by MATTHEW HAYS

You may be suffering from the same thing I am. The symptoms involve depression and a terrible sense of loss. You're pining for something sick and twisted. (No jokes about my love life, please.)

It's called Fantasia withdrawal. Now that our beloved festival of all things nutty and kooky is done for the year, many of you similarly smitten Fantasia fans may feel at a terrible loss. But the Cinéma du Parc's "Parc After Dark" series has just the antidote: Red to Kill is Billy Tang's strange rape revenge movie, and it's screening this weekend.

This Hong Kong special is set in a rather grim home for mentally challenged young people. Here, the softspoken and mentally deficient Ming Ming (Lily Chung) innocently practices her dancing while also making friends with various other schizoids and lower-functioning inhabitants of the home. When a series of horrific rapes happen in the building, neighbours and other tenants turn on the mentally-challenged patients, assuming it must be them behind the crimes.

Soon, it's Ming Ming who gets into trouble, when she unwittingly wears some red underpants. It seems the ostensibly sweet and helpful institution manager (the gorgeous Ben Ng) harbours some pretty danged ugly memories from his childhood that involve rape and the colour red. Whenever he sees this colour, he turns into a raging, seething, out-of-control rapist!

Red to Kill has its interesting moments, but for the most part it simply serves as a concept movie, the question being, how low can this thing go? There are various rape scenes and no skimping on the gore budget. My favourite parts occur when someone is cut up or blown apart; we then get a cutaway to a reaction shot, in which someone gets spattered with blood as a result of the destructive action. Much of this is disturbingly un-pc, while much of it is also laugh-out-loud in terms of its depiction of violence. When Tang isn't trying to rattle our sense of fair play in terms of representation, he's trying to make us laugh (and generally succeeding). For me, it presents a perfectly nasty little night out at the cinema, and a taste of what all sensible moviegoers are pining for now that Fantasia's almost 12 months away.

Also in Parc news, this weekend the late-night lineup includes Wizards, Ralph Bakshi's typically hallucinogenic '77 entry about a dystopic future full of magic and seemingly endless warfare. Some critics trashed this one, but Bakshi's innovative mishmash of animation styles and techniques make it well worth a shot. And yes, that's a young Mark Hamill's voice you hear in one of his first voiceovers. Now he's become a staple of the animation market, doing voices for the new Batman series.

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