Speaking of which, if anybody actually goes through with these things, please please PLEASE send me a copy of said pictures. If not for posting somewhere on the site, then at least for my own awkward, terrified amusement at the oddball heights I can inspire in the occasional aimless weirdo.

"Horror Hotline" is a Hong Kong radio show popular with the Cantonese X-Filers out East. Hosted by associated of the paranormal, Ruth and Edmond, the show covers the usual topics of importance in today's world, like ghosts, psychic visions, and the occasional urban legends about faceless women and their caged mutant monster babies. Normally over here we'd just ship the latter onto "Jerry Springer", but HH's creator Ben takes his spook stories very seriously and sacrifices a lot to keep his little labor of supernatural love up and running... sacrifices I'm all too familiar with as The Tomb now inches towards its own 10th anniversary. Traditionally the 10th anniversary is the tin/aluminum anniversary, so if anybody wants to send me canned meat products just email me and I'll provide you with the address.

Unfortunately, being all wrapped up in your life's work (not to mention wearing sunglasses at all times) usually makes you a dick in the pantheon of character stereotypes, which is never good for your in-film relationships, so we also have Ben's cute-as-a-button (resting on Scarlett Johansson's naked ass...) live-in, more often than not neglected girlfriend Helen. Hel's oven is currently baking Ben's bun, but she hasn't told her man just yet and you know he'd never notice on his own, being the always preoccupied dick I just pegged him as. Also brought into our cast is an American TV correspondent named Mavis, who is in Hong Kong documenting the behind-the-scenes of "Horror Hotline" along with her two-man tech crew. The piece is supposed to focus on how Hong Kong has become an amalgamation of both Eastern and Western cultures, but really Mavis doesn't stop covering Ben's production once she starts by tagging along with the man of eternal sunglasses to interview a popular local legend. Auntie Ying, a reputed medium carrying on her family's legacy of futurist voyeurism, tells Mavis that there's trouble surrounding her and that she should stay away from her friends so they don't become victims of it... but you know they totally are, otherwise there'd be no movie!

Later that night, like clockwork (more specifically the Grim Reaper's Swatch), one of Double-H's callers regales the show's listeners with a tale from his grade school years. Going by the name Chris, the man talks about playing soccer with his chums circa '63, as one of the little dummies kicked the ball too hard and sent it sailing into the surrounding woods, much like most close encounters of the kiddie kind always seem to start off. The boy discovered a small fenced-in shack, only to come running back to school, terrified of something with a "big head" and "many eyes". When the school principal and the boys went back to investigate for themselves, the freak baby with the enormous head they found caged up inside the shack turned their Fruit of the Looms from white to brown and even made the Iranian principal's Koran start to smoke! This giant skulled infant with the numerous oculars is no doubt Jesus and his holy power was denouncing the false holy book of the Muslims!... that'd be something, wouldn't it? Sounds like something Mel Gibson and Larry Cohen would put together.

Being a large-craniumed man, I can relate with our titular oddity, but more than anything it reminds me of this girl a friend of mine dated in school. Nice enough can on the lass, but the rest of her body suffered from Ally McBeal disease and seemed to feed on itself. Speaking of which, whatever happened to Calista "Skeletor" Flockhart anyway? As I was saying though, this girl's diminishing body coupled with her already sizable noggin left her with a really unkind form. We always said she looked like Minnie Driver or Jack Pumpkinhead (or Skellington, depending on your childrens' fantasy period of choice) with that massive globe on her shoulders. If you stuck a pencil into an apple and balanced it on its eraser, that was her. She was one of those girls that came from money though, so as long as you could keep your massive skull jokes quiet she'd more than likely try to buy your friendship off with steak dinner or a full keg on weekends. Besides, as stated, she had a deceptively plump set of seat meat strapped to her hips, so I can see why said friend kept inviting her into his boudoir. Oh the pushing I would've given to that cushion...

Back to business and away from anecdotes, no sooner does the big head baby monster story come out, then Horror Hotline's message board is flooded with responses and their phones ring off the hook from people with similar stories about the gargantuan cranium bearing ankle biter. Pieces of urban legends come in about how the beast is the product of chemical warfare, that it was able to walk and talk straight out of the womb, that it had fallen from its bed and died, that it has this ear piercing cry, that it once had to be rushed to the hospital to have a family of guinea pigs removed from its colon following a botched orgy at its Malibu home. Oh wait, that last one's from unfinished sequel: Horror Hotline...Big Head Richard Gere. More a skeptic than a blind believer, Ben isn't sold on these tales of a pediatrician's worst nightmare, so naturally this is going to be the only story to make it on the show that turns out legit.

Mavis isn't quite as skeptical though, and thinks there might be a bigger story here for her to cover than a "how a radio station works" fluff piece. Besides, she can't make a liar out of Auntie Ying now, can she? Digging up the current address for the Iranian principal mentioned in Chris's story, Mav Jimmy Olsen's her way deeper into the story and seeks the guy out for a follow-up interview under the guise that she and Ben are former students interviewing him for a class reunion video. That smell you're getting a whiff of right now? The one that smells a lot like sweaty feet and cliches? Yeah, that's the odor of our medium's prophetic words of the American girl's ill-fated future starting to boil. I'd say it should be finished cooking and ready to serve sometime in the next hour. Hope you brought your appetite!

