Fairy Tale Killer Danny Pang The story: Jun (Wang Baoqiang), a stutterer with his face painted white, confesses to five murders in a police station but is released as his statement does not add up. But the next day, the brutal murders he confessed to begin. Each time, the word “wolf” is left at the scene of the crime. Detective Han (Lau Ching Wan) has to hunt down Jun while covering up his team’s slip-up in the first place. The latest offering from Hong Kong director Danny Pang is like Frankenstein’s monster assembled from disparate movie cast-offs, with all the rough joints showing. Fairy-tale fever has been sweeping Hollywood with movies such as Mirror Mirror and the upcoming Snow White And The Huntsman, so Pang has decided to cash in by clumsily adding a fairy-tale motif to the killings. He then pilfers a central conceit from the South Korean thriller The Chaser (2008), in which the killer confesses to his crimes but is then set free for lack of evidence. Indeed, the Mandarin title of this film is Zhui Xiong, or Chasing The Murderer. Pang then proceeds to pile on the crazy. Jun appears to be mentally unstable and he is seen with a long-haired woman (Elanne Kwong). She could be a Chinese Rapunzel or, more likely, Sadako from the Japanese horror flick Ring (1998) – after all, she paints creepy drawings which are full of violence and gore. Coincidentally, Han has an autistic son also given to scribbling all over their apartment. Guess who later conveniently puts together clues for Han? There is also the side plot of Han’s team falling apart as the members suspect him of betraying one of them. The more pressing question here is: Why must all five of them in the team go on an investigation together? So that we can have a multitude of reaction shots when some discovery is made? Everything is treated with a heavy hand and underlined with a loud and intrusive score. Even the usually solid Lau cannot save this hysterical mess as the film ends on a wildly over-the-top note in an abandoned concrete “castle”. By this point, Fairy Tale Killer has slaughtered all plausibility and murdered in the audience any remaining interest in the story. (ST)