Review of Dream Home (2010) by Hugo G — 19 Apr 2014

Hong Kong, China, a bustling metropolis of over 6 million people. A vibrant, densely populated city with an impressive skyline and gorgeous harbors. Hong Kong is renowned as the epicenter of Asian and international commerce. While personal incomes steadily increase, real estate prices, especially in desired prime locations, continue to skyrocket. Put it this way, since Hong Kong's handover to mainland China in 1997, the average personal income in Hong Kong has increased by 1% each year. What about the cost of real estate? According to a survey, prices shot up by 15% in 2007 alone.

The year is 2007. The economic bubble continues to expand. It is a year before the bubble bursts, leading to a global financial crisis. Something about subprime mortgages and banks engaging in deceptive lending practices and borrowers taking in more than what is financially feasible. Anyway, while the bubble expands, home prices continue to rise at an absurd rate, driving many ordinary citizens out of the housing market. In Hong Kong, it is reported that a flat of 600 square feet costs more than HK$7 million. If you want a flat with a pretty harbor view in Hong Kong, it can cost ya HK$30,000 per square foot, which approximately translates to $3,200 in US dollars. Living in Hong Kong can be expensive, to put it mildly.

Cheng Lai-sheung (Josie Ho) is just one of many individuals struggling to make ends meet. She's about to obtain what everybody wants: her own place. She's working two jobs - including one as a telemarketer for a major commercial bank - with the hopes of buying her own apartment. She has her eyes on the prize: No. 1 Victoria Bay, a luxurious high-rise flat with an ocean view overlooking the Victoria Harbor.

Sheung's life is anything but a fairy tale though. Her father (Norman Chu), a former construction worker who has helped built some of Hong Kong's fanciest high rises but has never earned enough to live in such a place himself, is gravely ill and in need of serious medical treatment. But the insurance she has won't cover the bills for his much-needed medical procedure. So she takes a second job selling luxury brand items to posh, upper class folks out of her limited circle of friends. In addition, Sheung is carrying out an affair with a married businessman (Eason Chan). The sex is great, the passion is burning (who am I kidding), but to her, love is just another four-letter word.

Things go from struggling to worse, as the bank is only willing to lend her a 70% mortgage. Though Sheung is able to save enough for a down payment, her father's medical bills have become overburdening to the point that he's better off dead so that she can get money from his life insurance...

With the money from her father's life insurance, Sheung now has a chance to purchase the flat she so desired. Unfortunately, as housing prices continue to rise, the owners of the Victoria Bay flat don't keep their end of the bargain. Instead, they renege on their deal and raise the price of the flat instead. This causes Sheung to go in a frenzy, and instead of going to the authorities or complaining to the business regulatory agency about the owners' unscrupulous practices, she decides to take matters into her own hands. She will do anything she can to get the flat of her desire. Even if it means she must kill for it. She gives new meaning to the idea of eliminating your competition.

Sheung just happens to have a little murderous streak. And nobody, I mean nobody, is gonna get in her way of obtaining her dream home. Home, bloody home. Sheung has a penchant for killing those who stand in her way. With a knife, and other creative weapons at her disposal, Sheung embarks on a most unique killing spree, murdering those she feels are responsible - directly or indirectly - for raising the price of her dream condo. She does this with the hopes that the price will go down, thus making the flat affordable for her. All she wants is a nice, spacious loft with a stunning view of the Victoria Harbor. Is that not unreasonable?

In a crazy city, if one is to survive, she's got to be more crazy...

Wow. What a mind-blowing movie-watching experience. Dream Home is on the surface, a gory slasher film. But it is much more than that. One can describe Dream Home as American Psycho on an insane LSD trip. It picks up exactly where American Psycho left off. Like American Psycho, I definitely think Dream Home has a caustic satirical bent to it. It shares a lot of themes with American Psycho. Mainly the conspicuous consumption yuppie culture and how status conscious we have become. Where keeping up with appearances becomes more important than keeping up with one's well being. Dream Home contains all the disturbing gore and hyperviolence you'd expect from a slasher film with the grim social commentary evoking the works of Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Frazen.

