An eclectic antique collector is mysteriously killed, and his body goes missing. His estranged brother receives a cryptic letter attached to a puppet and begins to investigate his brother’s strange life and murder.
His investigation leads him to meeting some odd characters in his brother’s life, and a tall tale about a human bone piano that appears to be at the center of his death.
The most frightening thing about this movie is the original poster featuring the puppet (seen below in the review score graphic). The second most frightening thing is that a group of people produced this movie and attempted to pass it off as a horror film.
The moody, dark lighting, punctuated by flashes of a lightning storm outside, with subdued, almost muted music of the introduction are coupled with a series of jump scares and visual effects lifted from a late 80’s horror slasher.
But that’s about it. That’s all you will get with this film.
Then the movie moves into the mystery thriller mode that it was always supposed to be. The dead man’s brother, who is brooding over the death of his wife and child and blames his brother for it, attempts to solve one of the most ridiculous and complex mysteries this side of a Murder She Wrote episode.
There are more twists and turns here than a casual Sunday afternoon drive up a winding mountain road. But unlike that drive, you will eventually end up at a satisfactory destination. With this movie, all you get is confusion when you try and work out how the new twist overrides the previous twist. And then bracing yourself for the next one!
I’ll give it credit for one thing - the puppet. It’s creepy. But it was first creepy in 1970’s when most cinemagoers originally saw it. Now it just looks like a poor man’s Jigsaw without the tricycle.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s the goofy translation of the subtitles that makes these Chinese horror films so bad. So while I am watching, I am pretending I am fixing the dialogue, hoping that it will make more sense. I gave up after 30 minutes with this one when I realised the first twist wasn’t going to make sense.
In the end, almost every actor does a more than adequate job with what they are given here to work with. Likewise, the director has done an okay-ish job, but she was obviously hamstrung by the fact that her ending had to be a South Park style “I learned something today” conclusion. At least this movie wasn’t channeling Scooby-Doo!
Avoid at all costs.
GENRE Chinese Horror Thriller
DIRECTOR Mingzhi Tang
STARRING Bowei Han, Zhiqiang Chi, Bingyao Hong
ORIGINAL TITLE 消失的收藏家
ALTERNATIVE TITLE Disappearing Collector
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN China
RELEASE DATE 22 December 2023