final_flash

An okay drama that’s just mid

Everything about this drama is just mid. Average. Okay. There is nothing outstanding about it, it spends most of the time just cruising along as medium speed and medium pace with hardly any strong emotional investment in any of the characters. Wayne Lai is completely wasted here as the character he plays is completely two-dimensional as this nice guy ex-stuntman and this does not change even 21 episodes in, and I know it will not change due to the pacing and story beats happening. The only character worth watching is again with the awesome Rebecca Zhu as this strange wildcard of a person who suddenly returns home. Despite her past being the most interesting, it is barely touched upon, again wasting a huge opportunity. I really wanted to like this drama because Brian Chu gets to be a lead character and I do thoroughly like his acting such as in Al Cappacino, but here he is like a plank of wood with rarely any facial emotions outside of his typical thousand yard stare. Overall, this is not a bad drama, but it’s nothing exceptional either, it is just average and that is a huge shame.

Update: I just completed watching this series today and well… it is still pretty average. There were some touching moments, but overall it doesn’t shift my rating. What I found hilarious at the end was the romance between Brian Chu and Rebecca Zhu’s characters. Brian just suddenly blurts out “Hey, let’s be together” but he doesn’t love her and she just brushes it off. This made sense as they both has no romantic moments together in the drama. But, suddenly, in the final episode in a flash forward to the future scene for 1 minute we see the implication that they are together without the show outright stating it. Yes, it is really cheap for not showing us them getting to the romance stage, but at least I can say it is a better love story then Twilight. Literally.

You know, the entire show kept asking if 輕功 was an actual thing, and we see some implications that 輕功 does indeed exist, but I think the show missed out on an opportunity here. If 輕功 was real in the world of the drama, surely 氣功 is real, and if 氣功 is real then surely 九陽神功 is real, and if 九陽神功 is real…

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A disappointing drama despite having legendary actors

You know, I wondered if anything else could take legendary actors and put them in average dramas for us to watch like they did with Bowie Lam and D.I.D 12 this year, and this gave me my answer. Yes. You have proper great actors like Jordan Chan and Simon Yam that do amazing jobs in their roles, and yet the drama is terrible. Just awful!

So what is the story? The driving plot of the whole drama is that some white dude with a beard, who is in a room with huge monitors showing stock market trends, wants the Hong Kong stock market to crash. Why? I don’t know. He just wants it to happen gosh darn it! To make it happen he has some outside help to make it happen like this woman with an Australian accent called Anna and this crazy gangster played by Peter Ho. I cannot hear half the stuff the white dude says because he speaks too quietly and slurs his words together. And he is always seen in that huge room with the monitors with huge graphs and is never seen anywhere else, even as the drama ends he is still there throwing a tantrum. Because we never get a clear motivation on why he is targeting Hong Kong specifically, it is all very shallow and we get no depth. It is just “me want HK economy to collapse, lol” and that’s it. Wtf? Why not the UK? Why not USA? Heck, why not Singapore? Nope, is had to be Hong Kong

The drama starts off with a sting gone wrong. Jordan Chan is part of the Organized Crime department. He and his mentor try to arrest a group of gangsters in a sting operation, but Peter Ho - as the boss of the gangsters - managed to strap an explosive watch onto Jordan’s mentor’s wrist. He makes Jordan beg for his mentor’s life before pressing the button to activate his mentor’s explosive watch anyway. His mentor jumps into the water to save Jordan’s life while Peter uploads part of a clip he recorded of Jordan begging to make it look like he was begging for his own life.

Jordan later gets moved from Organized Crime
to the EU department because of what happened. He refuses to explain to his wife what happened that day, thus driving a wedge between them, and everyone thinks Jordan is a coward.

While in the EU team he meets his new team, which includes the nearly retired EU driver played by Simon Yam. Jordan continues his investigation into Peter Ho while doing his EU duties despite not being allowed to investigate crimes anymore.

Jordan has some great scenes showing off his police sense and understanding how to approach situations to deescalate and handle situations well. He also has great observation skills and notices things that others can miss. When he is doing this stuff he is great to watch, but then we have scenes where he is trying to be a better husband and father. These scenes are difficult to watch because he and the woman who plays his wife - Lynn Hung - have nooo chemistry at all. Just none! Even when they start to make improvement in their relationship, you don’t see them as husband and wife and just as friends who happen to live together.

Was Peter Ho a good villain? Despite spending the entire drama speaking mandarin to Jordan, I found this to be the best move to make because that was his native language and he was able to emote really well. I found him equally fun to watch and menacing at the same time because he had the charisma to appear like a gang leader while demonstrating in many scenes how smart and tactical he was at planning operations against the cops. The only thing that ruined his character was how he could have easily just shot Jordan at the beginning and prevented all the headaches Jordan would give him, but he instead let Jordan live to suffer the death of someone close to him (his mentor). I found that really dumb. He dies at the end after kidnapping Jordan’s wife and locking her in a police van filled with C4 explosives, telling Jordan it came time for Jordan to pay. That made ask why didn’t he shoot Jordan in episode 1?! Come on! Jordan manages to finally shoot Peter in the neck, setting off the C4 bomb countdown as the timer was linked to Peter’s heartbeat.

Then we have Aarif Lee who plays a fellow EU officer. He has a particular bias against Jordan because after the incident with the mentor, Aarif’s father made the decision to keep Jordan in the police force, which cost him a potential promotion. Despite witnessing great police work done by Jordan, Aarif spends most of the first half of the drama just being an unreasonable prick against Jordan. This got really annoying really fast and should have been resolved much sooner.

The drama tried to be more international so it had a mix of many languages in it, from cantonese to mandarin to hindi to english. The problem is that this got very annoying to watch as you had to suddenly focus on the subtitles to understand some things being said, and not helping things either was the terrible audio mixing done. Some scenes the speech was fine, others it is too quiet, so you have to turn up your speakers to hear it. And then suddenly as the episode ended, the ending song would play loud af and scare you out of your seat because you were just watching a quiet dialog scene. Why do this? They should fire the sound guy.

And to top it off, you have people who try to speak cantonese but you can immediately tell cantonese was not their main language so it comes out all wonky and weird. I found this really distracting. Get a speech coach or just use the language you are more comfortable with. For example, Cecilia Han is clearly a native speaker of mandarin, so when she attempted cantonese I just cringed so much. And there is this guy who speaks with a perfect English accent when having chats with Anna and her Australian one, and then switches back to cantonese immediately. I don’t understand these scenes because that man and Anna can speak canto, so why switch to english?

Simon Yam was great in his role of EU driver as he was the oldest member of the team but had great advice for everybody. He refused to be promoted because his wife had early onset alzheimer’s disease so he didn’t want the extra responsibility of work to stop him caring for his wife. I found that really touching and Simon really played his role very well. At the end, Simon makes the ultimate sacrifice by saving Jordan’s wife from the van with the C4, then driving into the harbor to prevent loss of life. As he got ready to do this he called Jordan to tell him to look after his wife with tears streaming down his eyes, and it was great… up until his van hit the barrier and everything became CG, including the explosion. The CG was terrible, like think Playstation 2 era game graphics.

