Dream Home (2010)

Ho-Cheung Pang’s Dream Home is marketed like a slasher, but is very far from a slasher. It has a massive body count and is about one person killing of a lot of other persons in a small area, but still – this is not even close to what I would consider a slasher. Instead it’s an impressive, but slightly flawed, satire with lots of nudity and splatter, foul language and honest drama.

Josie Ho is Cheng Lai-Sheung, a young woman working for a bank doing telephone calls to customers who really don’t want her to offer anything to them. “Fuck off and never call again”, is the normal answer she have to endure whole day long for a shitty salary. But she has a dream, a dream home. She wants to live in a special house, on a special floor, close to the water with a fantastic view over the sea. When a loan at the bank falls apart and the people who’s gonna sell their apartment there raises the price she’s forced to do something about it… and it’s gonna get very ugly!

Told with the help of flashbacks in-between the mayhem, Dream Home is a sharp and smart thriller/drama with some outrageous gore-scenes and a intelligent and a tragic backstory. Josie Ho is nothing but brilliant as Cheng Lai-Sheung, even if her character borders to be totally unsympathetic. You understand what she wants and maybe even why she do it, but what she does is brutal and so violent and that can be hard to – as a spectactor – forgive her for the brutality. The victims aren’t bad guys or people deserving to die, just ordinary loosers living in a fancy building. That might be one of the reasons it can be hard to root for Lai-Sheung, but why do we always have to root for a character? That’s just silly!

Lai-Sheung has to do what she does, or else she doesn’t want to have the apartment. If she even once back away from killing a character the whole story would be lost, the whole pay-off with the movie.

Dream Home is CATIII, with very graphic gore- and violence, not to forget the nudity, sex and foul language. But it’s also very slick and great-looking, with no traces of low budget-filmmaking. The locations are small and claustrophic, which makes the mayhem even more nasty. The special effects are very well made, mostly non-CG (for those who care, I don’t care) but with some clever CG-enhancements.

In the end Dream Home is a great little movie, which may lack the final emotional punch because Josie Ho’s character are such a fucking bitch. So extremely sadistic and evil, with no traces of humanity, nothing to relate too. But fuck that, I’m sure you, like me, will love this movie!

This is one of those movies Janne Ahlgren at Dischop will deem dangerous for everyone watching it, a movie for psychopaths and people who don’t believe in God. That means you should buy it, at once.