Navigation

Dr Lamb - aka “Gao yang yi sheng” (1992)

Dir: Danny Lee/Billy Tang

As a child Lam Gor Yu was generally picked on and disliked by his Stepmother, Stepbrother and Stepsister and was fascinated with sex, even going so far as to watch his Mother and Father making love. But his disinterested Dad sees no harm in his curiosity.

Now a grown man, Lam Gor Yu (Simon Yam) still lives with his Family (minus Mother but with his Stepsister’s young Daughter) and spends his nights driving a taxi. His fascination with sex remains, but he is unable to perform and grows more and more frustrated with the ‘dirty’ women that offer up what he can‘t participate in.

When photos of seemingly dead women are reported to the Police by the developing lab and traced back to Lam, Inspector Li (Danny Lee, “The Killer“) and his squad arrest Lam and try to get him to confess his crimes.
Eventually, after his Family is confronted with the truth, Lam does just that and soon the horrified Cops are hearing just what Lam did to his victims…..

 

Based on the real life case of Lam Gor Yu (known as the "Taxi Cab Killer", in fact killer cabbies would make a few appearences in HK cinema) who was convicted of murdering and then mutilating four women in 1982, Danny Lee and Billy “Red to Kill” Tang's “Dr Lamb” is actually a bigger budget, big screen reprisal of the ‘ATV’ television series "Hong Kong Criminal Archives” which dramatised infamous criminal cases.
It’s also the groundbreaking entry in then fledgling Hong Kong film rating ‘CAT III‘, which came in to cover the more sexual, sexually violent and gory movies then appearing.
And, along with “Escape from Brothel” and “Bunman: The Untold Story”, it became one of the key titles in opening such extreme fare onto the wider World market.

As with most Hong Kong serial killer flicks that have a heavy Police presence the Cops are not really shown in a glowing light. And in “Dr Lamb” they are particularly out of control.
Suspects never have Lawyers when interviewed and are (as well as witnesses) routinely and openly punched, slapped and beaten with hammers (!) with seemingly no repercussions of any kind!
We also have a truly bizarre sequence where Lam’s entire Family proceed to beat the hell out of him in an interview room while the Cops leave them to it! True, it yields confessional results but it’s so blatantly illegal (and rather absurd) that it distracts from the ‘true crime’ aesthetic the rest of the film strives for and basically succeeds in doing.
And just as Lee‘s “Bunman” had nothing much to offer when it’s deranged killer was not on-screen and carrying out his beastly deeds , “Dr Lamb” also gives the viewer little that is truly engaging when it’s not concentrating on Lam’s nightly drives (the taxi scenes are neon lit and rain soaked and add a suitably doom-laden atmosphere), sleazy fumblings and horrific butchery. All delivered via some expert cinematography, direction, acting, design and editing.

So good are these ‘psycho’ sequences in fact that when we are away from them the rest of the film comes across as rather flat.
And sadly Lee and Tang (though this smacks more of Lee) often concentrate to excess on the rather drab Police investigation, and on totally superfluous Cop moments in general, instead of their killer.
But thankfully “Dr Lamb” avoids most of the dreadfully inane humour associated with these scenes and characters in “Bunman“, which almost sank that particular movie.

It’s also refreshing to see Danny Lee himself give a serious performance and not the obnoxious clown turn he gave in the aforementioned “Bunman”, something that makes the Cop moments in “Lamb” far more welcome.

While the other Cops are crude, loud cartoon characters with the actors giving suitably loud, crude and cartoon performances, Simon Yam manages to give a serious, totally inane when needed, subdued when not, performance that means the basically serious handling of the macabre story remains in the forefront.
Yam came to CAT III shockers after some stand-out performances in some excellent ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ action /tough drama movies (the highlight being his superb turn in John Woo’s masterly “A Bullet in the Head”) and it’s this grounding that means he brings an astute awareness to what is needed (and what is not) in bringing such wild and twisted characters to life.

There is the odd humorous moment though and one that is truly warped and black (and that does thankfully work) is a gross-out gag involving the outrageously clumsy handling of a severed, pickled breast.! It’s a very memorable moment of macabre, politically incorrect, comedy.
Although a later murder flashback sequence, showing the newly cut-off breast being bloodily dropped into the pickle jar, is so genuinely grotesque that it means the seriousness of the movie is crucially (and rightfully) restored as soon as possible.

In fact breasts (and very nice ones too) play a big part in the movie and are often on show where the corpses of Lam’s victims are concerned and they generally suffer much abuse of one kind or another, be it excessive wobbling, violent squeezing and even getting sliced off of course.
Breasts have a very hard time of it here folks.
Breasts equal nudity of course and that brings up the lack of full frontal shots. Probably because of the still pubescent CAT III and what would or would not be allowed in the mix, pubic hair shots are noticeably (and very obviously) avoided, something of course later CAT III films would not bother to do as they would go on to revel in the full nudity on display.

The violence on show is still (despite the odd cut) strong stuff and it’s still a film that would have almost no chance of getting a rated, intact, release in the UK or America.
Lam slamming a cleaver into the arm of a corpse, and his electric-saw dissection of the body, are real in-your-face moments. The saw scene in particular goes wild with the blood and fleshy chunks that fly around the screen (some bits of meat even end up in the fish tank!) as the blade rips (mostly off frame) into the corpse. The already mentioned breast removal, via scalpel, delivers a little more on screen bodily damage as we see the blade enter the flesh (a pretty damn good latex dummy that reportedly cost a lot of money) and start to cut. This scene does feature the most obvious censor cuts though.
Quite heavily cut for it’s HK cinema run, these cuts remained for it’s home viewing releases. Luckily the recent ‘Winson Entertainment’ DVD restores a few of these cut scenes and it now means only a few seconds are still missing.

Mention of the DVD and censorship brings up English subtitles like “vaginal orifice” and various other dubious translations that do not help the seriousness of the movie, but that’s not the movie’s fault.
Nor are the obvious audio bleeps to remove crude language! Something I remember being present when I saw the film on it’s opening day in Hong Kong, and still present and correct on this more complete ‘Winson’ DVD, the subtitles however keep the words (like ’bitch’) in.

There is little to criticise the film itself for from a technical standpoint though as it looks great, is well designed and has some effective uses of music (very good score by Jonathan Wong).
One thing that did stick out though was that video footage that Lam takes of his butchery is simply the same footage we have seen in the movie, which brings up the question of how Lam could have been cutting into a breast while at the same time getting the camera to move, change angles and altar the distance of various shots!

But such things are of little importance overall and in general “Dr Lamb” (no idea where the Doctor bit comes in!), despite the overly long Police scenes which spend running time that could have been better used elsewhere, is a pretty fine chunk of extreme cinema history and one that still manages to deliver the shocks, the nastiness and the insanity.