Speaking of the bad CG, it feels like they ran out of money after spending most of it on the cast. The effects were just terrible no matter how you looked at them, and there is this constant feeling that certain things had to be cut to save money and this persists throughout the entire drama.

There was a part of the drama trying to discuss the prejudices that Hong Kongers have against South Asians, in this case Indians, and how they assume they are all crooks. I found myself not really caring about this subplot because it was so obviously forced into the drama as there was no racism up until that plot point, then suddenly everybody is prejudiced against South Asians. Once that part of the drama was over, there was no more racism against South Asians. Like what? I understand these are important topics but this was so clearly forced in. Just focus on the cops catching bad guys.

The drama’a ending was very unsatisfying. The cops manage to save the Hong Kong economy from collapsing but the white dude from the beginning still wanted to being down the Hong Kong stock exchange so ordered his minions to sell sell sell! The Hong Kong elite talk about using their assets to buy buy buy and keep the Hong Kong stock exchange from collapsing, and then one guy had a bright idea. This young man stood up, and without a hint of hesitation, said that maybe they could save the Hong Kong economy and stock exchange by depending on the Hong Kong public. His plan was to drop a hint to the public to buy specific stock, which they would guarantee would give a good return, so this would encourage the public to buy buy buy and thus save the Hong Kong economy from collapsing. All the elites realized they would not have to buy stocks at a loss agreed immediately because of course they would, and somehow the public really took the bait and bought those stock. I know this was meant to be portrayed as Hong Kongers coming together to save their own economy, but in reality it was rich people basically tricking the public into buying stock that have a high chance of losing value in the future so they wouldn’t have to swallow that loss themselves. Wtf?

It ends with the Hong Kong economy being saved and that white dude getting very upset. And that’s it. Nothing else. That white dude doesn’t get arrested or anything, we just cut to the cops getting on with their lives and then the drama ends. Ha?? What??

Just awful.

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Best cop drama of 2025 by far

When I first heard about this drama, I had no expectations since I did not want to go in with high hopes, only for them to be dashed because the drama sucked. Well, I can tell you guys now, this drama was great. For now, it is the best HK cop drama of 2025. There were so many high profile actors in this drama that I was worried it would suffer the same "too many protagonist" issue we have with other dramas *cough* Mission Run *cough*, but somehow it worked out.

The story follows three main characters: Bosco Wong as a Senior Inspector of HK Police, Kenneth Ma as a Senior Investigator of the ICAC, and Moses Chan as a DOJ Prosecutor. It covers how these 3 departments later work together - and later become friends - to deal with the big bad. They all have their own personal subplots to deal with, which provided great character building and depth to each of them. And these characters are interwoven so well that it naturally brings them together, which is just how things should be!

So who is the big bad? This drama wastes no time in letting you know who it is, and it is a bastard played by Dominic Lam. Man, I really missed watching this actor in action. Whenever he plays a good character, it is always really empty and shallow, which is quite strange to me, but whenever he plays the bad guy... man I just really hate the character because he plays the bad guy so well. Here, he is a really rich business man who does so many illegal behind-the-scenes deals to make himself extra rich., such as organ trafficking and selling firearms. This guys trusts nobody and so has no family or true friends, just people he finds useful until they are not, and when people are no longer useful he gets rid of them. A true villain and he really shines here. You know from episode 1 he is the big bad, and he evades capture while tormenting the main characters all the way until the last episode. I loved watching this guy as the bad guy.

The main character who suffers the most is Bosco. The 1st episode starts off with a bang as he is escorting a witness, played by Moon Lau, to court to get on the witness stand to testify against Dominic. On the way there, a bunch of mercenaries turn up and start shooting at the cops and killing everybody, just insane action at the beginning - bang bang bang! Bosco does his best but ends up getting knocked unconscious while his entire team was killed by the mercs and Moon Lau is kidnapped so could not make the stand. The only survivors were Bosco Wong and his colleague played by Raymond Cho. Everyone suspects a mole in the police, and all suspicion goes to Bosco because he led the team and survived the onslaught, but of course since he is the main character it's obviously not him.

Raymond Cho just so happened to be the uncle of Kenneth Ma, and so Kenneth doesn't believe his uncle would have been the mole and directs all his ICAC efforts against Bosco. There was a lot of animosity against Bosco until later we discover Raymond really was the mole, making things very awkward for Kenneth. Just when Raymond was going to testify to admit he was the mole because he was being blackmailed, he was once again threatened with his wife's safety, so on the stand he says Bosco was the person who made him do the things he did during episode 1. Nobody believed him as it was obvious he was lying, so Bosco was reinstated as a cop with all cops suspecting him of being bad.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, Bosco is kidnapped from his home - along with his wife - to an abandoned oil rig where they do illegal dark web live streams of underground Fight Club, with many people putting bets to see who would survive and who would die in these Battle Royale fights. Meanwhile, the women who are kidnapped get strung up in their nightgowns and whipped on livestream to perverts watching and paying to see more. Bosco only just got back with his wife - played by Jacky Cai - and his wife was pregnant with his child, so this made it extra difficult to watch. Dominic taunts Bosco repeatedly over this fact to make sure Bosco continues to fight in the arena. Man, they eventually escape but at the cost of his wife's life as she is shot by Dominic.

Then we have Moses Chan, a close friend of Kenneth Ma, and who is trying his best to put Dominic behind bars but is unable to because of lack of evidence and witnesses. His love interest played by Jessica Hsuan was an architect but ended up going to prison after her boss - played by Pat Poon - pushed his crimes onto Jessica after she noticed there were some strange numbers with the accounting and gave the details over to Kenneth to investigate. When Jessica ended up in prison, Kenneth felt so guilty for getting her in there that he didn't know how to face her and never visited her for those 8 years. Moses, though, never gave up and kept visiting her and doing his best to get her out. He has a daughter played by Regina Ho who ends up becoming a victim of an illegal organ trafficking ring and getting her kidneys harvested. Why? Believe it or not, it was to save Pat Poon as his kidneys were failing. Pat Poon was a business partner of Dominic, so Dominic was going to hook him up with a new kidney to save his life. They took one kidney but problems occurred that caused the transplant to fail, so they were going to take Regina's other kidney, but luckily the good guys managed to find her and save her.

When Jessica gets out of prison, her first step was to plan revenge against Pat and Dominic because she found out they worked together at the time she was framed and put in prison. She befriended a group of women while in prison, who all decide to help Jessica get revenge out of gratitude for her helping them while locked up. She managed to get a large sum of money from Pat Poon by threatening him at a restaurant, and then used that money to fund her operations to get revenge. With one of her allies, she managed to murder Pat Poon in hospital via lethal injection rather than let the police arrest him after they had enough evidence to nail him. That scene of her coldly telling Pat how she made all the arrangements to make sure Pat suffered kidney failure and then having the chance to go in and kill him was all planned by her. It was a great scene. Sadly, she doesn't go after Dominic because the main characters work out what she did and convinces her to not go down that route, so she turns herself in and ends up back in prison. If there was a character that needed more screen time it would be Jessicas. I wanted more!

