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Wade Chen (Bryant Cheng) is asked by his boss Yang (Jerry Huang) to
attend an "invitation only"-party for rich folks in his stead -
which is quite a treat for working class Wade. And the party starts out
great, too, he wins at the gambling table, shags his boss's model
girlfriend (Maria Ozawa), and is given a silver Ferrari. But then he and a
few other party guests (who also have working class roots and attend in
someone else's stead) are led into a seperate room ... and are brutally
attacked. It's revealed only now that the party is actually organized by
Wade's boss Yang, a man who has bween filthy rich all of his life, and who
waskidnapped as a child because of this - which is why he hates all lower
classes, and holds these parties to demonstrate the superiority of the
filthy rich over everyone else ... by operating on a handful carefully
chosen poor souls on a stage right in front of his rich friends, and
torturing his victims to death in the process. Wade and company try to
evade their attackes, but only with limited success: It seems only Wade is
able to fend for himself and Hitomi, a small fry bank teller, makes it to
the place's control room, from which he gets not only a great overview but
also an idea of the layout of the place. Eventually, Wade and Hitomi
reunite when one of their fellow victims (Vivi Ho) is about to be tortured
to death, and by threatening everybody with weapons, they fight their way
out and make an escape in Wade's Ferrari - to run into a police
checkpoint, where they are held just long enough for Yang's henchmen to
arrive and take over by taking out the cops. However, back at the party
place, Wade finally manages to show what he's made of and manages to
slaughter Yang and pretty much all of his henchmen, before taking off with
a more dead than alive Hitomi by his side. So, did these
"invitiation only"-parties stop with the death of Yang and his
gang. Very unlikely, as the epilogue shows. Pretty much
by-the-numbers torture porn. Everything's here from the rather unlikely
premise to the underdog hero to the decadent torturers, to plotholes
aplenty. But besides the fact that you can't shake the feeling that you
have seen Invitation Only before, there's also the fact that the
whole thing is badly paced and edited which derives the plot of most of
its much-needed suspense and instead turns it into a tired exercise of
gore accumulation instead. Not really worth your time and money.
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