Singular Cay

Singular Cay (2012)

Dir. Yao-wu Zhao

Written by (unknown, the credits are in Cantonese and IMBD doesn’t list a writer. It’s possible that it was just made up as they went along)

Starring… well, the IMDB credits list just four people, the first being Pei-Pei Cheng, who is not anywhere close to the main character. There’s also Deric Wan, who is pretty important, and the other two actors credited have no photo or part identified, making it impossible to know if they’re real stars or just random actors who happen to have a manager savvy enough to get them on IMDB. Frankly it’s a real mystery.

Speaking of mysteries...

So what is a Singular Cay, anyway?

To answer that question, let’s talk a little bit about the movie itself. SINGULAR CAY THE MOVIE is 88 interminable minutes of weak-ass Chinese (Hong Kong -- but don't get excited, it's modern Hong Kong, so basically just Mainland appeasement) crime melodrama with two scenes of ghosts and two of kung fu, notable only for its A) plodding mediocrity, B) bizarre pallette, and C) howlingly boneheaded plot which is so naively moronic that it would almost be a saving grace if it weren’t so anesthetizingly dull. It’s absolute dreck, but it’s gonna sound kinda funny on paper, I think. I don’t recommend you watch it, but you should definitely read this and have it spoiled for you, if for no other reason than so at least I can say that something of value came from this experience.

At its essence, SINGULAR CAY is a movie about a family of nitwit fuckwads who are staying with their aunt (Pei Pei Cheng, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, no joke!), and have their obnoxious child Jia-Jia (????) kidnapped. Mother I-Ling (????) is upset by this for some reason, despite every single moment of screen time prior to this kidnapping emphasizing what a bratty, obstinate little git Jia-Jia is and how fucking crazy she drives her mother. Literally, they’ve had no other interactions of any kind except I-Ling asking her daughter to do something reasonable (finish dinner, practice piano, say hello to Uncle) only to have the child defiantly refuse. I-Ling’s horrible aunt seems to take the position that demanding a child obey a parent’s instructions is approximately morally equivalent to strangling a puppy in front of a baby, so poor I-Ling isn’t getting a lot of support at home, especially from her husband Fei Wang (????), who, from the looks of it, works entirely alone in an abandoned lab made of blue light, and has just gotten a call from a mysterious antagonist demanding he hand over the McGuffin he’s working on. Kidnappers throw a weird baby doll through the window and demand a million Hong Kong dollars (about $128,000 US bucks, still more than this little monster is worth). I-Ling can’t go to the police, so she goes to her old boyfriend (Deric Wan, ROYAL TRAMP 1 and 2) --who happens to be some kind of international supercop -- to figure things out.

All of that would be fine, except somehow it takes the movie nearly 40 minutes to set all this up, and it is absolutely deadening. What feel like eons pass as family members, sitting in a room waiting for a phone call, all have an individual shot of their distinct placid non-reaction to this non-event, while the music that came with the editing software plays quietly in the background.

In order to keep the brain from eating itself during this period, you will be forced to pay attention to the technical aspects of the filmmaking, which will in return reveal one of the movie’s odder features: the pallette here is absolutely bizarre. Back in the day I’d cite the filmstock they used for the odd effect here. But of course, this is clearly cheapie digital, so I can only assume that someone fiddled with the color corrections on it in such a way that any colors with even a hint of brightness to them absolutely fly off the screen. Any color -- blues, greens, reds, oranges, hot pinks -- tends to look like they’ve been burned into a screen with a neon laser, which is especially notable because for long stretches, the production designer seems to have gone out of his or her way to include every color in every frame.

This doesn’t mean it’s a visually bright movie, or a pretty, or even visually competent one; it just means that in frame after haphazard frame, there’s always a neon pink chair or a bowl of vivid oranges or a bright red wall to draw the eye away from the action for absolutely no reason. Towards the end the movie settles down a little bit and limits itself to being an ugly eyesore of glum grays, but for long stretches of time it’s an ugly eyesore peppered with gaudy baubles of iridescent glow sticks. I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed this were it possible to direct even 5% of my attention to the plot, but, as I’d recommend a maximum safe level of attention set to 2%, there’s plenty of free brain power available to think about these things.

Right about the 50 minute mark, though, things go from boring to insane in pretty short order. And I’m just going to tell you the whole thing, because it’s pretty funny and let’s face it, you’re never going to watch this piece of crap, so consider it SPOILER territory from here on out. And there’s a lot to spoil! For a movie which begins with forty minutes of virtually no plot, it has about five movies worth of rambling nonsense in its back half.

