The teacher goes to Ting-Ting's home and knocks on the door. No one answers. She enters the house and calls out Ting-Ting's name. Finally, the little girl appears. She hands her teacher a meat cleaver. When questioned, Ting-Ting doesn't answer. She has a cold, vacant look on her face. The teacher turns and sees something that makes her scream.

Cut to the outside of the house. Police swarm the place. Policeman Wan (Dayo Wong) and his men enter the house and find the schoolteacher has gone insane, swinging a bloody meat cleaver around and fiercely attacking the officers who are trying to subdue her. She bites one cop's finger off and spits it out later!

The police also find the butchered bodies of Ting-Ting's aunt and uncle, who have been her guardians since her parents' death. Ting-Ting is taken to the hospital. When she is examined, scars and bruises are found all over her body. The police realize that Ting-Ting's aunt and uncle have been savagely abusing her for years. They suspect that her teacher found out, went berserk, and took revenge.

That night at the hospital, a night shift nurse sees Ting-Ting leave her room and run down the hall, playing with a ball. She confronts the little girl and cruelly belts her across the face. The nurse turns around and sees something that makes her scream - a malevolently smiling little girl that looks just like Ting-Ting! The girl-thing attacks the nurse.

The schoolteacher didn't kill Ting-Ting's evil aunt and uncle - a vengeful guardian spirit did - a spirit who looks like Ting-Ting when it takes human form! The spirit sings eerie songs to Ting-Ting through the speaker of her kiddie cassette player, and kills anyone who dares to hurt her.

Ting-Ting is taken to an orphanage-school to stay until she can be adopted out. The orphanage's sinister caretaker Uncle Cheung is a pedophile, and he has his eyes on Ting-Ting. The only friends she has are policeman Wan and his girlfriend Sam (Ruby Wong), a social worker. Ting-Ting refuses to talk and is feral, almost like a wild animal.

As Wan and Sam try to understand how one abused child could be surrounded by so much death and insanity, the body count continues. When a kind older couple befriends Ting-Ting and plans to adopt her, the jealous guardian spirit starts killing the innocent as well as the guilty. After Wan is killed, Sam faces a showdown with the spirit, who reveals its true identity...

The Report Card: A

The Last Word: Temegotchi is a chilling and disturbing ghost story that you won't soon forget. It features great acting by the cast - especially the little girl who plays Ting-Ting - and solid direction from Wellson Chin.

The story begins when Tintin's teacher, Miss Tsui, played by the splendid character actress Helena Law Lan, visits Tintin's home to find out why the child has been absent from school. She finds the orphaned Tintin's guardians brutally murdered, and something that she sees at the crime-scene, presumably the killer, unhinges her mind. The police immediately suspect Miss Tsui of the murders when they find her raving and violent at the site of the killings.

A social worker, Sam, is assigned to Tintin's case. Sam is dismayed to find evidence of systematic torture on Tintin's body and concludes that the child's guardians were the ones responsible for abusing her. Tintin has been so traumatized by the murders and her mistreatment that she will no longer communicate with the outside world. After a night spent in hospital, where Tintin's childish antics lead to the death of a nurse who is cruel to her, Sam takes Tintin to the orphanage where she herself was raised. Tintin, on learning of her fate, appears to cause the car they are traveling in to crash in another display of what seems to be a lethal telekinetic gift but is actually something much more sinister.

Tintin immediately begins to disrupt the ordered routine of the orphanage and is punished by the uncaring Dean for what is seen as her willful disobedience by being locked in a dark room. She is molested while imprisoned by the creepy Uncle Cheung, an employee of the orphanage whose pet dog Tintin has inexplicably caused to turn on him. The molestation scene is thankfully left to the viewer's imagination, an example of the tact with which the director treats the theme of child-abuse. Cheung dies soon after molesting Tintin. Sam, while trying to save Uncle Cheung from falling from the roof of the orphanage where he has apparently fled in terror, is suspected of causing his death and taken into custody. Sam is assisted in discovering Tintin's secret by her policeman boyfriend, Wen, all of which leads to a powerful and downbeat climax that is refreshingly played with the utmost seriousness by a talented cast.

Working from an excellent script by Lawrence Lau, director Wellson Chin creates a compelling supernatural story from that most hoary of horror film clichés the malevolent child, utilizing a prowling camera and moody cinematography to keep the viewer continually on edge. Tintin is a surprisingly effective object of menace, a necessity in a film of this sort, a blank-faced, doll-like child, the knowing puppet of forces beyond her control, whose inscrutability keeps us guessing about her powers until the last quarter of the film. A European influence is discernible in the presentation of Tintin in some scenes. She appears all in white bouncing a ball, a familiar image of the demon child from such films as Mario Bava's Kill, Baby... Kill!, and the Fellini segment of Spirits of the Dead.

Temegotchi deals with the serious issue of child-abuse in a relatively restrained way for an exploitation movie and never once suggests that Tintin is a "bad seed" who deserves the terrible things that happen to her, which would have been an easy trap for the filmmakers to fall into given that Tintin is the catalyst for the violence that erupts throughout the film. Despite the horror Tintin unwittingly unleashes, she remains the victim throughout and our sympathies are always with her, affording us a measure of uneasy delight in the fates of her tormentors. Institutionalized abuse is depicted in the form of the social welfare system that consigns Tintin to the hell of the orphanage, a place that punishes its charges by locking them in darkened rooms and employs convicted child molesters as part of its staff. The touching relationship between the social worker Sam and her policeman boyfriend Wan is presented as a contrast to the dysfunctional and hostile social forces of the adult world in which Tintin finds herself adrift. These are the most human characters in the film and our natural identification with them gives the climax a power it would not enjoy without the restrained and sympathetic performances of the actors involved.

The violent climax is tense and exciting and particularly well shot, especially a chase sequence on foot in the rain involving Wen and the prospective adoptive father who has taken Tintin from the orphanage and who has been driven to kill as a result of his unwelcome interest in the child. Given the film's subject matter, it should come as no surprise to learn that there is no happy ending for any of the film's major characters. In fact, the suggestion is that for Tintin and Sam the horror will live on indefinitely, a suitably disquieting note on which to end this well-crafted gem.