Everyone in Demoniac Flash suffers from delusions. If you picked up this DVD expecting some sort of quality filmgoing experience, then you probably suffer from delusions too. Director/writer Tony Leung Hung-Wah follows up his underwhelming B-movie PTU Files - Death Trap with a completely underwhelming horror flick. This movie is so underwhelming that you will likely forget what happened only moments after it occurs onscreen. It's that uninteresting.
     Anthony Wong leads the cast as crippled fellow Mo, who became so thanks to tragic, yet oddly laughable circumstances. In the opening moments of Demoniac Flash, we witness the truly awful parenting that leaves Mo in crutches. While reading a paper, Mo let his son get run over by a truck, and the resulting trauma of being such a lousy father psychologically induces Mo to lose the use of his legs. Thanks to Tony Leung Hung-Wah's direction, you might lose control of your bladder. While it's awful to watch a tyke get totaled by a truck, the scene is staged so ineptly that A) you know the kid is going to get run over, and B) you'll probably want to slap Anthony Wong for phoning in his performance.
     Ah, but it gets worse. Nicola Cheung (who was nominated for a Best New Artist Award in 1997) shows up as the comically delusional comic artist May. Basically, everytime she falls asleep, she either A) sees a person in a white shirt get stabbed, or B) gets chased by a hunchback garbage lady. On the bright side, May's nice guy co-worker Ken Wong (who was also nominated for Best New Artist in 1997) dotes on her like a lovestruck dope. Meanwhile, his sister Natalie Ng is a shrieking social worker who has delusions of getting sexually assaulted by one of her female patients. She also runs around calling May crazy, which would be all right if she weren't so batty herself. All of these characters either live in or wander around Rose Villa, an impressive condo establishment that also houses Sam Lee (Who actually won Best New Artist over both Ken Wong and Nicola Cheung in 1997. Go Sam.) and a bunch of his friends, who are in town to work on a movie. Then someone dies, a couple of gangsters (Timmy Hung and Jason Chu) show up and overact, and things start to make even less sense.
     "Pointless" would be the best description for Demoniac Flash, though "interminable", "mind-numbing", and "mystifyingly bad" could qualify too. Tony Leung Hung-Wah assembles a massive cast of characters, though some are so unnecessary that it's a wonder they even made the final cut. Sam Lee looks to either be A) visiting the set, or B) doing someone a favor. Anthony Wong actually does appear to act on occasion, though his character's ultra-nice attitude could merely be the actor channeling his boredom. Nicola Cheung is fetching but mechanical, and everyone else in the cast either overacts or can't act at all. It's hard to say who's to blame, the filmmakers or the actors themselves. To be safe, we should probably just blame everyone.
     The killer to all of this: none of the characters are remotely compelling, and the situations are incredibly uninteresting too. Horror should have some basis for affecting you, be it characters who matter or situations that are unnerving in their primal familiarity. That doesn't happen here. Though the "scary long haired woman" does appear once or twice to remind you that this is an Asian horror film, most of the scares here are too character specific to get under your skin. Even worse, 90% of them occur in dream sequences. Too often we are introduced to moments of mild horror, only to have the character suddenly wake up. This probably happens only a dozen times, but thanks to the miracle of filmmaking, this "wake up after a bad dream" narrative device seems to occur no less than 10,000 times. The lesson here could be to never fall asleep, because if you do, you'll see some wacky hunchback garbage lady goose-stepping towards you in an abandoned warehouse. Either that, or you could dream that you're watching Demoniac Flash again. If that happened to me, you could count on me staying awake until the end of time. (Kozo 2005)