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Spacked Out
2000; directed by Lawrence Lau

1995's Kids showed a thought-provoking, shocking, and/or exploitative view of troubled teens, depending on your view of frank depictions of sex, drugs, and violence as it pertains to those under eighteen. Lawrence Lau's social drama Spacked Out travels much of the same territory. However, despite carrying a Category III (Hong Kong's version of NC-17) rating, there's nothing really hard-hitting or really all that interesting here at all. In fact, at many points, Spacked Out almost comes off at times as a glorified ABC afterschool special, just with a bit more cursing and meth smoking.

Spacked Out focuses on a quartet of junior high students who are experiencing a standard salvo of cliches: absentee parents, abusive teachers, asshole boyfriends, and the like. As you might expect from a movie of this type, the teens turn to casual sex and drug use to try and drown the pain. Perhaps not so shockingly, this doesn't end well as one of the kids ends up pregnant, and the group must try and scramble to get money to pay for an abortion.

This film has generally recieved very good reviews, and even though on the whole I didn't cozy up to the proceedings, it's easy to see why some people really like Spacked Out. The gritty cinema verite style by cinematographer Lai Yiu-Fai and editor Andy Chan Chi-Wai works for the most part. Combined with the naturalistic performances from the lead actors, Spacked Out thankfully manages to transcend the melodramatic nature many entries in this genre spit out, especially releases from Hong Kong, which oftentimes seem to subsitute voice volume for actual talent.

But for this particular reviewer, even though all the pieces were there for a successful film, when they were all put together, Spacked Out still came off as a bit of re-treaded ground. Perhaps it's from a schooling where terrible D.A.R.E. "just say no" films were burned into the the collective psyche of a generation, or maybe a sign of early on-set of brain mush from years of watching Wong Jing releases, but there was really nothing all that compelling or interesting here to have me give Spacked Out more than a mild recommendation.

RATING: 5

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