Supercop isn’t great with evidence, but he’s top notch with hunches, and he seems to suspect this is an inside job. And he is correct; it turns out that the whole ransom and industrial espionage thing that the opening of the movie sets up is a total non-sequitur, because the culprit was actually… the bitchy Aunt! Auntie kidnapped Jia Jia because of her crippling phobia of any kind of discipline whatsoever, and stashed her at, I guess, a friend’s house or something? It’s unclear exactly who was willing to get involved in a kidnapping scheme to save a little girl from having to finish her dinner, but it turns out not to matter because by the time Supercop arrives, whoever lived in this house is dead and the girl has been re-kidnapped by someone else!

By the way, in case you haven't guess yet, neither that bloody lady nor any giant mushrooms of any kind appear in the movie, so I have no idea what to make of this poster except that...

Why, what have we here? It's just the poster from SHROOMS with a long haired Asian ghost lady crudely photoshopped over the center mushroom, and for some reason some kind of bloody rag stuck in up  at the top. To my knowledge, I am the first person on Earth to realize this fact, but that shows you how little Netflix was willing to spend on this dreck.

Wait a second, you ask, if Aunty did the kidnapping, who was it that called the family and demanded the ransom? We’ll get to that. It makes no sense, but we’ll get there.

For now, though, the movie ignores this weird fact, and also that this Aunt is a fucking monster. I-Ling is pretty upset that Jia Jia is re-kidnapped, but doesn’t murder Aunty on the spot, which is more restraint that I would be able to show. But wait, who is the new kidnapper? Supercop’s instinct that it’s a second, even more inside job seems strengthened by our knowledge that I-Ling has a ne’er-do-well younger brother who seems to be some kind of low-level crook and is always hitting her up for money. At one point, we see him torturing a blindfolded guy and pouring gasoline over him, demanding some kind of code. Definitely a bad guy. So when a mysterious masked ninja shows up at the house where everyone is staying for no clear reason (and I mean that in two senses -- there’s no clear reason they’re all in this house, and there’s no clear reason a ninja would show up there, since they already paid the ransom) and gets into a mild kung fu fight with Fei Wang (the scientist dad, in case you forgot about him) and then the Supercop, we suspect we might know who’s behind the mask. Our suspicions are strengthened when Supercop dispatches his ninja into a river, and then we see a wet brother stumbling home.

Supercop has a different idea, though, suspecting the father for reasons which are entirely obscure. But we already know he also got into a ninja fight (though he doesn’t mention it to anyone), so we’re not surprised when he’s cleared by I-Ling, who can see he doesn’t have any damning bruises.

No, this isn't from the movie, SINGULAR CAY has nothing remotely this entertaining in it. It also doesn't seem to have a single fucking film still online, just that hilarious ripoff poster and the generic one with the lady that I already used. Therefore please enjoy some random pictures of cats for the remainder of this review.

This clears the way for us to suspect the shifty brother, but we’ve got one other red herring to get out of the way first: having been wrong about the dad, Supercop now suspects that I-Ling’s wallflower sister (who is also staying in the house, but who has, to the best of my recollections, no dialogue whatsoever) is the kidnapper. He follows her to a seedy flop house with some motorcycle hooligans outside, and discovers the horrible truth -- she has kidnapped a child and held her for ransom -- just not the child we’re interested in. Yep, she’s involved in a completely unrelated parallel kidnapping. It’s unclear if this is sheer coincidence, or if she got the idea from the other kidnapping, or what her deal is, or why she did this, but there you go. What kind of fucking family is this, anyway?!

Now we’re finally free to focus on the suspicious brother, who the movie all but screams is the bad guy, constantly cutting back to him doing something vaguely nefarious. But wait, before that, it’s a Hong Kong movie, so we got to have a little melodrama. Remember, Supercop is I-Ling’s old flame, and they keep getting teary-eyed and saying things like “if only you hadn’t left Hong Kong to be an international Supercop, dot dot dot” and I-Ling cries and they almost hug once. So that takes care of that.

OK, finally, now we’ve got that out of the way, can we please get back to this obvious no-goodnik brother?

Having run out of other family members to accuse, Supercop finally sets his sights on the person it obviously is, who has motive and opportunity and so forth. But not so fast! Remember all those suspicious things we saw him do? Stumble back to his house wet after Supercop kicked the ninja into a river, torture a guy with gas, etc? Guess what! There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of them, it’s just that the movie only shows them out of context! How can there possibly be a reasonable explanation for a torture scene? Get this -- it turns out he was auditioning for a movie! Now we flash back and see there’s a director and camera on set (it’s never been mentioned before that he has any aspirations to thespianism)! By pure chance, the one glimpse of it we saw earlier was at the wrong angle and lacking any context, ain’t that just the darndest thing. Boy, I could sure see how you would get the wrong impression if that’s all you saw! Good to be able to set the record straight.