We later find out there was another mole in the police department, and this mole was a high ranking one. The drama did great casting here and cast two people who could suspect because historically they have both played bad guy roles: Cheung Kwok Keung and Lawrence Ng. This made it difficult to guess who it was, especially since Lawrence Ng was Bosco's mentor in this drama so Bosco also didn't want to believe his mentor was a bad cop. We eventually discover it is actually Lawrence Ng that had been a secret partner of Dominic since the beginning, but instead of Lawrence just going ham and turning into an evil bastard like he does in his other face-turn roles, he maintains his demeanor and said he only wanted to be a good police officer and help the public, it was just that he kept getting held back by all the red tape. He finally turned witness against Dominic to point out every evil deed he had helped cover up for the bad guy as a way of atonement for his past crimes.

Eventually, the 3 mains get enough evidence and witnesses to nail Dominic and put him behind bars. There was a very clever plan to waste Dominic's time and delay the court date so they could get more evidence by arresting Dominic and detaining him for 48 hours at the police station, and then once he was released he was detained by the ICAC for another 48 hours. Finally, they had enough evidence so when Dominic went to leave the ICAC, he was re-arrested by the cops, and since it was the weekend and he missed the court date, he would have to wait over the weekend to the Monday before court can begin. This was a genius plan by Moses that had me thinking why don't we have more clever tactics like this in other dramas? As Dominic realized he was going to lose the court battle, he had a group of mercenaries storm the courtroom and kill the guards, taking control of the entire courtroom and Dominic basked in his bad guy monolog to everybody in that courtroom. This was great scene because he was so full of himself that when the good guys started fighting back, he just ran like coward, proving he was all talk. This led to a great chase scene that in turn led to a great car park scene, where Bosco and Dom played chicken in their cars, trying to ram into each other. It ends with Bosco getting the upperhand and was about to finish off Dom, but the bros - Moses and Kenneth - appear and stop him from doing it, saying it wasn't worth it and he would end up in prison instead. Bosco stands down, and just as his does, Dom drives his car towards Bosco and knocks him out. Dom ends up in prison anyway for his crimes and Bosco is in a coma, able to spend his coma time with his wife until she forced him to wake up and be a cop again to help people. I have never seen Bosco act so well like at this scene, it was very touching and tugged at the heart strings.

Despite the great scenes, this drama did have three things that annoyed me. The first of these was Him Law. That guy can act, that is for sure, but it feels like he keeps getting typecasted into these roles where he does really stupid and impulsive things that get him into trouble. He was a cop that served under Bosco and had learning difficulties so was unable to get promoted due to failing the written exam. He later takes an investigation too extreme and accidentally kills a gang member he was interrogating and tried to get rid of the evidence. Unfortunately for him, Lawrence Ng found CCTV footage and blackmailed him into assassinating Dominic and doing various things to undermine Police investigations. This led to Bosco suspecting him and eventually discovering that Him was a mole. This culminates into Him regretting all his actions and holding Lawrence Ng at gunpoint during his inauguration ceremony to being made Commissioner of HK Police and telling everybody he was the corrupt cop before un-aliving himself. When I saw Him Law I had a feeling things would turn out this way and prayed that it wouldn't, but it did, and that made me so disappointed because it was so predictable.

The second issue I had was with the theme song. It is a good rock song for sure, but the issue is that they use the song for both the intro and the ending theme, and they make you listen to the entire song in the ending, so after every episode you are forced to listen to the entire song. After 25 episodes, that song really got on my nerves.

The final issue was with the last scene when Bosco visits Dom in prison to talk to him - for some reason. This scene had the worst dubbing I have ever seen in any drama. I understand the need for dubbing if the audio in a place is terrible and it was likely that room had too much echo, requiring the dub, but the dubbing here was so bad it had me going wtf. The sound was not balanced properly, the lips did not sync up with what was being said, and they make it worse but doing close ups of each character's face so you can clearly see this. This was meant to be a cool scene where Bosco's last words to Dom would be the title of the drama "執法者們", but the terrible dubbing really took away from the scene's impact, kinda like going to a theme park but the rides there were all go karts. Why?

Overall, despite the issues I had with the drama, this was a great drama that I would watch again in the future! Worth a watch!

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Starts off really promising and then farts at the end

I watched this back when it was first on TVB but I didn't write anything about it as I was not on kisskh at the time. But recently a suggested YouTube video played the intro music to this drama and it brought back so many memories, so I thought why not talk about it.

This drama started off really well and it felt special, like a break from the typical TVB nonsense as it was full of cool CGI and style. The Chinese title of the drama was very simple. just one word and it was designed in a very clever way along with some really cool style choices. And there were cool scene transition b-roll where it is a close up of Kevin Cheng and it panned a little around him, just like on the title screen with Raiden in Metal Gear Revengeance. I was excited to find out more about what was going on with the drama as the story initially felt really compelling and the whole thing was dripping with style, but holy crap, it fell hard on its face as the drama continued.

So the show is about vampires. Yes, vampires. Nothing wrong with that as long as they do it properly. And at first it felt like it was all mystical and cool, but we eventually discover that everything - and I mean everything - is purely scientific. That destroyed all the mystical aspects of the drama and immediately made it crap. Imagine if Journey to the West had Sun Wukong doing magical stuff because he was a deity, and then halfway through we discovered he was actually an android. How many WTFs would you throw at the drama? For a more real-world example, do you remember the awesome movie Highlander? There can only be one! It was all magical and mystical and it never deviated from that fact in the storytelling. And then, Highlander 2 came out and it goes "oh you thought it was mystical? No! All science and different planet stuff." That p***ed off a lot of people, and this was what happened to this drama for me.

So, to explain my disappointment I'll explain the story how I remember it. In the future, humanity is all messed up and near extinction because of a vampire virus. Yes, a vampire virus, so it was taking a page right out of the Underworld IP. Two uninfected humans from the future - yes I said the future - played by Joel Chan and Kay Tse decided to take a sample of the virus and travel back in time to retrieve an extinct holy water that could cure the virus. How do they know this could cure the virus? Dunno, it was simply brought up without much explanation from a terribly voiced computer AI. While they were flying to the past in their time machine, they encountered problems that led to crashing, leaking of virus, Joel Chan and Kay Tse getting infected, and then the both of them emerging 500 years in ancient China where they went crazy and started biting everyone.

While these new vampires were going nuts and biting everybody and making new vampires, Kevin Cheng and his band of Imperial Guards from ancient China - yes Imperial Guards who were supposed to be guarding the Forbidden City but were now outside - were on a mission to defeat the vampires who were terrorising the town. They obviously lose because they were only human, but then suddenly all the guards - including Eddie Kwan - get struck by lightning and become immortals with superpowers. Yes, immortal just like immortals in Highlander so they can only die by being beheaded. Now we have human immortals and vampire immortals, both with super powers running around unchecked. The immortals continue their mission to hunt down vampires to the modern day with the belief that they would become human again when all vampires are destroyed.

