T he debut feature by 25-year-old director Kevin Ko (柯孟融), Invitation Only (絕命派對) is Taiwan’s answer to the genre of horror films made popular by the Saw and Hostel film series. With a cast of pretty idols and sexy models, the film is a 90-minute ride of guilty thrills that combines graphic violence, repulsive torture and sexually suggestive imagery with bitter commentary on a wealth-obsessed society.
Promising actor Bryant Chang (張睿家) plays Wade, an ordinary guy who makes his living by running errands and chauffeuring around his wealthy young boss, known as President Yang (Jerry Huang, 黃志瑋). When Yang asks him to attend a private party by passing as a cousin, Wade is thrilled by the invitation to join the world of the rich, young and fabulous.
It turns out to be the best party ever. Wade wins big at gambling, enjoys a casual fling with supermodel Dana (Maria Ozawa) and makes new friends who include Hitomi (Julianne, 朱蕾安), Lin (Ma Kuo-hsien, 馬國賢) and Holly (He Chia-wen, 何嘉文).
The debauchery becomes a nightmare when the group finds pianist Robert brutally murdered. Hunted down one by one by a masked killer, Wade and his friends soon realize they are prey for a sadistic, high-society audience with a taste for the spectacle of torture and slaughter.
The invitees now have to fight back if they want to survive this killing game of the rich.
At its best, Invitation Only smartly plays with society’s obsession with the wealthy and the sense of unease over the widening gap between the elite and everybody else. The film effectively uses model Liz and Japanese AV idol Ozawa as disposable playthings and male model Huang as a young and powerful man of pedigree with a hint of menace.
Director Ko caught the attention of local film circles with his 2004 short horror flick The Print (鬼印), which circulated widely on the Internet while he was still a college student. In his debut feature, Ko follows the trend sparked by Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) and conjures up visceral and frightful experiences through graphic portrayals of gore and violence. The narration is, however, carried out in a plain and sometimes uninspired manner that kills the suspense in the first third of the film.
The story picks up when the psychopathic killer begins to hack his way through his victims. With a stomach-churning shot in which Wade cuts off his own thumb and an extended torture scene where Holly is mutilated by a knife, this slasher film is guaranteed to make audiences fidget in their seats.
Spiced up with local zest, Invitation Only is a competent first effort that aims to cultivate an audience for a genre that is rarely tackled in Chinese-language cinema.
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
RSS