Powerful

Overrated and overhyped

How sad is this?

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Well executed. flashbacks serve well . when theres gore, it is for accenting the horror and it is very gruesome. some black humor . main actress fit well in the well written dialogues. worth 8 + for a very good gory drama wt black humor and well directed

On one hand, Dream Home is a poignant drama about a young Hong Kong woman's life of hardship and her dream of living in an apartment overlooking the bay; on the other, it's a gore-drenched tale of obsession and madness, the lady in question going to extreme and very bloody lengths in order to achieve her goal. As a whole, the film works brilliantly as a shocking slice of social satire on the difficulty of getting on the property ladder (although it's not as far fetched as it might seem: the film is apparently based on true events!).Josie Ho plays Cheng Lai-Sheung, who, ever since she was a child living in a run-down high-rise, has longed to move with her family to No.1 Victoria Bay, an apartment block affording views of the sea. As the years pass, Josie saves every penny of her meagre wages, but loses both of her parents, yet still hangs on to her dream. So when the opportunity arises, she does whatever it takes to secure her dream home at an affordable price—by killing off the other inhabitants to drive down the property values.The emotional drama is sensitively handled by director Ho-Cheung Pang, with touching flashbacks to a childhood friendship, Cheng's relationship with her ailing father, her unfulfilling job, and intimate moments shared with a married man, but for me, Dream Home is all about the gritty violence, which, along with the true-story connection, lends the film an atmosphere not unlike that of a classic Cat III movie. Pang certainly doesn't hold back when it comes to graphic unpleasantness, Cheng's victims suffering a variety of very grisly fates…Victim number one, a security guard, is forced to slash his own jugular while trying to remove a plastic tie-wrap from around his throat; a pregnant woman is suffocated with a vacuum bag and her maid gets a screwdriver through her head (which emerges out of her eye!); the pregnant woman's husband breaks his neck in a brutal struggle with Cheng. The most outrageous scene of all takes place in an apartment occupied by some drugged up youths and a pair of whores: Cheng guts one guy, sticks a broken bottle into another's neck, bashes a hooker's face on a toilet bowl, repeatedly stabs a bloke and emasculates him while he is going at it with the other prostitute, and jams a broken piece of wood into the woman's mouth. When a pair of cops arrive to investigate the disturbance, Cheng gets the upper hand and shoots them both in the head!Not since the Cat III heyday of Anthony Wong have I seen such relentlessly nasty slaughter in a HK movie.

The urge to just walk away almost got me a couple of times. But, in the end, this is an excellent character study. Cheng Li-sheung is a young, upwardly mobile professional finally ready to invest in her first home. But when the deal falls through, she is forced to keep her dream alive - even if it means keeping her would-be neighbors dead. Are there annoying things in this movie? Yes, like the overdone acting. But the movie has enough to keep you entertained. If you end up watching this, you will probably be like me in saying that it starts off great then gradually begins to suck. For these reasons I award this film 7 out of 10.

A second viewing of this slasher / drama. The combination of the two elements aforementioned still don't work perfectly to my taste, but I enjoyed it more than the first time. It helped that the storyline, with all its shifting back and forth in time, became clearer to me this time, and thusly had a greater impact.Josie Ho is a fine actress and knows how to underplay a definite psycho. The background of her character is worked out well, based on true facts of the practice of rich people forcing out home owners in Hong Kong in the '80s. The moment when she lets her grandfather die, partly because he betrayed her trust, is a pivotal moment to somehow stay on her side as a viewer - although it should not be missed that there is a lot of awfully dark humour in here, as well. And that humour makes it so that the gore (very well worked out, but not easy to stomach - pun intended?) has its rightful place here, too. Altogether, this is a weird one, and it will certainly not be for everyone. It may never be a favorite of mine, either, but the ingredients are separately very effective in any case.From 6 to 7 out of 10.