"Bloody" Billy Tang is a director best known for his Category III exploitation output, which has produced some of the classics in the genre, such as Red to Kill. So it comes as a surprise that his 2000 entry, the ghost movie Dial D for Demons, comes off as so limp, boring, and outright annoying at times, making this a sub-par effort, even considering the low bar the Hong Kong ghost genre has set over the years.

Owing more than a little bit to the Japanese movie Ringu (aka The Ring), Dial D for Demons tells the story of six idiotic young people looking forward to a weekend of fun and sun. Beside the mandatory bottom-feeding romantic subplots, everything seems to be going swimmingly until the morons start getting mysterious pages -- yes, they're still using pagers in 2000 -- and begin dying off. And, from there, the audience is going to be counting down the minutes until all of these mouth-breathers are knocked off and they can eject the DVD from their beleaguered player.

From beginning to end, Dial D for Demons offers nothing of value to the viewer. The acting is simply atrocious, with the actors literally screaming most of their lines, besides Jordan Chan, who sounds like he has a mouthful of marbles. The "spooky" special effects and scenes that are supposedly intended to scare come off like the B-reel of a Lifetime movie of the week. A Category IIA movie in every sense of the rating, with nothing in the way of over-the-top sex or violence to keep the audience's eyes open, most will have to turn to No-Doz or a cold bottle of Jagermeister to keep some small modicum of interest going in the proceedings.

Those that actually have the fortitude to sit all the way through Dial D for Demons thankfully brief running time in hopes of having a solid payoff are going to be even more disappointed. I won't fully spoil the ending, but it involves a newspaper, a bone, and a woman that kills herself over a soccer match. WTF? WTF indeed. Like the movie as a whole, the ending has a slap-dash quality to it, which demonstrates that the film-makers were more concerned with piggybacking on the success of a much better movie, rather than trying to make a picture that is compelling on its' own merits.

RATING: 3.5