Review of Dr. Lamb (1992) by Paul M — 17 Feb 2012

At first you would be led to believe that there's nothing remotely nasty to have given this movie a Cat III rating as the opening 45 mins is just a straight forward story of the cops arresting a suspect of murder and trying to get a confession out of him. But once he starts telling the cops what happened, the red stuff starts getting shown on screen. But even then it's not terribly shocking. You do see a scalpel being plunged into skin around the breast of one unfortunate murder suspect and see blood being spurted around a room when a victim gets cut up with a buzzsaw. I've seen far worse in other Cat III gorefests such as Ebola Syndrome or The Untold Story (shot by the director and star of this movie Danny Lee the following year). Lee took some of the best aspects of Dr Lamb and upped the gore level in The Untold Story. Dr Lamb was the catalyst for a slew of Cat III grisly horrors to come out of Hong Kong. Believe it or not, the movie is also based on a graphic real life murder case.

I've said it before but I'll say it again - Simon Yam is excellent whenever he plays a psychotic insane maniac just like the taxi driver in this movie. He portrays the killer as an OTT nutjob who howls like a dog, twists and contorts his face whenever he has killed a victim. Apart from Danny Lee as Inspector Lee who has nailed playing a cop to a tee due to similar roles in other movies, the rest of the actors who play the C.I.D officers are only average in their roles. I don't understand why there was a need to inject some silly slapstick comedy into this serious movie. It just looked out of place and stupid.

Naturally this movie will disgust some people with it's content and it's certainly not for the squeamish. As for myself, I enjoyed this sleazefest especially Simon Yam's menacing performance. I'm sure this movie would not have been half so good if he wasn't in it.