lamb, if you know what I mean, and generally
causes the woman cop to barf all over whenever they're watching the video that
he made of all this. The movie manages to plod for the first thirty minutes as
the cops stumble onto some dirty photos, trace them back to Lam, arrest him and
his entire family and then beat him up, until it becomes clear that he doesn't
mind the pain all that much. So then they put his family in a room with him
(after showing them the dirty pictures that he took of his niece. Hey, those
are
"art" photos! I was just trying to get her started in modeling!) and they beat
him up and cuss him out and finally he says that yes, I killed a
couple hookers. The cops search his house, find dissecting books, more photos
and severed breasts in bottles, one of which gets dropped onto a cop's back.
The expected hilarity ensues. The other cops make fun of the woman cop who the
boobie landed when she complained that her back now itched and they said that
she
was going to get "sloughing" disease. That's the kind of office-style humor
that I think has been missing from recent episodes of NYPD Blue. You just want
to tell those guys to lighten up a bit, just like these jolly cops in Hong
Kong. I'm not real sure why this movie has a reputation for anything at all, let
alone one for being shocking or anything. There isn't anything in here that we
haven't seen done a hundred times before in other sleazy films. Can I really
be so jaded that seeing a guy bang a corpse elicits a glance at the clock
to see if this will also be the climax of the movie and signify that it's just
about all wrapped up (and after the whole severed breast gag where can you go
anyway?)? Yup, I sure can be that jaded. But it's not just jaded moviegoers
who watch this and mentally note that as far as being delightfully scuzzy, this
one can't hold a candle to a movie like Beautiful Girl Hunter (and I don't
even think that one had necro in it!). Other than the prologue and Lam's
babbling about dirty women and innocents, none of the flashbacks serve to shed
any light on what motivates this guy to do not just what he did, but how he
accomplished it. Being a former profiler myself (I never missed an episode of
the hit NBC series), I know that the ritual of the kill is the most important
thing to these dopes and serves as a window on their soul (except that I don't
believe we have souls, so I guess it would be a window on their hang ups and
kinks, which sounds more titillating anyways). We get nothing from this movie.
All we have is this guy killing a couple of broads and chopping them up. There
are slight stabs (hawhawhaw) at style in this movie with rain drenched shots and
other techniques which try to show us that Tang and Lee can move the camera
around and use different colored lights, but much of the movie is shot in
plain-Jane fashion at the police station, so it just looks like a
run-of-the-mill
Hong Kong flick with some semi-elaborately staged kill scenes. If you're
looking for an icky Hong Kong movie that lives up to its rep, you need to see Ebola Syndrome . That one went over the top and stayed there, proud of its
nasty nature and infused with enough dark humor to keep you wincing and
smirking at the same time. It was crude and gross, but you weren't bored. In Dr. Lamb, you may as well be watching some American movie about a serial killer
for as little new ground as this one trod. Nothing worth noting in this scurvy
entry in the genre except for the occasionally hilarious subtitles. As one guy
tells the police after they beat him, "my bladder is injury". Yeah, well my
brain is tumor, so suck it up and give us a disgusting movie worthy of the
label and not this wannabe.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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