I don’t like writing about bad films. I don’t mind films so bad they’re good (as I like to say), but films that are so bad, they’re like a nasty case of insomnia or painful diahrettic. Perhaps a case of intense indegestion, the like of which puts you in tears, because you can’t find the Rennie. Victim is one such film, and one that I wish I hadn’t seen. It felt like a waste of my time, and it was.
Low-budget, low-fi but offering up a mix of a mystery thriller and mild horror, Victim is the story about a kidnapping that may have resulted in the ghostly possession of its victim. This causes the victim to act erracticly and behave in a manner which is more like the ghost of the dead, than it is himself. Pit (Tony Leung) believes the case to be much more serious than some spiritual excuse. He pushes and pushes to find out the truth, one which unravels with negative consequences and modest body count.
The problem with Victim is two fold. Firstly the acting is hilariously awful. Some of the scenes are diabolically bad, and I mean so bad they’re not just funny, they’re amateur. That’s how it feels when watching the film. It’s like watching a school play with a revolving set. Or having students carry a camera around filming a thriller with fellow students.
It’s not quite Ed Wood bad, but it’s certainly the lower scale of both acting and directing. They seem to have slipped in scenes which offer nothing further, but simply humour. An example would be where the female officer finds out her colleague is dead, we see everyone’s sullen face, and then she pouts throwing her case on the desk. It’s done so badly, you just want to punch everyone in the face for putting you through watching it.
Victim’s major issue is that of coherence and genre. It’s never sure what it wants to be. At times it’s a horror, and at times a ghost film, sometimes a thriller, sometimes a detective story and other times a drama. Now good films can go through transitions seamlessly, while keeping the core genre at the forefront. Victim seems to go through the genres as though it’s walking a mine field, blowing limbs off with the loudest possible explosion it can trigger.
It bumps and drags its limbless carcass through so many differently directed bits that at the end of it you’re not sure how the whole thing ties up the the initial horror/ghost thriller motive. If anything it seems to force the resolution in order to justify the use of different directions throughout. It’s a bloody a mess really, and an unconvincing bloody mess too.
To top it off, the ending is so unsatisfying it makes nausea seem like a birthday present. Finding out you’ve lost a leg will perhaps be more solace than dragging your fragile, numbed mind through the bile that is Victim. Crap acting, crap score, crap special effects and to add insult to injury and pretty crap ending to boot.
It’s a “what the fuck” sort of ending, that doesn’t suggest a dream, just no logic to it’s conclusion. I really shouldn’t be surprised since non of it was really logical. Not one actor did anywhere near a decent job, though I have to applaud the dead as they were pretty impressive, since that’s the only thing I can say that is positive.
At one point someone mentions ghost, and as if on queue, would you believe the next scene is a car parking in front of a ghostly, old looking building, large amounts of mist and a big clap of fake thunder and no lighting. Forget build up, forget suspense, let’s just chuck everything in there. We’ll call it horror if they ask. Well, it is a horror; it’s a horror of film making of the lowest kind, making Michael Winner look adequate by comparison. I mean if a film can do that, it’s got to be rubbish.
I can’t believe I even bothered writing the review, as writing it has caused stress, and RSI in my left arm. To sum up, Victim is abysmal, and if you do watch it, do it on your own so your friends don’t beat the living daylights out of you for wasting 100 minutes of their life.
Verdict: In a word crap. In two words totally crap. Leave it where it is and move along