Released by: Vinegar Syndrome
Released on: October 29th, 2024.
Director: Billy Tang
Cast: Jordan Chan, Terence Yin, Winnie Leung, Yee-Man Man, Alice Chan
Year: 2000
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Dial D For Demons –Movie Review:
Directed by Billy Tang, one of the most notorious purveyors of Category III sleaze films to have ever worked in the Hong King film industry (he gave us Dr. Lamb and Red To Kill to name only two!), 2000’s Dial D For Demons is the movie about haunted pagers that’s you didn’t know you needed in your life.
After an initial twenty-minutes or so of people bickering at each other, a half dozen young adults - Bully (Jordan Chan), P.J. (Terrance Yin), Ka-bo (Yee-Man Man), May (Winnie Leung) and Sammie (Alice Chan) -decide to take some time off from their busy work schedules and leave Hong Kong to travel to a remote island for some rest and relaxation. They rent a house and arrive as scheduled and a short time later, one of the group, Bully starts getting a strange feeling about the place. See, Bully has the ability to see ghosts where others cannot and before long, he starts experiencing spooky visions of people killing themselves in the house by inhaling burning charcoal.
Not everyone guys what Bully is selling but soon enough, various members of the group start getting strange messages on their pagers (this was 2000, after all, so not everyone had cellphones yet). It’s around this time that the vacationers realize that escaping from what seemed to be a nice rental property on the shore is going to be much more difficult than they could have ever imagined.
A fairly goofy movie plagued by a lack of proper character development and some bizarre tonal shifts throughout the film, Dial D For Demons is patently flawed but still pretty entertaining once we get past the initial twenty-minutes or so and the actual plot kicks in. Granted, it would have been nice if the movie had bothered to properly explain how or why Jordan Chan’s character can see ghosts when no one else can – this element is just sort of tossed into the plot haphazardly – and the movie does seem to be borrowing more than a little bit from Hideo Nakata’s classic Ring made two years earlier in 1998, but the last half of the movie picks up enough that, by the time the end credits hit the screen, you’ll find yourself having been properly entertained even if the movie has no real lasting impact.
There are some pretty interesting ideas at play in terms of the way that the supernatural elements of the movie are portrayed. Some solid design work offers up creepy imagery in the film’s final twenty minutes and the whole ‘death by inhaling burning charcoal’ idea (a very real and tragic phenomena which effectively kills via carbon monoxide poisoning that was affecting Hong Kong and nearby areas in the nineties and is still common today) issued well and allows Tang and his cinematographer to capture this practice using creative camerawork for maximum impact.
The end result isn’t the most original film and, again, it takes a while to hit its stride, but once it gets going it’s entertaining and nicely shot, giving us enough to take in that we can ignore the fact that most of the cast were seemingly cast for their good looks rather than their acting abilities.
Dial D For Demons – Blu-ray Review:
Dial D For Demons arrives on region A Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 1.85.1 widescreen “scanned and restored in 2k from its original 35mm negative. The picture is clean, showing very little print damage but retaining the expected amount of natural film grain. Colors are reproduced well, skin tones look good and black levels are solid if maybe a step away from reference quality. There are no noticeable issues with major compression artifacts and the picture is, thankfully, free of any obvious noise reduction or edge enhancement problems.
The main track on the disc is a Cantonese 24-bit DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track but there is also a 24-bit Cantonese DTS-HD 2.0 Stereo option and a DTS-HD 2.0 Stereo option in Mandarin with optional subtitles included in English only. The 5.1 track is pretty solid, with some good channel separation noticeable that helps make the action scenes more interesting. Dialogue stays clean and clear throughout and the levels are nicely balanced. There are no problems to note with any hiss or distortion.
The first extra on the disc is an audio commentary track with Kenneth Brorsson and Phil Gillon of the Podcast on Fire Network who go into a pretty deep dive on the movie and the people involved in making it. They discuss the way in which the narrative unfolds, the significance of the title, biographical details on the cast members and thoughts on their performances, thoughts on the characters that populate the movie, some of the effects work featured in the film, details on Billy Tang's career and directing style, the funhouse elements of certain scenes and of the set design in the movie, the state of the Hong Kong film industry at the point when this movie was made, the popularity of horror movies in Hong Kong in the late nineties and early two thousands, some of the imagery that the film toys around with and more.
Not One Of Those Movies is a thirteen minute interview with actor Terence Yin on the making of Dial D For Demons. He covers how he'd only been acting for two years when he got the part in this movie and how raw he was as an actor, how his parents were in the film industry when he was growing up and how this led to him getting into the business, getting along with his fellow cast members, why working with Billy Tang was a big draw for him when he took the role, thoughts on the script, thoughts on the script, location work, what it was like on set and how he feels that the movie remains a lot of fun.
The Bloody Legacy Of Billy Tang is a ten minute video essay by film historian Samm Deighan that goes over the importance of the director's work in the CATIII boom years, what makes other highlights in his filmography stand out, how his work evolved as censorship restrictions in Hong Kong loosened up, themes that his films explore, how the Hong Kong handover affected is work, where Tang's career went later in his career and some of the transgressive elements that work their way into Dial D For Demons.
The disc also contains the film’s original trailer, menus and chapter selection options.
As to the packaging, Vinegar Syndrome provides an individually numbered slipcover designed Black Coffiend with this release, which is limited to 4,000 copies. Inside the Blu-ray keepcase alongside the disc, we also find a double-sized poster.
Dial D For Demons – The Final Word:
Dial D For Demons doesn’t get nearly as nasty as some of the films its director is better known for, but it’s eighty-seven minutes of entertaining supernatural horror schlock that should please fans of Hong Kong horror pictures. The Blu-ray looks and sounds very good and the supplemental package does a good job of exploring the movie’s history and the backstories of those who worked on it.