Perhaps this is strictly my interpretation, but I see Dream Home as a criticism of the competitive cutthroat mentality of an economically thriving country, particularly among the overly ambitious, goal-oriented yuppies. Sheung embodies everything that is wrong with Hong Kong's competitive yuppie culture. We become so obsessed with desiring what we want that we often cast aside what really matters. Of course, she takes this to an extreme level, but I think at some point in our lives, we are all guilty of wanting something so bad we would kill for it (figuratively of course, though she takes it quite literally)! Kill your way to the top...

The fear is that we would eventually succumb to our materialistic desires and end up losing our souls and humanity in the process. Sure, we may be better off financially, but at what cost? Hong Kong is one of the most affluent and crowded places in the world and in the pursuit of artificial happiness, we end up feeling even more alienated and lonely. Even the company Sheung keeps is a bunch of vacuous, vain individuals from her adulterous lover to her coworkers who are perhaps engaging in illegal get-rich schemes and using their ill-gotten proceeds to travel and party and go on shopping sprees and meet other like-minded individuals.

Dream Home further criticizes the state of the property market. Yes, the prices are so expensive and the views are nice, but are the flats and condos really worth the hype? I mean, many of these flats are small (relatively speaking) in a crowded location and do not necessarily look and feel comfortable. It's not like you get a lot of privacy either. Then again, it has to do with living more in the city, the best and most accessible part of the city, more than anything else.

Patrick Bateman, I'd like you to meet Patricia. Call her...Patricia Bateman! Sheung is Patrick Bateman's feminine female counterpart. Like American Psycho, the film also plays into what's real and what's hallucinatory, a figment of Sheung's twisted imagination. One can see the pressures of living up to that rich lifestyle get to Sheung and causing her to gradually unhinge. Both the family stress -- her father's illness - and the financial stress tied to her need to get the property she wants in a hot market makes for an interesting psychological profile. In addition to Patrick Bateman, I think there's a little bit of Frank Zito (portrayed by Joe Spinell in the film Maniac) in her as well.

Dream Home is seen almost entirely from the point of view of the killer. I think what makes Sheung so fascinating is that on the surface, she is so mild-mannered with a subdued demeanor. She's the type who will do what you ask her to do without questioning your motive. Yet, when she kills somebody, she does it in a way that is so clinical and cold-hearted. She is cold, quiet, and emotionless, and when you look into her eyes, you don't see a trace of a soul in her. Is she really killing these people, or are the murders a figment of her imagination? It's because of her soft-spoken personality that a part of me always felt that Sheung was imagining these killings as opposed to actually committing them. She's definitely different from Patrick Bateman in that she does not overtly display her psychosis. But because of that, it makes her violent behavior all the more disquieting.

She is the main antagonist, yet she is an antihero of sorts with her own twisted values.

In her own sick way, she feels her actions are justified and she has done nothing wrong because the people she kills were responsible for driving up the market prices. Her mind is shrouded in madness. Her soul is engulfed in darkness. There is a dark fascination with her character, as she doesn't fit the look or profile of a stereotypical serial murderer. Her mental breakdown is much more subtle. She doesn't show any obvious signs of distress. She resembles a goody two-shoes. She could be your next-door neighbor. The fact that she's very identifiable makes her all the more frightening.

Yet at the same time, Sheung is not portrayed as completely unsympathetic. Unlike most slashers, Dream Home really goes into some length in exploring her background and attempting to delineate her younger years. The film jumps back and forth between the present time (circa 2007) and memories of Sheung's childhood. We get a glimpse into her childhood, living with her family in a low-rent apartment in the more impoverished section of the city. Despite living in near poverty conditions, she was close to her family. Although she had tough parental figures, they weren't overly abusive to her. She didn't appear to suffer any physical or even emotional abuse from her family as a child. If anything, she had loving and supportive parents. They meant well, but struggled to make ends meet. Eventually, the government - allegedly in collusion with the triads - condemned the place where Sheung's family was living in and forced them out. Upon their eviction, the building was demolished to make way for new opulent high rises. Seeing her childhood home condemned and demolished had a long-term effect on her. It is there that we learn more behind what drives Sheung to want to be successful. All her life, all she wanted to do was please her family. Her motivation was to make her family happy and buy them a most ideal home.

The flashback sequences don't always work, but they do a decent job of illustrating her background, particularly during her early childhood and youthful years. These sequences provide some motive behind her extreme behavior. None of what her and her family have been through justifies her outrageous conduct, but it provides some degree of commiseration. It's not necessarily to make her sympathetic, but it does provide some background on her struggling childhood.

