This Category III effort from Herman Yau, the director of "The Ebola Syndrome" and "The Untold Story", is not a terrible movie, but it isn't a great movie, either. "Gong Tau" is a type of voodoo which is visited upon the wife of a cop (Mark Cheng) who betrayed a woman in Thailand. Cheng and the dependable Suet Lam spend much of the movie on the trail of a criminal who is sending bad voodoo curses to Cheng's wife and making her life unpleasant. Director Yau is expected to deliver grisly violence and messy gore in his Cat III work, so the presence of crawling centipedes, a baby stabbing, blood vomiting, and brutal beatings is not surprising or unwelcome. The film is beautifully shot, but it is dramatically schizophrenic and unfocused. It is more of a police procedural than a horror film, with too much time devoted to people standing in offices talking. Yau always manages to push a few buttons and up the shock value in his movies, but he doesn't go quite far enough in "Gong Tau", so the audience loses.
Review of Voodoo
