Released Date: 21 July 2005

Synopsis:

The group of young people at Psychic Park all has supernatural powers. Moon can communicate with insects. Gao Yuan has “pushing” powers. Idol Sasha can fly. Auntie is perpetually youthful. Chi can recount the past and predict the future of an object by touching it. Eggy has x-ray vision. Baldy can jump to incredible heights. The Twin Sisters are telepathic and can move things with their minds. Then there’s the ladybug with only one dot: Cootchie. But after one major disaster, it seems that no amount of supernatural powers in the world can save the day. But we never knew that the most magical force in the world is the love and courage inside each of us.

Movie Review:


You may be thinking that this is a HongKong’s copy of Pixar’s animation movie “A Bug’s Life”. But “Bug Me Not”, directed by Golden Horse winner Lo Chi Leung is not talking about, well, a bug’s life. Instead, despite of the “buggy” movie title, the comedy centered on a team of “Ultra-power” youth, their chance encounters and their adventure.

The film spotted a high influence of Japanese anime cultures, which depicted mostly on “girl-power”. Hence, it is not surprising that the female casts have outshined the male leads.

The ever-adorable Twins, Charlene Choi and Gillian Chueng continue to charm the screen. Gillian Chueng, who always has that serious looks, is particularly hilarious this time as “Auntie”, the Leader of the “Ultra Power” youth. On the other hand, some may be disappointed that the other Twins, Charlene Choi has been diminished to a cameo role. Nevertheless, her brief appearance still managed to earn some chuckles. The leading lady, Isabella Leung looks promising with a pretty face and enchanting smile, however, she have fallen flat with her performance as a 16 years old student. But still, she is just too sweet to be penalised.

As for the male leads in this film, they are mostly insignificant auxiliary although I thought that their supernatural abilities might have put into better use.

The iconic teenage line-up and synopsis may suggest an innocent genre, however, the movie is filled with undesirable cheesy lines and sleazy scenes. Parents may consider keeping their minor in the safe hands of the old folks as the movie contains way too many fetishes: Moon (Isabella Leung) discussing with female classmates about “curves” and “puberty”, in their Japanese schoolgirls mini-skirt uniform. Eggy (Half-Boy’z, Steven Chueng) possessed the all-boys-dream-gifts of X-ray vision that could instantly see the under-contents of any girls. Gao Yuan (Chen PoLin), just can’t gets his hands off Moon’s “frontal assets”. One could not see why the filmmakers wanted to flirt the audience with such trivial even though the adorable animated creepy crawlers like the single-spot Ladybird “Coochie” and the one-horned beetle “Monster Horn” were enough to attract children to the theater.

Moreover, the inclusion of Japanese inspired scores throughout were amateurish and puzzling, consider the movie is from the hands of a Golden Horse winning Director.

Probably the concluding chapter of insects going on strike is the only portion which I find interesting in the movie. As entomology is totally alien to me, I felt enriched when the finale tells the importance of insects in our eco-systems. Hopefully this served as a timely reminder
that we should not take our environment and other living being for granted.

A bold attempt trying to amalgamate human and animation but apparently this is not good enough to kick off a sequel.

Movie Rating:

Review by Leosen Teo