Subconscious: It should have been easy: Dinosaur (Kno
Tang-Yu) and Sister (Candy Lo) simply wanted to grab victim Ah Wah (Chang Tzu-Yao)
and hold him for ransom at an abandoned warehouse, but something goes
horribly wrong when they first accidently stab him, then a thief (Xiao
Bao) who's at the warehouse by coincidence, locks Sister in with him, and
then the thief also kills Ah Wah's girlfriend Sze (Liu Shu-Ting), who has
come to his rescue. And in the end, only Sister makes it out of the
warehouse alive, and that only after killing Dinosaur, thinking he has
crossed her ... Crazy Analysis: Tin King (Terence Yin) has to
spend three nights in his deceased uncle's abandoned office building in order to
inherit it ... thing is, the place might be haunted. And soon enough, he
meets a crazy bum (Hui Siu Hung), a female ghost who turns out to be blind
deaf-mute Yuk
(Tiffany Lee), and a violent watchman. And when Tin King thinks he has
sorted everything out anyways for his final few hours in the building, Yuk
turns out to be neither deaf nor mute nor blind, but a knife-wielding
maniac - and essentially, she drives Tin King into committing suicide ...
when everything turns out to be just an experiment, with dead Tin King
having been the guinea pig. But wait, Tin King isn't really dead, he has
teamed up with Yuk - only an actress hired by the experiment's leader who
has turned against him - to sabotage the experiment ... and thus,
everybody loses, even Tin King, who has at one point tried to rape Yuk,
and now she's going to report him for it. Fear Factors
is made up from two featurettes that, concerning their stories and
narrative build-up, couldn't be more different: Subconscious is
an experimental featurette that repeats telling its same basic story, but each
time from a different perspective, and thus it only gradually reveals the
complete picture. This might sound a little brain-heavy, but in the case
of Subconscious, the experiment actually works out to make up a
nice and entertaining genre picture. Crazy Analysis on the other
hand is pretty much a straight-forward horror comedy with a far-fetched
set-up and a rather silly pay-off. However, what happens in between is not
bad at all, and while it might not be wholly original, it profits greatly
from a moody direction and a few pretty funny bits. In all, although Fear
Factors is incredibly uneven concerning its two segments, the segments
for themselves are pretty well-made (with Subconscious being the
superior by far) and entertaining enough to make the film well worth
watching.
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