Dream Home (2010)

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

There are two main threads. In flashbacks, we follow Sheung's growing up in Hong Kong, from 1991 to the present, 2008 in this case. We see why, ten times over, she wants a nice flat to live in with what's left of her family. In the 'current' thread, we see to what lengths she goes to get to that difficult goal.In the current thread, she's on a mission to kill certain people. The murders that she has planned for she executes well, and seldom gets hurt in the process. It's the extra killings she does out of irritation that get her into trouble. Loud music sets her off, as explained in the flashbacks. While finishing up her planned murders, she's annoyed by music from a nearby flat. She ends up killing five people to make it stop. Then the cops show up.A running commentary is made through many characters: infidelity is rampant, as is the brutality of humans toward one another. Despite the widespread acknowledgment of the infidelity, it still engenders hard feelings that sometimes have very bad results. Her married lover is not all that great a choice for her.Her father's illness due to persistent aspiration of asbestos fibers (he was in construction) was set against the coldness of the insurance company. Again, money limits caused large, painful problems in her life.Sheung comes to quite a decision point when her father is in a crisis with his breathing. She lets him die. He was bankrupting her, after all, and he had insurance. Through working a couple of jobs, plus collecting the insurance money, she scrapes together enough money to get the flat she wants. Unfortunately, the seller made other arrangements while she was getting ready.This is the spark for the killings mentioned above. By a set of favorable outcomes (dumb luck, that is) the cops die as she's being handcuffed. The seller of her target flat not only is willing to sell to her, but drops the asking price from 6.5 million USD to 4.9 million. She demands 3.9 million.Will her exceptional luck continue?-----Conclusions----Like Caterpillar, Dream Home is much scarier than most fake gore films with supernatural themes. In terms of visuals and sound, this is one of the most gorgeous movies I've seen in years.-----Scores------Cinematography: 10/10 Excellent.Sound: 10/10 Amazingly good, rich, evocative for this tale of obsession.Acting: 9/10 Steady and good.Screenplay: 9/10 The well-crafted story was about a difficult subject. The director and actors did well together executing the script.

Josie Ho plays a young woman desperate to own her own flat. She makes the perfect deal for her dream home, but then the owners decide that the property is too valuable to part with. Ho decides to take matters into her own hands and lower that property value - by killing the crap out of everyone who lives next door to that place. I've never quite seen anything like this. The structure, which moves back and forth in time, is a bit confusing at first, but it all comes together in the end. The film is most notable for its violence. These are some of the nastiest, most disturbing murders I've seen in a long time. I can't remember the last time I was actually shocked by a movie.

The new film from Hong Kong director Pang Ho-Cheung, Dream Home, depicts the unsettling descent into madness of a seemingly ordinary young woman as she endeavours to secure the sea-view apartment of her childhood dreams. But this is a far cry from Grand Designs. Despondency and desperation at a stressful, overworked lifestyle, Hong Kong's ever- rising house prices and her insufficient savings prove so overwhelming that her sanity begins to wane, and she ventures down a more direct, murderous route to reach her goal.With its satirical portrayal of Hong Kong's booming property market, and the extraordinary lengths to which aspiring owners will go to get on the ladder, this film is a neat piece of social commentary. But that is perhaps not how most viewers will remember Dream Home. For it is also a protracted exercise in bestial, blood-soaked horror likely to repulse all but the most strong-stomached of the genre's veterans. This incongruous mix of styles is the reason that the film ultimately fails to impress.Pang leaves us with no doubt from the outset that this is not a film for the faint-hearted. The camera pans down myriad empty corridors, before settling on the face of a dozing security guard. A mysterious dark figure looms over him, a cord is slipped round his neck and he is brutally garroted from behind. Any impression that this is just another Bond-style action film is quickly dispelled; we watch, transfixed and helpless, as the guard writhes and splutters on the floor for what seems an eternity, hacking frantically at his neck with a knife in a vain attempt to release himself. He finally succumbs, falling back into a pool of crimson.This sets the tone for later butchery, scenes of which are interspersed through the main narrative, set several years previously. It transpires early on that quiet, unassuming young telemarketer Cheung Lai-sheung is the perpetrator, but her motives are as yet unclear. The film relates her day-to-day trials, and as she grapples with two part-time jobs, a callous, terminally ill father, an uncaring partner and dwindling chances of obtaining her dream home, we gradually uncover the rationale for the killing spree on which she will later embark.Underpinning Dream Home is an artful tension between our sympathy for this cute, hard-working idealist and our revulsion at the savage, merciless psychopath she becomes. A clear part of Cheung's appeal is the determined, Gatsby-esque aspiration and innocence that her profound desire to realise a childhood dream reveals.This stands in distinct contrast with the depraved, hedonistic Hong Kong metropolis around her that Pang adroitly depicts. In a particularly telling scene, as she waits patiently in a hotel room for her partner, she can find only porn on the television as she flicks through the channels. Her lover is an arrogant and reckless alcoholic; while she saves her wages her friends plan to blow them on a wild weekend in Tokyo; her victims include three coke-snorting, bling-sporting young men attempting to sleep with a delirious, topless girl half-asleep on their sofa.However, our fragile bond with Cheung is increasingly hard to sustain as the film progresses and victim after innocent victim falls at her hands. Insofar as these killings are a form of satire, a dramatic representation of the desperate pursuit of real estate in Hong Kong, they seem acceptable to the audience. The needlessly brutal nature of their execution, though, is hardly justifiable on these grounds, and will strike most viewers as utterly repulsive, perplexing and gratuitous. We can just about understand, if not accept, Cheung's decision not to pass her dying father his ventilator as he struggles for air. Her asphyxiation of a pregnant woman, by the ingenious use of a plastic bag and vacuum cleaner, and her severance of a young man's genitalia, however, fall well beyond the realm of comprehension.It can only be concluded that in Pang's excitement at his first film venture into the world of horror, a sense of proportion was the unfortunate casualty. My suspicion is that for those in search of the astute social analysis for which Pang is renowned, the relentless carnage may ruin Dream Home. For the faint-hearted or even average viewer, the blood and guts may simply prove so shocking and sickening as to obscure all other merit in the film. Even for those more able to comfortly stomach the gore, it could easily seem rather puerile, and its recurrence throughout may prove too great a distraction. Conversely, horror fans might find the film too bogged down by backstory, as impressive as the special effects may be.If you're one of that select group for whom a large dose of senseless, grisly bloodshed and a moderate sprinkling of intelligent social observation makes compelling viewing, go and see Dream Home right away. If you're a normal human being, however, probably best not to bother.

This movie caught my attention when it was reviewed by a friend of mine and I decided to give it a go and thankfully I did!!What can be said about "Dream Home" is that it's a very well done slasher movie with a fresh approach. I really loved this movie, what can I say! The basic story is a woman becomes so obsessed with buying a home with a view of the ocean she will go to any lengths to get that home....I'm a huge fan of ultra violent horror movies and this one did not let down on that front by any means. But what really got me was the fresh ideas about a slasher/killer in this film. It wasn't the tired "crazed man follows stupid teens to a cabin" crap that gets turned out every week but a look at a seemingly normal person getting so obsessed with a dream that they will do anything and everything in their power to obtain that dream. Her performance was spot on and quite disturbing with kill scenes that made me cringe (which is very hard to do). Seriously, one of the greatest kill scenes I've seen in a movie this year! Do yourself a favor and check this out if you're into the slasher/killer genre. It won't be a waste of your time at the very least and you may just like it, maybe a lot!