MORE THAN JUST A SPLATTER
The next year after Dr. Lamb Danny Lee as a director shot The Untold Story which came out to be a bit better than Dr. Lamb and became somewhat classic in the circles of gorehounds and category III movie lovers. But in Dr. Lamb some elements can be found that later made The Untold Story so popular.

In the beginning of Dr. Lamb police arrest a taxi driver accusing him in a number of girl murders throughout Hong Kong. Young man doesn't want to confess at first, but finally starts telling his story, and we see the rest of the film as a flashback. Dr. Lamb is pretty gory, with notorious episodes for example of woman's breast being cut off or chunks of human meat floating in a fish tank, although with nothing overly-disturbing which can shock those who's seen plenty of such movies. And altogether Dr. Lamb could become totally senseless and stupid exploitation schlock like, say Ebola Syndrome, but it didn't.

Danny Lee turned this gorefest into a pretty serious film. I wouldn't call it a drama, but it definately is much more than your ordinary splatter movie. As The Untold Story makes a sudden turn after the cannibal is seized, Dr. Lamb keeps it realistic from the very beginning. We see the taxi driver's family which doesn't want to believe that their relative is guilty, but as soon as he confesses they all turn their backs on him. We see this guy being interrogated in a police precinct and how cops - calling a spade a spade - torture him to get a confession. At this moment you don't even know whom to feel for - cops or a murderer. Dr. Lamb at many points turns out to be pretty ambiguous and thoughtful albeit it doesn't necessarily have to. It strongly reminded me of William Lustig's Maniac. This is the case when an exploitation film happens to be something more, and that's always a nice surprise for a viewer.

Dr. Lamb is really Lam Gor-Yu, a taxi driver with the most unusual proclivities. The beginning of the film shows us why he has so many problems adjusting to reality. His father spoiled the boy incessantly from the earliest years of the child's life, refusing to scold him for questionable behaviors directed at the other kids in the apartment building or towards family members. It is just a part of growing up, argues the elder Lam, to express a curiosity for girls and the young women dad brings home. That a social worker would probably think otherwise never impresses itself on this father's mind. These seeds of degeneracy blossom fully once Lam Gor-Yu attains manhood. He does not leave the house to seek his own destiny, but maintains a room in his father's home that he shares with one of his brothers. Only when the men in the family leave to earn their daily bread does Lam Gor-Yu express fully his grotesque desires, first with a few female relatives and later with women he meets on the streets of the city. The police step into the picture when a photo development laboratory brings in some pictures of a dismembered body left by a customer. That a calculating killer like Lam Gor-Yu would do such a stupid thing is only the first salvo of idiocy fired in this clunker.

The cops, with Inspector Lee at the helm, begin to search for the man who dropped off the negatives. When they get him, which does not take long, the police proceed to torture the suspect in ways that would cause the entire staff of the ACLU to have a fit. The police officers beat Lam Gor-Yu with a phone book, slap him around, and generally do anything they think will get them that valuable confession. The killer stays mum despite the atrocities, refusing to give the investigators the satisfaction of breaking him. Drastic situations call for drastic solutions, so Lee brings in the man's family and tells them what Lam Gor-Yu did to his niece. Then the family proceeds to beat the killer senseless while the cops watch closely for any signs of a willingness to confess. Well, Lam does confess to the heinous crimes, all of which we see in flashback. What did the killer do? Abduct woman and murder them in his apartment. That is all, with a few sick scenes of the cops searching the apartment for "evidence" and other crime scene reenactments thrown in for balance. "Dr. Lamb" is a tasteless film, but it is also an incredibly boring one with much less sauce than "The Untold Story" or similar Hong Kong masterpieces.

"Dr. Lamb" initially promises great things. It has Simon Yam as the psycho and Danny Lee sleepwalking through yet another role as a police investigator. I keep telling myself that the DVD version I watched underwent some massive cuts because the gore just isn't there. You do get to see Lam Gor-Yu perform homemade surgery on his victims, a little blood spatter here and there, but this does not compare to the gross out effects seen in other genre entries. The other elements you would expect from a film from this genre are here: the usual bad taste humor, experienced full force when the cops search Lam Gor-Yu's apartment and engage in some gluey slapstick sequences, is as upsetting as it was in "Untold Story." The emphasis on police procedures--meaning no access to a lawyer and unending interrogations filled with brutality--dominates a portion of the film, something that probably won't improve now that communist Chinese cops walk the streets.

The only positives in "Dr. Lamb" are the soundtrack and the cinematography, but even then some of the scenes inside the taxicab on the rain slicked streets of Hong Kong run on. The DVD's picture quality was atrocious, full of haze and color bleeding during the scenes when clarity mattered the most. I have seen a few reviews from people who label this film as one of the ghastliest pieces of cinema ever to emerge from the Orient, but I did not see it. Maybe I watched some obscure DVD version of the film that left out all the grue, but the movie I saw and the one other people describe is as wide as the gulf separating the earth and the moon. Give this one a shot if you like Asian cinema; perhaps you will have a better experience than I had with it.

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