"Neon Gods" involves two clusters of people. One, a couple of teenaged petty thieves (Tse and Ping)living in an apartment with a perpetually regurgitating floor drain, and the girl (Kuei) they are currently trying to make time with. The other, a disaffected student (Hsiao Kang) studying for exams and his taxi-driver father and religious nut mother.
We follow Tse and Ping as they sleep, break into phone and vending machine coin boxes (which they carefully replace), contemplate their flooded floor, and eventually steal some circuit boards after breaking into a video game parlor. They pursue and compete for a young woman they meet renting skates at a roller rink, and get drunk a lot, passing out in hotels.
Hsiao Kang is frustrated in his studies, and has some anger issues -- he smashes a bug on a window so violently he breaks the glass and goes through the rest of the film with a bandaged hand. His father, in the only role with some verve, seems headed for an early heart attack or stroke, shouting at his family and other drivers, including Ah Tse on a motorcycle. The mother retreats into religion, believing Hsiao to be the incarnation of a god.
Tse, honked at, surreptitiously smashes the taxi's side mirror. Hsiao, who had been riding with his father, later sees him, and follows Tse, Ping and Kuei, eventually extracting some petty revenge. Tse and Ping, meanwhile, get in trouble with some slightly badder boys through a magnificent demonstration of sheer stupidity; Ping gets beaten, and Tse and Kuei want to go away, but can't imagine where.
I almost got a flicker of caring about the characters at the very end ... but it soon faded.