After visiting the old Allah lover to no avail, strange happenings start up at the studio as phantom whispers seems to come out of a failing air conditioner unit and their original caller Chris rings in foretelling the death of someone in the group to happen within a few hours. If this were an American production, I can guarantee the tagline "Dead air takes on a whole new meaning" would have wound up on the poster. Anyway, while this stuff plays out, the hospital Helen works at gets a new John Doe whose brain seems entirely fried. She calms the kid down and quickly forms a mother-son relationship, but that night Hel finds him out of bed and curled up in the fetal position, whimpering in the hallway... with a familiar looking faceless woman not far behind. I'm starting to get this weird "Anti-Christ looking for a baby host body ala Demonic Toys" feeling, and when a horror movie out of Hong Kong inspires Charles Band Recall in me, things don't have a good chance of working out well.

After doing the Murphy Brown thing some more, Mavis and Ben learn that the mysterious Chris's six school chums all killed themselves in a factory several years ago. And to fulfill Chris's death premonition from the night before, Mavis's boom operator Mike (get it? "boom Mike"?) goes missing the next day only to call her that night... :::ominous pause:::... from the very same factory! This is the part where I'd normally turn on the tape with the dramatic musical cue, but since this isn't old time radio and I'm not Lamont Cranston, I think we can skip it. This turns into an effectively creepy scene of Ben, Mavis and her camera man David walking through the abandoned factory with only the light of Dave's JVC to see by as they navigate shadows with a soundtrack of pouring rain and their own echoes while seeking out their errant boom tech. Needless to say (yet I always find myself pointing out the obvious anyway, go figure) they find their pal slumped against a wall, covered in his own blood, and with the plasma smeared images of six faces painted above him. But if he'd been dead for half the day like the coroner says afterwards, then who was talking to Mavis through her cell phone? Did your spine just tingle? No? Oh, you've seen this stuff a hundred times in similar Asian movies over the last decade or so? Yeah, me too.

The question now isn't whether Mavis will buck her bosses' orders and continue trying to solve the mystery, but how many more people will die along the way, in what manner they'll be dispatched, if she herself will live to see the end credits, if Baby Big Head is part of some grand scheme or just a random genetic anomaly, and what connection if any all of this has with Helen's little bundle of presumed joy. Two things I will tell you though: (1) Evil Dead never let us see the horror and it did so to perfect effect, while movies like HHBHM just make it into one big-headed cop out and (2) if you've ever sat through an Asian horror flick that left you with more plot threads dangling in your hands than a nurse giving physicals to a retirement home full of old men has wrinkled geezer scroti dangling in hers, be prepared for that to happen yet again. Some people like such a chaotic film structure because it lets their mind draw its own conclusions and fill in the gaps themselves. Other people (your humble narrator included) feel less that it's "brilliant, disorienting mayhem" and more that it's a lazy excuse for entertainment. Either way, it's no longer something new, it's just irritating. Plebeian as it might make me sound, movies like this leave me identifying with Peter Griffin watching "Phantom of the Opera": nobody can ever just get to the friggin' point and we never get to see the gross half of the ugly guy's face.

As a mystery it peels back the layers well but never provides us with the big dramatic payoff. As a suspense flick, it succeeds moderately well in some parts but fucks up other parts by preparing us for big moments that just don't happen. As a non-stop freak out inducing thrill ride, the shocks aren't as fierce or life changing as you'd get, say, seeing Sadako do her seizure walk out of the TV set for the first time or finally watching Reagan (the girl, not the president) spider-walk down the staircase like she was always meant to. If you're one of those people who still likes The Blair Witch Project though, the last 10 minutes of HHBHM should give some of the hairs on the back of your neck rigor mortis. The rest of us? Depends on how you feel about having a very limited field of vision and listening to silly little sound bytes of gremlins giggling.

The English pieces where Mavis talks with her crew or her bosses back in the states are a little jarring and feel unnecessary between the lady's accent and the impression I get that the lines were ultimately just dubbed anyway. Speaking of translations, I'm going out on the following note: Asian nations always seem to have the worst luck when it comes to titling their movies. No one in the West can take their flicks seriously because the titles all translate into nonsensical shit! HHBHM is at times a legitimately creepy, spookier-than-watching-your-grandparents'-ghosts-fucking-in-your-refrigerator type of movie, but the name sounds like some goofy ass tween horror-drama book crossing Goosebumps with The Babysitter's Club. I guarantee that if Hong Kong had made Psycho first, it would've been called Tranny Boy Motel Shower Stab Party, mistakenly marketed as porn in the US, then never heard from again. "A rose by any other name" my ASS, Shakespeare! Go back to writing your trashy romance novels and instruction manuals for laser disc players and leave the sagely stuff to the guys who write the fortune cookie slips.