Since this was a TVB production, you bet your ass that the characters all decide to set up base in Hong Kong because you know... Hong Kong is a great place to be when you are immortal and stuff. I didn't really mind this too much. There were some great effects and fight scenes, some great - if predictable - conflicting drama when Eddie Kwan, as an immortal, decided to make his son into a vampire so that he wouldn't die, but it is all overshadowed by the darn annoying reveal that vampirism was a virus and there was time travel involved. They didn't just jump the shark, they skipped over the blue whale as well.

Besides my main complaint, there were other issues. The main cast loved going to Amsterdam for some reason, and the story makes everything - and I mean everything - happen in Amsterdam. Where was that super magic holy cure water? Yes, it is in Amsterdam. This was purely because TVB had a tight budget so they had to choose one country and then write the entire story based in that country to save money. This meant that vampires also came from there, which made me laugh because weren't vampires historically from Transylvania, Romania? Not here, everything is in Amsterdam, yo. Every time there was a scene where they had to return to Amsterdam I shook my head like why Amsterdam? I bet they only went there for the redlight district and to smoke weed at the cafes while they tried to write themselves out of the plotholes.

Speaking of plotholes, the biggest one was how the immortals came to be after getting struck by lightning. I thought maybe some higher being gifted them that power to fight the vampires, but the drama never gives us a true explanation. We are given a half-assed explanation that some things cannot be explained by science. Wtf, the drama used science to explain vampirism but the immortals we have nothing?

The vampire acting in this drama was also so over-the-top it was hilariously bad. When Joel Chan and Kay Tse use their vampire modes they get this really stupid growling voice and they do the old-school Hong Kong movie ghost claw hand pose that kept making me laugh when I saw it. It was so bad, man, you have no idea. Joel Chan being the big bad was not a problem for me because he had the acting chops to pull it off, but damn the effects and poses they decided to use here were so bad that it removed everything intimidating about the vampire forms. Even the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer are scarier, and that's not saying much.

And man, I found Grace Chan so annoying as well. She spends the entire drama just hopelessly in love with Kevin but Kevin turns her down because he is an immortal. When she discovered this, she chose to become a vampire so that he didn't have to worry about her dying, completely ignoring the fact he wasn't into her to begin with. The best part about this is that in real-life she succeeds in getting with Kevin and they got married and had kids, so she sorta succeeded I guess?

Finally we have Kay Tse as the female lead and boy she sucked. She has no, and I mean NO charisma at all. I had more fun watching Anjaylia Chan being an awesome martial artist learning under Kevin but hiding her skills, but later she becomes a vampire. Kay Tse's acting is so wooden and I really did not like watching her, and she has no chemistry with Kevin at all. I have seen more chemistry between Kevin and Chun Wong (the fat guy in the drama) than between her and Kevin.

On the bright side, it does have a great intro song.

Ultimately, a real letdown of a drama. Kevin Cheng did have a topless scene showing off how buff he was despite his age of 47 at the time, but that doesn't make up for all the awfulness of this drama. This was just disappointing and it was made worse by having a great start and then doing a stupid science twist later that just ruined the entire mystical mood it started off with.

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Boring. How is a Moses Chan drama boring?

I won’t write too much as many have already spoken about this but I can tell you now this drama was so boring. Predictable and boring. And when it tries to get interesting, it made no sense like what? My goodness, I like Shaun Tam and the tone of his voice can be ASMR soothing but he was just annoying af here. Moses is also portrayed as some sort of single minded businessman with a lot of ambition, but was too forgiving for his own good. He also got annoying to watch. Best actor was Katy Kung, but that’s not saying much I mean she was surrounded by mediocrity.

But the biggest sin of the drama? They took a classic musical piece Vivaldi’a Four Seasons: Winter - particularly the Allegro non molto movement - and put lyrics in it! Why? Why do that? The lyrics were terrible and I swear the timing was a little off as well! They could have left the lyrics out and it would have been fine but no, now all I hear when I listen to Winter is 續… 好… 戲! Damn it TVB! You ruined a classic!

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Was expecting more

I am a huge fan of the original anime, so when this was announced for Netflix I was hyped!

And then it was released.

Dammit, I wanted to like it so much but the Netflix series ruined a lot of the good stuff with the anime. I liked the actor playing Yusuke, he was likeable, but they took huge liberties with the story to squeeze as much as they could into 5 episodes. They took many of the beginning arcs and stripped them down and tried to squeeze them into 5 episodes. Why? Was it a budget thing? They completed skipped some important character development arcs such as the Genkai Tournament, the 4 Saint Beasts, and the best arc the Dark Tournament. For example, instead of Yusuke earning a place as Genkai’s student, he is just taken to her home in the mountains and starts training.

The action scenes were really good for sure, but they butchered all the great character development and stories that made Yu Yu Hakusho great to begin with.

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What happened?

Part 1 had its problems and was not bad as it had a real gripping ending, but part 2… what were the writers thinking?

I don't know how important CSAT exams are, but this exam is one of the driving plot points of part 2. What makes no sense is that humanity faces extinction and yet all these kid could think about was getting into college. I am sure there are more important things to worry about than college entry at a time like that. This becomes such a central plot point that one of the characters literally goes insane after finding out the 2023 CSAT exams were cancelled and were to be held in 2024. This leads to the drama ending not to a final showdown against the alien threat, but the final boss being this kid who has gone insane and had somehow activated god-mode in his final rampage.

The ending was anti-climatic and skips ahead to 2024 where humanity has wiped out 99% of the menace so had the threat under control. Okay... so we are supposed to imagine the final desperate struggle and not be shown it? Instead we were given teenaged angst drama with automatic rifles? Sure.

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Great drama, terrible main theme song

I love this drama, always puts a smile on my face.
It’s a shame Linda Chung cannot sing.
It has a fantastic cast and great story that is just fun and gripping from beginning to end.
But Linda Chung really cannot sing.
Bobby Au Yeung is fantastic to watch and Joey Meng is darn beautiful in her role, it just blows my mind.
And yet Linda Chung just really cannot sing at all.
Overall a great drama to watch and great to rewatch, just remember to skip the intro and ending credits because the singing is terrible.
Did I mention Linda Chung cannot sing?
Seriously, who thought she could sing and allowed her to sing so many songs at TVB? She has this low hoarse voice that makes songs sound like they are being wrung out of her throat instead of being sung, and yet somebody at TVB thought “yes, she can sing, make her sing!”
Other than that small black mark, great show! Just stop Linda singing, for the love of God.

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Anthology of 3 short movies, 2 of which disappoint

This movie is an anthology of 3 short movies. The first is called The Chink that talks about a pop star who moves into a new apartment as a secret love nest for her and her boyfriend slash manager. The second is called In The Mall following a KOL live streaming while walking around. The third and last movie is called The Tenement dealing with a rain soaked mysterious woman blocking the way for the residents of an apartment block.

The first two short movies are terrible and boring af, I did not care what was happening to the characters because they were all huge a**holes and deserved what they got. This is a shame because the second movie had Jerry Lamb in it, and I do enjoy watching him act but he was so unlikeable here.

Now, the last movie is the best of the bunch as it has a group of apartment block strangers working together to deal with this strange wet figure blocking the stairway that seems to be kill anybody trying to leave the block. This movie had Richie Ren in it and it was so great to see him in a cantonese acting role doing his best to speak canto, and most of the funny and scariest moments were here as well, but sadly the ending was too abrupt due to the time constraints of the anthology.

