recommended

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

For this supernatural serial killer flick, director Lun Ah not only adopts the grainy, rain-soaked style of David Fincher's Se7en (a big box-office hit the previous year), but also applies every clichéd technique available to him in the Hong Kong film-makers' bag of tricks. However, no amount of blue lighting, swirling smoke, slow-motion action, canted framing, and fluttering fabric can disguise the fact that Satan Returns is a cheaply produced, poorly considered piece of garbage that not even the presence of Hong Kong hottie Chingamy 'Naked Killer' Yau and top martial arts actor Donnie Yen can save from failure.The plot, from the pen of prolific writer/producer Wong Jing, sees a murderer named Judas abducting women born on the 6th June 1969 and removing their hearts to see if they are the daughter of the devil (apparently, having no heart makes little difference to a spawn of Satan). Whilst this silly story does allow for the occasional scene of light gore and unimpressive action, the focus of the film is on dull police procedure infused with lame comedy. Only towards the end of the film, do proceedings get a little livelier with the introduction of a couple of zombie cops and a touch of power tool mayhem, but by then it's definitely a case of 'too little, too late'.A touch more madness throughout, a couple of decent moments of tension, and a lot more gore certainly would've helped matters immeasurably, but as far as I am concerned, the key to success was under the director's nose all along: if he had made better use of Yau's smouldering sexuality (the only time she gets really horny, it is way too literal!), and hadn't allowed poor choreography and bad editing to prevent Yen from successfully displaying his awesome fighting skills, then Satan Returns would have been a whole lot more entertaining.

Now Hong Kong action movies are my one true cinematic blind spot, so I approached 'Satan Returns' with trepidation. I thought I would give it a look as it seemed it might be a slightly offbeat mix of Woo/Lam style cops'n'chops with a supernatural thriller theme. While I ended up hating this movie a lot less than I expected I still found it to be silly in the extreme, and pretty tiresome overall. The plot is incoherent nonsense about a religious nut called Judas attempting to find the Devil's daughter, and makes no real sense whatsoever. The only thing that kept me watching this to the very end was the the lovely Chingmy Yau of 'Naked Killer' fame, and some of the unintentionally funny sub-titles. Apart from that there isn't all that much to recommend this movie, and beware, the 'Se7en' comparisons are way off base, and extremely misleading.

Ah Lun directed this Wong Jing produced action shocker Devil 666 aka Satan Returns, in 1996. The film stars the incredibly beautiful sweetheart Chingmy Yau, who played the lead part in Clarence Fok's classic erotic action film Naked Killer in 1992. Donnie Yuen plays a tough cop who is with his colleagues (Chingmy included) after a lunatic killer who calls himself Judas and thinks Chingmy is the daughter of the Devil himself. What follows is gun battles, many plot turns, one chainsaw at the end, the usual Hong Kong "humor", gore and different camera styles, but the main interest for the film makers was to make a film which would appeal to the same audience than The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1990) and Se7en (David Fincher, 1995) did; Satan Returns is occasionally almost too obviously ripping these two Hollywood blockbusters off.The film has some genuinely creepy scenes and segments, and the camera styles and drives are again very restless and also imaginable, and there's at least one hyper fast drive through an apartment and its stairs, so I can't say the film isn't visually at least LITTLE interesting. The plot is nonsense and the scenes and characters are too close to those of Lambs' and Se7en's and the characters in this Orient production even mention these two films couple of times! The action is okay, but never "John Woo style" or near that as one writer requested. The gun battles are nothing special here as isn't anything else either. The rainy streets and dark settings could be gorgeous and effective, but since they've been taken straightly from Fincher's film, I cannot appreciate them in this film too much. There's also some bits of gore and fake blood, which looks occasionally very fake. This film is said to be rated CAT 3, but from what I know, that is NOT true and is only some distributor's "clever" effort to get people's attention due to the high rating. The violence isn't too strong, but it is the usual HK standard (i.e. some blood when people are shot and little gore and ripped hearts every now and then..) and what this film lacks unlike the real CAT 3 films, is the nudity and sex, which usually is the reason for high rating so there's no need to be gore and violence for film to get the "third" rating in Hong Kong.Devil 666 aka Satan Returns gets 4/10 just because of the fact that it is more watchable than some/most of these films, and I'm glad there's not too much of the usual stupid humor, but what's left, should have been left out as well. The visuals are occasionally interesting, but since the film is never original or too personal, the 4 rating seems reasonable, but those who have seen many Hong Kong horror and action films should not keep their expectations too high. Still, it could be MUCH worse!

Hyped as China's "answer" to Fincher's SEVEN; there's a scene where The Law run down a rain-soaked alley, a killer making use of a Biblical Motive and - well, that's about where the "connection" ends. Occult Scholar (??) seeks series of women with 6/6/69 birthdates in order to remove their hearts - any victim who survives the surgery, proves herself to be The Devil's Daughter. Usual HK buffet: martial arts (snore...), slapstick, noxious women, and, when all else fails, throw in some genital humour. It must be said, that zombie cops cut apart via chainsaw & a nailgun crucifixion are a tad more exciting than Paltrow's head in a box. Plus, a bonus "shock" ending. Basically, a feature length indictment of Chinese Law Enforcement. As one subtitled villain quips "Damn It! Go Eat S***!" Translation: rent a Cat III title instead.