By god, that’s a level of shameless cinematic tomfuckery which you almost have to be impressed by.

Anyway, so brother is now also excluded as a suspect. Which also sort of makes sense because since his ninja fight, Dad has been in contact with a mysterious caller who wants the Laboratory McGuffin in exchange for the daughter, and even sends a fancy radioshack remote-controlled drone to pick it up from the other side of a room. Supercop has now arrested, one by one, everyone in the family except I-Ling, and has turned out to be hilariously wrong again and again. Which makes you wonder what the fuck kind of Supercop he is,anyway. I mean, he knows kung fu, but so does the nerdy scientist dad, and given what I’ve seen in the movies, presumably the entire population of Hong Kong. What exactly would you say you do here, Supercop?

I should also mention one other thing: in two or three scenes early on, we see the ghost of a deceased aunt hanging around menacingly, mostly lurking unseen behind people but once aggressively reaching out and grabbing I-Ling from the medicine cabinet! But she disappears by the second half and no one ever mentions it again and it doesn’t turn out to be important, so, huh. This proves to be the entire pretext for labelling this airheaded crime caper a horror movie, which is pretty special. For a while, we also see a ghostly Jia-Jia running around, making her mother frantically chase her in impossible places and then dissapearing like the little fuckbastard that she is, and also the Supercop has a moment where she appears to him as a scary screaming ghost accompanied by a loud musical sting. It seems like she’s trying to get his attention to follow one of the hundred or so red herring characters as he sneakily walks out into the night, but then he does follow and it turns out to be nothing, and also it later turns out Jia-Jia wasn’t dead, so I don’t know what the fuck any of that was about, I guess her mom and the Supercop are just big hallucinating babies.

But not quite as big hallucinating babies as Fei Wang, though, because it turns out --in the movie’s one twist so fantastically moronic that it almost retrospectively makes everything worth it-- all those times he got menacing phone calls and fought with obscure, black-clad figures… it was really himself all along!!! because he’s got …. Multiple personality disorder!!! It was one of those personalities (the only one we’ll ever hear about, actually) who (re)kidnapped Jia-Jia, and also stole his own ransom money (why?) and also forced him to hand over his secret formula (to himself?) and I guess was also making threatening phone calls to himself (in one flashback, we see him calling himself and delivering a threat from an abandoned warehouse, which is quite a feat since we see him take this phone call in his lab at the start of the movie. He’s got some quick feet on him, that’s for sure.) A labcoat wearing a rather dumpy man explains all of this in some detail at the end, after some unclear amount of time has passed and Jia-Jia has been recovered from wherever she was off-camera somehow, apparently the details aren’t really important in comparison to this brain-melting twist. The labcoat claims this was the result of “various stresses” but that Mr. Personality might be able to return to normal, though it could take awhile. The camera fades to black.

Then it fades back and the Supercop is playing golf with some other authority figure, who tells him he did a good job and offers him a financial reward, which he takes. Fade to black.

Then it fades back to Fei Wang --apparently now cured-- who sits up and says “i think I’ll go to the lab.” Then he walks outside and is immediately hit by a car.

Cut to credits.

So to answer my original question, I have no idea what a Singular Cay is.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	None
TITLE ACCURACY	Impossible to determine, since it’s impossible to ascertain what a “Singular Cay” is
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	If so, there’s no way to know since the credits aren’t translated into English. Admittedly, the dialogue is just barely translated into some kind of vague English. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: How come ISIS can put out press releases that read like fuckin’ Gore Vidal, but Hong Kong imports appear to be subtitled by distracted schoolchildren in their first semester of English immersion?
SEQUEL?	Oh sweet God I hope not
REMAKE?	What is there to remake
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Hong Kong (which means, China, at this point, basically)
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Kidnapping movie where there’s a ghost in two or three scenes in the first half? Is that a thing? I guess call it a psycho-thriller.
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	I mean, Pei Pei Cheng was Jade Fox in CROUCHING TIGER, and starred in COME DRINK WITH ME. So she certainly deserves better than this.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Nope
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes, it just happens to be an incidental ghost who doesn’t have anything to do with the plot
POSSESSION?	Nah, except by (spoiler) multiple personality.
CREEPY DOLLS?	Yeah, a creepy doll with one eye out get thrown through the window, for… some reason.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Yep
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Supercop follows and spies on various family members
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you’re ever jonesing for some Asian horror but Netflix doesn’t have anything Japanese, Korean, or Thai, still don’t make the same mistake I did here.