The first two movies were so bad that I cannot rate them because it would just be a zero, but the 3rd short movie on its own pulls this up to a 6. If the third movie was able to become its own feature, this score could have been higher, but the bad aftertaste of the first 2 dragged it down.

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Hilarious! So much fun to watch!

Oh boy, the crew are back and already it has been great! I am 5 episodes in so far but I am already hooked. The first episode wastes no time in getting you acquainted with the main set up and the main characters, allowing you to watch them all get up to ridiculous activities and saying truly hilarious nonsense that it was masterful. The puns and really hokey olden day equivalent of modern day conveniences is always great to see and hear! This season has removed the whole Prince angle, and instead has Kalok Chow and JW become cops and immediately forced to go undercover by Raymond Cho. It all happens so quickly in episode 1 but I somehow found the pacing easy to follow.

The show so far is missing Hugo Ng and Jonathan Cheung, and from all the promo events I have watched, there is a good chance they won’t be appearing later either. This is a shame as I loved Jonathan in the first season being this really stupid moron who often spouts stupid stuff out of his mouth, such as the classic 衫長褲短. Instead, it seems Jonathan has been replaced by Hugo Wong.

Hugo Wong was a great surprise for me as I wasn’t expecting much from his performance, but he was hilarious to watch as this really dumb and clumsy Captain Jack Sparrow wannabe villain. The first episode with him fumbling an explosive because it was too hot convinced me that he was a good step-in for Jonathan this season.

I can’t wait to see what the other episodes bring. Bring it on!

Completed:

I have watched the entire drama and I can say this is a masterclass of M. Night Shyamalan plot twists. Man there are so many twists and turns that it had me going wtf? But the humor is still there and it is hilarious, but the weirdness did get on my nerves a bit near the end.

There are two major plot devices driving everything in the drama: the love forgetting wine that causes anyone to drink it to to forget their love and it’s extra amnesiac effects are random per person, and the forget-me-not medicine, which we find out later is created from specific bird droppings. Yes, a medicine that comes out of a bird’s anus. This medicine has heal all sorts of maladies, including the amnesiac powers of the love forgetting wine. Everything that happens is a result of those two things, and the ending was extra stupid because of this as well.

Hugo Wong had a really epic ending as he made the ultimate sacrifice at the end, but even though it was supposed to be a serious scene, he managed to make me laugh by saying to his daughter “remember to stop losing weight!” As his last words to her. He had such a tragic back story as well that I wanted him to survive. Watch the drama to see what I mean.

The most annoying character is by far the one played by Helen Ma. She was annoying from beginning to end as this really angry old woman looking for daughter, and even in a flashback we see in her youth she was still a hateful bitch. She just rubbed me the wrong way in this drama, so props to Helen Ma for pulling it off.

I won’t spoil the plot twists because it is part of the fun and you should watch it to know more the first season is by far better than this one, but this season was still fun to watch and hilariously funny at times. Worth watching!

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Wasted potential

I am up to episode 20 right now and I think it is enough to get some thoughts in before this drama wraps up for the New Year. This drama started off pretty well, setting up Carlos Chan as a Criminal Psychologist who had grown up with the extraordinary power of seeing briefly into the future to see when bad things happen. I thought it was going to be a drama where he gets mental flashes of danger like in the series Angel where Doyle/Cordelia gets these head splitting flashes of people who needed help. But nope, it is a very tame TVB affair.

I really like Carlos’ acting here because he really feels genuinely nice and easygoing. I think it is how he naturally is, so he melded into this role very well. I remember watching him act like a crazed terrorist in the film Detective VS. Sleuths and it didn’t suit him. It felt too forced. He definitely suits the handsome nice guy role, and I lapped it up.

The love interest is Hera Chan who plays a cop. I actually quite like her here as she is passionate about her job and getting real justice for victims. She is surrounded by red tape and people who ignore her insights because of how young she is. It is quite annoying watching experience cops pin blame on someone based on nothing but “intuition” or “instinct” when clearly there was not enough evidence and Hera pointing this out often.

And we get the big bad of the drama played by Nicholas Yuen. He works at a mortuary as a coroner and has a really sad back story. He is the most complex character in the series and I feel that Nick really delivered here in the role as someone who does questionable things and yet you sympathise with the guy. That is something really rare to see on TVB.

So the story is that Carlos grew up with this power to see briefly into the future and see bad things happen. He dad wanted him to become a lawyer but he refused and became a Criminal Psychologist. We later see him meet with Hera and Nick, and there is a rocky start and but suddenly they are best buds hanging around with each other. We even get scenes where Carlos’ mom thinks Nick and Carlos were a gay couple, it was quite funny. But these funny scenes are very few and far between the other stuff that happens in the drama.

We slowly find out how unhinged Nick is as he suffers from severe bipolar disorder and has some huge mental issues. This was because his father, who was a married man, slept with a prostitute and that prostitute gave birth to Nick. His father’s wife found out, so the wife paid a gigolo to seduce Nick’s mom so she would leave Nick’s father alone. This led to Nick getting disowned by the mom and ending up at an orphanage, and later a mental hospital because - understandably - this trauma as a kid really messed him up. So, in the modern day whenever he encounters people he deems as terrible mothers or bad husbands, he would end up killing them and then secretly sneering. Holy crap! We also find Nick is a compulsive liar, telling the truth and twisting some facts so that it seemed he was not at fault.

The drama also tried to have things extra spicy by making Nick’s father as the same man as Hera’s, so Nick and Hera are half-siblings. Hera accepted he was her older brother but things get crazy when her mother and father find out who he is.

Meanwhile, Carlos keeps getting future messages, phone calls and video calls from the future on his phone from a woman called Mary, who - coincidentally - looks exactly like Hera. She keeps telling him a crazy serial killer is out there and the cops are after her and also he shouldn’t start a relationship with her because he goes missing. And that’s it. Huh?

Man, Carlos’ future vision powers are so wasted in this drama. They introduce it right at the beginning when he was a small kid, but it only happens like 3 times in the entire drama and Carlos is unable to do anything about the visions. I mean if he recognises the place he would rush there, but so far 100% of the time he has seen something, 100% of the time it will happen and he is unable to stop it. Why even give him these powers when he cannot do anything about it? This is like giving a candy bar to a severely diabetic person, what were the producers thinking?

And the Mary - future Hera - thing has not been explained yet. We get flashes to the future of Hera being hunted by the cops while trying to find out where the missing Carlos is and where the serial murderer was, but it was poorly written into the drama. We only know it is a flash forward future scene when the screen makes it look like you are high off drugs and you see Hera wearing a black hat. All the future scenes go nowhere, we just see Hera getting chased by cops and people shouting at her but we ultimately go nowhere. Why introduce this? You could have left out the stupid unexplained future contact with Carlos and just made those future scenes as the final few episodes of the drama where Hera solves everything. We already know Carlos future vision changes nothing, this would have made it more streamlined and not all convoluted.

