Otto Chan's film Diary of a Serial Killer (1995) tells the story of a man (Chan Kwok-Bong), who has very serious traumas when he was sent to prison and after that, he's become a brutal killer who hates "certain types of females" the most, as he says it himself. He hates prostitutes and kills them in order to reincarnate them and thus let them born again as better human beings. He thinks that being a prostitute is the lowest form of life and all those have to be killed in order to being able to be reincarnated. Soon he is captured as he accidentally falls in love with one of his potential victims and the film is told (again, like Danny Lee's Dr. Lamb (1992) and Herman Yau's The Untold Story (1993)) as a flashback when the killer has already been caught. The film is pretty long (2 hours) but never boring or tired, there's always something going on, but what this film concentrates on to show, are brutal rapes, murders and mutilations in the tradition of Dr. Lamb, which means that the mutilations are done to dead corpses.
This film is okay film if one likes these often very sick films. They may have some themes and real message in them (like masterpieces Run and Kill by Billy Tang (1993) and The Untold Story have), but films like Diary, Herman Yau's Ebola Syndrome (1996) or Ivan Lai's Daughter of Darkness (1993) concentrate more on the display of nasty acts of violence, sleazy sex and perversions. Fortunately Diary has some great visual touches like the menacing cinematography during the scenes in which the killer rapes and mutilates the dead girls in his attic, but it is obvious these scenes are taken straightly from Lee's Dr. Lamb, which has identical scenes and was done 3 years earlier. That proves again that Diary is more a cash in than an ambitious piece of work. Still, the creepy lightning and atmosphere is effective and alongside the very erotic and warm love making scene, it proves the talent of director Chan.
The scenes which give this film Cat 3 rating are pretty powerful, too, to turn one's stomach. When the killer abuses and slices the dead bodies, they still spurt blood on his face and body even though they have been dead for hours or even days! So don't expect this to be a realistic film in this department. It is just because of the fact that the film makers wanted to throw some blood to amuse the audience which watches these films and made the whole CAT 3 boom so potential in the first place. The scene where the killer cuts the dead girl's vagina and takes it to himself as a "souvenir" is very sickening and makes some viewers to throw up, because even I felt very sick in my stomach during that nasty short scene. There's also plenty of nudity and sex here, and many times we get to see pubic hair and women's genitalia, so this film won't be too popular among the Japanese censors.
The ending is very emotional and touching, and almost made me feel the need to cry! The case is exactly the same as in Ivan Lai's Daughter of Darkness' ending which is very sad and sorrowful, while the whole film before that is just plain sick and graphically violent and exploitative. It feels very strange when these kind of films have actually something emotional in the end and that makes me wonder what did the film makers actually have in mind and want to say? I cannot find any "content" or message in Diary, but still it feels strange that the ending is this powerful without a reason. Some interpretations can be made about the bird the killer watches and the expression on his face during the final images, but it all seems like the film had some great potential to be more than just exploitation and we just get a glimpse of that at the end of the film. Also, the very final image involving a doll is very shocking and creepy and close to William Lustig's Maniac (1980) and Michele Soavi's Deliria aka Stage Fright (1987) and their use of similar "dead but living" dolls.
I give Diary 5/10 and it is not among the greatest achievement of this short lived "genre" in Hong Kong cinema history. This film could have been much more than it now is, but still this is worthwhile for Asian cinema junkies who are interested in these films, too.
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