DREAM HOME is a modern-day homage to the nasty Category III boom of the 1990s which saw Hong Kong film producers making such tasteless products as THE EBOLA SYNDROME, RUN AND KILL and BUNMAN. Sadly, it lacks the finesse and indeed interest of those films, which would have been passable without all the nastiness; instead this is a film entirely built around bloodshed.
This movie has an odd, convoluted-feeling narrative; half of the story is told in flashback, and the rest is basically one extended gore sequence. About the only thing I can recommend is the quality of the gore effects, which are exemplary and ultra-realistic, but that's all there is to it: there are no heroes or villains here, nobody to root for, just murder after murder. Before long it gets very wearying and nihilistic, worse than a cheap '80s slasher.
The set-up story, told through flashback, I found very lightweight and Josie Ho's stilted acting and monotonous delivery of her lines didn't help much. It seems to be building up to some big twist but you end up thinking "so what?". It's five minutes of screen time stretched out to an hour. Yes, there's some good subtext involving the struggle for people to get on the property market, but in the end this is a simplistic, dreary exercise in sadism and one that left me frankly bored.
This movie has an odd, convoluted-feeling narrative; half of the story is told in flashback, and the rest is basically one extended gore sequence. About the only thing I can recommend is the quality of the gore effects, which are exemplary and ultra-realistic, but that's all there is to it: there are no heroes or villains here, nobody to root for, just murder after murder. Before long it gets very wearying and nihilistic, worse than a cheap '80s slasher.
The set-up story, told through flashback, I found very lightweight and Josie Ho's stilted acting and monotonous delivery of her lines didn't help much. It seems to be building up to some big twist but you end up thinking "so what?". It's five minutes of screen time stretched out to an hour. Yes, there's some good subtext involving the struggle for people to get on the property market, but in the end this is a simplistic, dreary exercise in sadism and one that left me frankly bored.