John Chan plays Hera and Nick’s father and boy his acting was something else. It was as expected as in other dramas, but the scenes when he is in despair and showing his regret over being a terrible father to Nick were so over-acted. He just hammed it up to 11, crying out like a sad old martial artist in a Jin Yong Chinese martial arts drama. The only thing missing was him screaming 天啊 and teaching Nick 獨孤九劍. What I fund weird was how such a weak-will guy ended up having a child with another woman especially since he is so afraid of his wife. Man, he is so under her thumb that the thumbprint is visible from space.

Mimi Kung plays the mother to Hera and man, her character in this drama I am not sure how to feel about. This is because I understand her feelings as a woman who has a husband who had cheated on her and had a child with another woman, but at the same time the decision to hire a gigolo to seduce the other woman and then dump her was simply disgusting. This led to Nick’s awful experience where he was abandoned by both parents and becoming mentally deranged. And yet despite finding out about all this, she felt no guilt and doubles down. We’ll see if she redeems herself later, but so far I really am not sure what to think.

And then we have Zoie Tam as Hera’s superior. She plays a tough and strict cop who butts head with Hera often at the beginning, but later they come to an understanding and mellow out. I actually quite like her character as it was acted out very well, adding complexity as we see her tough side and her vulnerable side when we find out how bad her relationship with her husband was, and later how she blamed herself for how bad things got after he was murdered. She was very convincing in her role, but there is one problem, though. Have you seen her in other dramas like The Learning Curve of a Warlord or The Exorcist’s Meter 2? She was pretty in those dramas, but here oh my goodness… who was the make up artist because they did her dirty. They made her look like Michael Jackson. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, just make sure it’a not white like Michael Jackson!

For now this drama is just average because so many flaws hold it back. The final few episodes might turn this all around so who knows, but let’s wait and see.

Up to episode 23: okay what just happened? Man, it turned out I was wrong and Nicholas Yuen (Duncan) was not the big bad but an obvious red herring planted by TVB to misdirect us. The big bad was actually the Director of the mental hospital. I really did not see that coming, but it explains a lot. The victims of the deaths were all connected as they were or knew someone who was a patient at the mental hospital. Since Carlos was getting too close to working out who it was, the Director purposely moved all suspicion to Nicholas. Nobody would believe Nick was innocent, it even had me convinced it was him, until Nick concocted a plan to expose the real culprit. It was quite clever and it ended in a final confrontation against them at a BBQ place in the middle of the night. In a smart move, Nick put up a small hidden camera to record the whole thing as the Director busted into his monologue of why and how he killed his victims.

In their struggle, Nick was stabbed multiple times and was heavily bleeding out, leaving the Director to pour gasoline everywhere to burn everything down and pretend that Nick had committed suicide out of guilt. Unfortunately for the Director, he slipped on some gasoline on the floor and fell over, hitting his head and passing out. Nick grabbed the hidden camera and crawled out of the BBQ building, just as Carlos and Hera conveniently arrived to call him an ambulance. The Director “seemingly” died in the fire, with a charred corpse found later in the building.

Sadly, Nicholas doesn’t make it and died in hospital, but was at least able to clear his name and prove his innocence. Damn, the acting here was phenomenal and I felt so bad for Nicholas when this all came to light. Nicholas actually said in his next life he would want to be the son of his father again, but I say no way dude. Your dad was a nice guy but he was also the worst father in the world.

One thing did ruin the aftermath of his death for me. In one scene near the end of episode 22, there was a flashback to when Carlos was giving a lecture on how to control your emotional state by cupping a fist inside the other hand and breathing slowly for a few minutes to get the emotion pass. Nicholas was in this lecture and used it to control his outbursts when he could, but projected onto the wall was a slide with the title “Emotininol Control”. That clearly meant to saying “Emotional” as in “Emotional Damage”. How quick would it have been to edit that and fix the typo? The moment I saw it, it ruined the scene for me, kinda like getting ready to make love but the other person had really smelly feet. It kinda ruins the mood.

After some sad scenes, I realised that there were still 3 episodes left and that the future Hera/Mary storyline was not explained. So what did we just sit through then? And the moment I thought that, a new killer was introduced who liked to pick up girls in a taxi and then kill them with hammers. Suddenly, at the end of episode 23, there is a sudden weather change with rain and lightning so Carlos and Hera take shelter at a bus shelter, and suddenly he receives a video call and he can see future Hera/Mary getting attacked by this new killer. I have a sneaking suspicion the new killer is really the Director who managed to escape and replace his body with someone else's. This is the TVB thing to do. I don’t know how they are going to top the tragic death of “Duncan” but I have a feeling the drama already peaked.

Completed watching: what the heck. This drama really peaked with Nicholas. After he died the rest of the drama turned into a huge wtf fest.

So I was right, the Director didn’t die. Instead the body that died was his future self. Pardon? Apparently in the future he was chased by cops and he jumped off a patio where he used to live and fell, but instead of dying he travelled back in time!! What the actual f? How? Why? In any case the Director meets his past self and tells him about the future and how to commit murders while he took on a fake identity. That evening when Nicholas confronted him, the future Director went to visit and they got into an argument. Yes, the Director argued with himself, and so present Director decided to murder future Director and use future Director’s body to pretend he had died. Meanwhile, the Director’s father, who coincidentally was the Midnight Murderer, also fell down the same patio in 2005 and ended up 20 years in the future where our present is. From here it goes crazy and the Director’s father wants to kill Hera, but instead gets killed by his present day son. Carlos gets a sudden flash of the future so knew where to find Hera so tries to save her but gets stabbed to death by the Director. Hera managed to finish off the Director with a broken bottle that Carlos conveniently broke and placed on the floor for her. At the end of the drama, her desperation in seeing Carlos again made her jump off that patio and travel to the past to meet younger Carlos and give him a hug.

The time travel nonsense made no gosh darn sense. Apparently all you had to do was go to this old apartment and then jump off a patio and then as you hit the ground you would somehow be safe and would end up somewhere else in time. Why? Never explained. It was such a lazy and stupid plot device because it made no sense! And Carlos’ future vision powers are also never explained. Not only were they never explained, but they were never useful until right at the end, and even then they could not save Carlos. It was as useful as the power to breathe underwater but being afraid of water.

And man, the Director’s father is only seen in the last episode and he instantly - despite being from 2005 - was able to use Hera’s smartphone to access the internet and find out about the future within a few hours. So you’re telling me he managed to unlock Hera’s smartphone and then know how to browse the internet on the phone when he was only familiar with 2005 tech? Man, back then we barely had 2G on our candybar phones back then! Such nonsense!

And Hera, my goodness she was so stupid like doing all the wrong things. Her stupidity led to all the crap happening at the end of the drama, like absconding after being arrested and getting Carlos killed because she was captured. And her plan at the end to jump off the patio to travel back in time was so premature! She should have gotten the Mark-6 lottery numbers and took them with her as she went back so she can rebuild her relationship with Carlos again AND be rich. What a wasted opportunity! And the time travel into the past was not guaranteed! The Director’s father travelled to the future, so the time travel rules are not explained and were unclear. Why did he travel to the future but the Director travel to the past? Why?

