There was a time in Hong Kong cinema when Category III flicks about insanely graphic serial killers were all the rage, with The Untold Story one of the best remembered and most award-winning, which is completely surprising to me because — and let’s be honest — it’s kind of terrible.

Directed by Herman Yau with all the skill and dexterity of a low-budget TV-movie journeyman, Story stars a skin-crawling Anthony Wong as the untold storyteller, a glasses-wearing creeper with a boiling-over penchant for ultraviolent outbursts, one of which luckily takes him to exotic vacation destination Macau.

But, as you can guess, that’s really only half of the untold story.

Once there, he opens a restaurant that specializes in the best steamed pork buns in town, absolutely filled with the perfectly cooked meat of the previous night’s kill. City on Fire’s Danny Lee, who seems to always have a hooker on each arm, leads an investigative squad of buffoonish cops only interested in ogling Lee’s women while simultaneously eating free pork buns and harassing the only woman on their team, mostly for not having heaving breasts.

After years of destructive desensitization, the grue and gore aren’t really all that shocking, with the exception of the brutal scene where Wong uses a handful of chopsticks in a way they were hopefully never intended for. While the last half of the movie mostly features Wong constantly beaten while in police custody, in scenes that might give a few fascist viewers untold boners, I’m really not sure what was the point.

With a little urine drinking — according to Wong, it helps heal your busted-out, broken-down innards — the film’s abrupt ending, complete with a Dragnet-styled voiceover, only adds to the back-alley greasiness of the cleaver-heavy proceedings, a dirty job that won Wong the Best Actor trophy at the Hong Kong Film Awards. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Although the remote Mamiya mansion has been abandoned and off limits for 30 years, a Tokyo TV crew talks its way into gaining access for a documentary. The crew members insist the spacious, foreboding structure contains a lost mural by its former resident, the famed painter Mamiya Ichiro. Proving themselves correct, they immediately begin restoring the dusty wall of art to its former greatness, and in so doing, awaken dark spirits who never left the grounds — you know the kind: flowing dark hair and all.

With such concessions made for its homeland audience, writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Sweet Home is a Japanese take on the American haunted house film. From Robert Wise’s suggestive shadows to Steven Spielberg’s Tobe Hooper’s more malevolent forces, Kurosawa (Creepy) builds upon trope after trope to provide shock after shock.

As the title suggests, Kurosawa employs the horror genre to examine society’s modern fractured family — in particular, the role of the mother as caregiver. Among the TV team, the producer (Shingo Yamashiro, Karate Inferno) is a single father who’s brought along his precocious daughter (pop singer Nokko, in her only feature credit), who’s pushing him to admit his attraction to a fellow crew member (Nobuko Miyamoto, Tampopo). On the Mamiya side, we learn the painter’s wife accidentally killed their toddler, who happened to be playing in the furnace when Mommy fired it up; hence, the hauntings.

But no worry necessary: Sweet Home is not some term paper on matriarchal dichotomy that’s been committed to celluloid; it’s a horror movie first, foremost and even second and third. Someone is bisected parallel to the waistline, while someone else takes an ax to the head, right between the eyes. And all the grisliness is brought to an in-camera believability with practical makeup effects by the legendary Dick Smith (The Exorcist), whose command of the craft is best exemplified by a character’s dissolution into a literal pile of bones.

Because it has yet to see an official release in the United States, Sweet Home is best known for its eponymous video game, developed in lockstep, which went on to inspire the multimedia juggernaut we know as Resident Evil. Credit where credit is due and all, but Sweet Home deserves global acknowledgment for its own worth, not insignificant. —Rod Lott