Review of Dr. Lamb (1992) by Adam L — 25 Nov 2012

Lam Kor-wan, the 27-year-old Hong Kong taxi driver who strangled four female occupants in 1982, later fielding dressing his victims in the family flat and preserving their sexual organs in jars earning him The Jars Murderer moniker throughout the media is given the full-court press in "Dr. Lamb," a Category III update of the proceeding year's made-for-television "Hong Kong Criminal Archives: Female Butcher" based on the infamous case also starring Simon Yam in the titular role.

While not a provocation of Lam's gruesome crimes, recreated here in all the sordid details far too graphic for its televised predecessor, "Dr. Lamb" does at least -- albeit in brevity -- give one of Hong Kong's most notorious serial killers some semblance of context by attempting to understand what might have helped shape Lam's pathology. (The film's prologue portrays the serial killer as an anti-social adolescent trapped in a dysfunctional home with an onerous fascination with human sexuality).

Given the Category III subgenre largely exits to exploit sex and violence "Dr. Lamb" rarely approaches its subject matter with the same nagging sense of cognitive dissonance much of Hong Kong wrestled with when the case went to trial.

Was Lam simply a bad seed or actually clinically insane?

Co-star, producer, and director Danny Lee fails to even approach the question -- he's too preoccupied with the specifics of Lam's sickening crimes (which, unfortunately for us, involved necrophilia) in addition to his own umpteenth turn as a hard-nosed investigator; however, with its chintzy lighting, sleazy cinematography, intermittent peppering of gross-out humor and occasionally over-the-top performances "Dr. Lamb" sort of works as a vice mag exploit of Lam Kor-wan's crimes which were tailor made for this brand of uber-lowbrow entertainment.