This drama was so dumb. TVB cannot do sci-fi to save its life. Look, TVB, my dude, stop with the sci-fi nonsense until you get a good writer to pen a good script for you. Stick to mystical until then. This is why The Exorcist’s Meter and it’s sequel were awesome.

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A great entry in the Rosy Business series

I have seen all 3 previous Rosy Business dramas, and I was so disappointed with the 3rd entry. It lacked Sheren Tang, but if the replacement female lead was good it would still shine. We had Myolie Wu who did her best but yeah... it was still a very disappointing drama. The twin brother story and the lack of any real romance was a real turn off for me.

This 4th entry still did not bring back Sheren Teng, instead it brought back Nancy Wu as the female lead when she only had supporting roles in the previous entries but dang... I really liked her in the role. The comparisons with Sheren Tang are unavoidable - as expected because she was playing a strong female leader type role - but I found myself actually really enjoying myself watching her in this drama. I know, this would be blasphemy for some people, but I found Nancy's scenes of vulnerability more convincing as she openly admits her feelings to the male lead and it doesn't wait until near the end of the drama, something that Sheren Tang never really did. I also loved how Nancy had so many outfits in the drama, even if some of them made her look like a Christmas tree, but I loved that she had such a varied collection of clothes to wear as it reflected her status on the show and what lady doesn't like to have many dresses? I know I love to have many! She plays a General Manager at a bank during 1920s Shanghai and is nicknamed the 7th Elder because her financial power ranks at number7 in the whole of Shanghai. Of course, in this position she has many enemies that want her to fail, especially her brothers. Oh yes, most of the plot is driven by one of her brothers as I will explain later.

Wayne Lai is - as always - amazing here. His character Chai Sup Chat was great to watch as he played a really stubborn businessman who kept failing at business because of his bad people skills. However, as an advisor in investment opportunities, he will always give excellent advice to return a profit to those willing to listen. He spends the start of the drama butting heads with Nancy Wu, but their interactions throughout the drama made their growing romantic feelings for each other very believable to me. I know many would say Wayne looks way too old for Nancy, but I disagree because love comes in many different strange forms, and how they drag each other out of dire situations they themselves could not have survived alone was a convincing reason for them to develop feelings for each other.

Spoiler warning: A great scene that was unexpected and quite refreshing was when Nancy took Wayne out for a trip to a beautiful dock and then she outright tells Wayne that she wanted to be with him. A woman declaring her love for a man and wanting to be with them was a big deal in the past because it was nearly always the man to make the first move. Wayne's shock and subsequent rejection, because he felt he was not up to her level and therefore felt he didn't qualify, led to one of the most dramatic scenes in the drama. Nancy was very rich and very beautiful, and she put aside her pride to do it, so the rejection was a huge humiliation for her. Gosh, I really felt bad her and I was screaming at Wayne, like wtf were you doing man? He clearly liked her as well, but his low self-esteem held him back from making that step.

Next we have to talk about Joey Law. I never liked his acting in previous dramas but he has improved a lot in this one, being this retired mercenary who would kill for money. His acting is still a little wooden, but it matched the role he played as a guy trying to escape his mercenary past and trying to live a normal life so that he could be with the girl who he had loved since they were kids. The action scenes with him fighting and showing off his physical prowess more than made up for his wooden acting, and he clearly bulked up for the role.

And who was he in love with in the drama? Why, Hera Chan of course! She was okay I guess, and this time the producers knew her long neck was something quite distracting so her outfits all had collars to help reduce the appearance of that neck. Thank you so much for that! She was pretty average overall with no real captivating scenes, but earlier in the drama she got on my nerves a bit for being this girl who would run off on her own because she wanted to see Joey. Luckily, this improved later on after her family accepted Joey and his past.

But boy, the person I really wanted to talk about was Edwin Siu. He had so many roles in this drama that I lost count. He played the half brother of Nancy Wu's character and he was trying to get his revenge on her, but there are so many plot twists involving him that it made my head spin, and yet it led to him being one of the most memorable villains in TVB history. When you first meet him in the drama, you'd notice how he kept "dying" and yet somehow managed to return with the same appearance but with a different name and a completely different personality. Edwin really had me intrigued as to what on Earth was going on and every time he was onscreen you had no idea what he was going to do next, and that type of chaos was what made him such a scary villain. He nearly managed to win as well, which I found quite a nice change, but it came down to a last minute save that was a little disappointing. I'll explain why later.

Although I really liked this drama, I still had a few scenes that had me going what? for example, Wayne Lai later started working for Nancy because he helped her deal with a huge issue previously, and as part of his condition to join he wanted to fire a group of women who were bad for the company. Nancy agreed to this numerous times and yet somehow, these people who were fired all came back or never left in the first place even when all evidence proved Wayne correct. And then later, they all get along as if this never happened in the first place. That was such lazy writing like what were they thinking?

Spoiler warning: And then we have the main villain played by Edwin Siu. He was such a great bad guy to watch from beginning to end, knowing how to fight and how to manipulate people so well, however he ended up revealing everything in episode 23, and just as he was about to win he gets shot to death by his "mother" for everything he had done up to that point. What I hated about this was that we were told how poor his "mother's" eyesight was, barely being able to see 1 foot in front of herself, and yet from 20 meters away she managed to shoot Edwin accurately with her handgun. And to top it off, the drama was 25 episodes long, so we had 2 episodes after where the Director had to force something else in to keep things interesting for the viewers, so - predictably - he shoved in a Japanese invasion to raise the stakes before the end. To be honest, the 4th entry could have ended at episode 23 because despite both main protagonist hard-headedness, Nancy decided to travel to Hong Kong (watch the drama to find out why) to meet with Wayne Lai and they had a great reunion where she sang to him while he was missing her. That would have been a good ending there.

Spoiler warning: So, the last 2 episodes did drag it out a bit with Nancy suffering poor memory due to a bullet injury slowly causing memory loss, but I got to admit the ending was great and I did like it a lot. Nancy gets lost in Hong Kong later and could not remember how to get back home, so she ends up in Kowloon. Wayne spends 3 years looking for her, and finally finds her during a Japanese bombing run. He finally managed to take her home where many other plot threads are also tied up. Wayne got to spend the next 28 years with Nancy proposing to her every year, with her telling him each time she would think about it when they were clearly already together. The final scene had them really old and together, which was a very romantic scene that was very touching. It made me forgive the dragging out of the final two episodes.

I loved this latest entry of Rosy Business and I personally recommend it, and I can see myself rewatching this in future because the ending was just great. Unlike the endings from the other entries where there was no romance at all or it was very short-lived, this showed them being together happily for many years. I know many would compare it to the ones with Sheren Tang and voice their disappointment, but my opinion is that the torch has been handed over from Sheren to Nancy, and Nancy did a great job!

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Best TVB ICAC drama yet, but that's not saying much

Every year, TVB does a short ICAC series to discourage people from doing any dirty money laundering. I understand the need for this, but at the same time almost every year the short ICAC series have been awful. Do you remember the last few years of these? Nope. Because they all sucked.

