Stunning and talented art student Jiney (Race Wong) feels that something is missing from her life. Encountering a car crash she’s inexplicably compelled to take photos of the body of a female pedestrian. Much to the concern of her best friend and lesbian lover, Jas (Rosanne Wong), Jiney becomes obsessed with shooting images of death – paying a butcher to kill on demand while she snaps away.

Jiney is tormented by flashbacks of childhood abuse at the hands of three little boys, which goes some way in explaining her increasingly unhinged status as she threatens to jump off a 10-storey building and douses herself in paint and writhes on the floor uncontrollably.

Twin brothers Oxide and Danny Pang have established themselves as Hong Kong’s most stylish gore-meisters and were internationally acclaimed for 2003’s The Eye.

Abnormal Beauty is a lone effort from Oxide and fans of the brothers’ previous work may consider exploring Jiney’s burgeoning psychosis for the first hour of the film a leisurely and unnecessary indulgence. On the one hand it makes an interesting character study of one woman’s reaction to sexual abuse and neglect, but it’s merely unnerving rather than horrifying.

Abruptly shifting gear, Abnormal Beauty becomes the horror flick expected of Pang. Just as Jas pulls Jiney from the brink of insanity, Jiney receives a videotape of a girl being beaten to death by a masked man while cameras snap paparazzi style in the background.

Casting real life sisters Race and Rosanne Wong (Hong Kong pop outfit 2R) as screen lovers could have been additionally unsettling, but Pang isn’t really interested in Jiney’s sexuality and uses it purely as a tool to explore her past. He sees her lesbianism as a bi-product of the trauma she suffered at the hands of the opposite sex.

Pang’s sense of style compensates for his haphazard storyline to some measure, but Abnormal Beauty has too much in common with ‘women-in-peril’ slasher movies of old and the bare-chested gimp-like tormentor seems motiveless and fails to sufficiently frighten.

Abnormal Beauty (Hong Kong: English title) is released in Cineworlds Shaftesbury Avenue and Wandsworth on 23 September 2005 and other key cities on 7 October 2005.

By the DVD of D.E.B.S. online and save some money while watching the dyke spies in undercover action! If that doesn't get you going, take a peek at these other new releases of lesbian films: Bar Girls, 2 Seconds and Fingersmith.