While these scenes sometimes provide insight into her character, the drama may seem overwrought and out of place at times. Fans who are simply looking for a bloody good time may feel confused as to what they are watching. The abrupt shifts in tone can sometime be jarring. Sometimes, the film is a drama. Other times, it's a bloody slasher flick. But once you get used to this structure, I think it works to this film's benefit. But I do acknowledge that the melodrama in these flashbacks occasionally slows the film down.

This just goes to show that Dream Home is not just about showing blood for blood's sake, as weird as this may sound. Believe it or not, there's a method behind her madness. Maybe she's mentally ill. Maybe she's just a narcissistic psychopath like Patrick Bateman. Or perhaps the emotional trauma of losing her family home has driven her mad. But she kept it all pent up inside. Until she finally snaps...

So now that I have explored the satirical elements and themes of Dream Home, I will go into detail what you've always wanted to know: how impressive are the kills? Because that's what you want to know about, right? Let me say this for the record: Dream Home contains some of the best kills in slasher movie history. The kills are elaborate and gruesome and nobody is spared from her rampage. The way she dispatches her victims is quite inhumane. Dream Home has plenty of bloody stomach turning violence with an ample body count in the double digits. The victims range from a late night security guard to a pregnant young woman to police officers and twenty-somethings who engage in illicit activity and will receive their comeuppance. Sheung doesn't merely kill them. No quick bullet to the head or a knife in the heart. Killing them would be merciful. She makes her victims suffer in agony. Worst of all is the lack of a nubile, virginal heroine to counter as her antithesis.

Dream Home charges right out of the gate with the grisly killing of a late night security guard sleeping on the job. He wakes up, only to find himself choking on a plastic zip tie around his neck. As the security guard tries to cut the zip tie open, we see painful close ups of the box cutter puncture his jugular. The guard bleeds uncontrollably, with a geyser of blood spraying out of his neck relentlessly. Every second of his agonizing death is captured on camera and nothing is spared. And that is just the beginning. Later on, a young maid gets screwed over in the head. Another guy gets bludgeoned repeatedly with both a golf club and a clothing iron. But at least he puts up one hell of a fight before getting his neck broken. Some poor dope gets his stomach sliced open, and all his entrails are splattered onto the floor. You see every bloody detail of his intestines. The sick part of it is that he is somehow still alive and forced to watch his own guts being spilled. He gets to see how much guts he really has! Another dopehead gets a glass bong shoved right into his neck. The bong gets filled with his own blood. Sheung also rudely interrupts a young couple during their lovemaking just as the male lover is about to reach his climax. The nasty money shot has to be seen to be believed. Talk about coitus interruptus. The female lover herself eats a large wooden board rammed into her mouth. Talk about getting wood!

But the film's most memorable kill is the brutal dispatching of a young pregnant woman in her own apartment. The audience witnesses the cruel asphyxiation of a pregnant woman with the use of a plastic bag and a vacuum cleaner. She struggles to breathe as the plastic bag further tightens around her mouth, suffocating her. You get the sense that she eventually gives up, knowing that death will claim her soul. You can see the helplessness in her eyes as she's struggling to breathe, gasping for air. To top it off, she starts leaking amniotic fluid onto the floor, leaving a graphic, bloody mess.

I had a tough time watching as that scene alone made me feel queasy. There's just something about that scene. It's the way she suffered, her body twitching, and her bleeding from the uterus. It's like a violent menstruation. Have the filmmakers gone too far with this scene? Needless to say, I do not recommend pregnant women or anybody who's expecting to watch this scene, even if they think they have strong stomachs and can handle the gore. It's just too much and too upsetting. Which goes to show the skillful craftsmanship of that sequence. Even the most jaded slasher movie fans who think they've seen the worst and seen it all will find that pregnancy scene to be very distressing.

Dream Home is a testament to the power of old school practical make-up effects in the tradition of KNB Efx and Tom Savini. These special effects are so repugnant they can give Tom Savini a run for his money. What makes Dream Home stand out from its peers is the film's exceptionally nasty tone. It delights in its sadism. It definitely pushes the envelope in terms of what is acceptable to show on screen. It's hard to watch because in the back of your mind, you know that none of those victims really deserved to die. Many were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Dream Home is outrageously violent, to put it mildly. Perhaps I'd go so far as to say it's distasteful at times. The violence is so disgusting th.