However, this year there has been a sudden jump in quality. The actors are more compelling to watch and we actually do care a little bit for the characters we're watching, like Kelly Cheung being pregnant but also head of the ICAC department. The first episode even threw in Kent Cheng, who was great to watch being this greedy villain. He sold it really well and I thought the entire 5 episodes would be ICAC trying to nail him and him avoiding all ICAC assaults until the very last episode. When Joel Chan secretly confronted Kent and Kent got suspicious, that scene got tense. It made for some great drama right at the start.

But sadly, it fell apart so soon. Instead of a 5 episode cat and mouse game with Kent and the ICAC department, it did the classic monster-of-the-week sort of deal where each episode was it's own case, and the cases all ended without a satisfying conclusion, instead slapping onscreen text explaining what happened next. The classic rule for good story telling is SHOW, NOT TELL! When the ICAC made a move to arrest Kent Cheng at the end of the 1st episode, it doesn't show us what happened and just cuts to the text. Talk about giving the viewers blue balls! The other cases after episode 1 were all not as good and I have already forgotten them all.

This is not the worst part. Man, the music is still terrible. They took the classic ICAC theme music and remixed it but it still sounds awful. I think it is about time for an update TVB. Change it! And my gosh the character played by Yvette Chan was so annoying, just pure naïveté and stupidity that just got on my nerves. For all 5 episodes.

Overall, the quality is much better than previous years but there is still huge room for improvement.

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What a pile of crap

The only redeeming feature of this movie is Philip Keung in the third story, but even then the story is really weak and the only scary thing was the terrible script Philip was given to work with. He did his best but it was as immersive as a dirty toilet bowl.

The first story involved two friends, one who wanted to be a screenwriter and one who wanted to be a director. They go to a special props shed with many preserved animals, where the scriptwriter writes this amazing serial murder script and wants to be the director of the movie. The aspiring director gets upset at this and claims the screenwriter was being selfish, there is a scuffle, and the screenwriter predictably dies. Aspiring director guy panics and, predictably, he put the screenwriter’s body into a suitcase and pours formaldehyde all over him to preserve the body. The director guy later is able to make the movie using his friends script but then oh no, the cops ask him questions about his missing screenwriter buddy. He claims he hasn’t seen his friend in months and realises the cops are gonna find the location where he killed his friend so decides to go back to burn the place down. This is when - somehow - he discovers his screenwriter buddy had murdered 3 people in different ways as inspiration for his script and had the bodies hidden around the prop shed, which he somehow also discovers. Plot twist, the screenwriter wanted to be the director because he knew it would be the first and last film he would make as he would be arrested soon after it. Oh no, I don’t care.

The story was boring and the deaths were all so crap and had no stakes at all so I didn’t care what happened to anybody. I didn’t even care about the two male leads because they were so unlikeable as well. My biggest issue with this story is that a few months have passed already since all the murders, but when the director guy finds the bodies they are all still fresh and not rotting at all. Do you think corpses stay fresh for months and not rot when stored in the Hong Kong heat? I don’t care how much cling film you use and formaldehyde you use, no body can look that fresh for that long. Also, won’t some dude who doesn’t work as an undertaker be refused purchasing of large quantities of formaldehyde? I am sure you need a lot for 4 cadavers. And also that suitcase where the screenwriter was thrown into must have been made using some legendary material because it was clearly a cloth-like material suitcase and yet none of the formaldehyde leaked out, not even through the zipper gaps. They should have gotten a suitcase sponsorship to promote how great the waterproofing was inside and outside.

The 2nd movie was a slightly better story about 2 girls as aspiring screenwriters (see a trend here?) and the younger girl copying some of the ideas of the older girl to write a great screenplay. The older girl was slightly upset about it, but ultimately let it go. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the younger girl goes missing and the older girl starts seeing the younger girl and thinks she’s a ghost. Oh no! We find out later the younger girl got into a taxi and the taxi driver murdered her because… I dunno. The older girl was hypnotised to try and bring back any useful information about what could have happened to the younger girl. The taxi guy just so happened to work at the same studio as the older girl so he tried to silence her. Suddenly, as the older girl was riding in his taxi and realised the taxi man was likely the murderer, the cops arrive and arrest him. Older girl’s colleague appears and says “yeah I totally suspected him so I called the cops.”

My biggest issue with the 2nd story is that we do not get given any context into why the taxi driver killed the younger girl. We do not truly understand his motivation, the story just goes “oh she died he killed her” and that’s it. We get one scene where taxi man talks to his wife and his wife shouts at him for a variety of things, as if it was trying to imply he was looking for a way to release his pent up anger but it wasn’t enough and I wasn’t convinced. And the “ghost” situations were all in the older girls mind as a result of hypnotism. That was lame.

The third story is the best of the bunch but that’s not saying much, that’s like saying the diahrrea I did today was better than the diahrrea I did yesterday. This is the story that has Philip Keung, who wakes up on a wet floor with temporary amnesia. As he runs around this warehouse he keeps seeing ghostly figures appearing and disappearing around him. Eventually he meets a woman and starts talking to her as if he was very familiar with her but she won’t follow him as he is trying to make her leave with him due to the ghosts that were there. She eventually goes with him and in a room where he saw a ghost there was no ghost there, so she tries to leave and kicks Philip in the balls using a very fake and terribly unconvincing manner. Later we discover Philip was a triad boss and his wife wanted to leave him, so he killed his wife and poured acid all over her body so she wouldn’t leave him, and then be became a vagrant out of guilt. Later some guys drugged him and his friend and took them to a warehouse to conduct illegal experiments as a way to cure this disfigured and ill woman at the behest of some guy. Philip woke up and killed a lot of the people at the warehouse out of anger and passed out due to being injected with something during one of the scuffles. All the ghost stuff and the woman he was talking to were all in his head as he was recovering from the injection. He catches up to the disfigured woman and is about to lill her when all of a sudden someone smacks him at the back of the head and kills him and the story ends.

Story 3 was a confusing mess and what illegal experiments were being conducted to fix what ailment of the woman? Nothing is explained. The story started off pretty good as Philip was dealing with possible supernatural stuff, but it immediately fell in quality the moment the woman - as his hallucinated wife - kicked him between the legs. It was poorly edited and looked incredibly fake that it took me out of the immersion immediately and the rest of the story just fell apart.

Avoid this mess of a movie.

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The CGI is pretty good but this drama is so full of things that annoyed me.

It started off pretty well and gave us enough exposition to explain the current situation, but suddenly stuff goes sideways and we see how inept and pathetic the Republic of Korea Armed Forces were. They are so undermanned that they had to rope in 3rd year High School students to help fill in the numbers.

Now these kids.... they make some really stupid decisions that had me asking if any group of rational people would make the same decisions they did. And some scenes made no sense, like in one scene they were stuck in a garage and the danger was coming in through the roof but the car keys were stuck behind a cabinet. They made it very clear it would be in any moment and yet found 10 minutes to draw lots to determine who would be bait and lure it away so somebody could try to grab the keys... the same amount of time they could have easily moved the cabinet and grabbed the keys! That is just one of many idiotic moments that had me cursing at my TV.

Best moment is the huge sacrifice at the end. Really emotional and was a great way to end part 1.

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