God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand Review

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(More customer reviews)I've been avoiding this one for a while after I read some not-so-positive reviews. I looked it up again recently and noticed that not only was it directed by Shusuke Kaneko (a very entertaining filmmaker) but it was also based on a book written by Kazuo Umezu, which is always an advantage because a handful of imaginative and fun movies have been recently made from this man's works (see "Tamami: The Baby's Curse" and "Orochi" ASAP!). I decided to give it a shot, and I'm glad I did.
After her psychic brother falls into a coma, a girl attempts to use his clues to catch a serial killer. One bizarre aspect is that the antagonist (Tomorowo Taguchi in an over-the-top performance) murders hot schoolgirls and then draws their deaths in a picture book for his 7-year-old daughter to read! This is one of those fun horror films that's not to be taken too seriously. The death scenes are nicely bloody and there's a healthy dose of absurdities and cheesiness (be prepared to chuckle a lot). The ending of this movie is so ridiculous that it needs to be seen to be believed. Oh, and the use of little kids in bloody terror sequences is much appreciated by this horror fan.

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Splatter: Naked Blood Review

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(More customer reviews)Let's face it, you're not here for a story.
Yeah there is one, with a deep message about excess.
But you're here for the blood.
And when it rains, boy does it pour.
If you're freaked out by self-mutilation, give this one a pass.
I personally had to pause this movie a number of times to make it through.
It takes a while for the gore to get going,
(there is a story here after all)
But once it does, grab your umbrella.
Here's what it's about:
Eiji infects his mothers 3 patients (all women testing out a new contraceptive)
with the ultimate pain-killer,
A pain-killer that turns pain into mounting pleasure.
This in turn, has disasterous effects.
One pateint is obsessed with eating
Another patient is obsessed with beauty
And the last suffers from extreme insomnia.
(She hooks herself up to a cactus, in order to sleep. Why? I have no idea)
***GORE SPOILER***
In this flick you'll see:
- one woman eat herself alive (hands, eyes, nips, and bajingo)
- another pierce herself to death (and I mean pierce)
- & a guy crawl into a woman's open chest cavity.
Sound up your alley?MORAL OF THE STORY:
The pain of life cannot be masked by excessive pleasure.
It will consume you.

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The Maid (2005) Review

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(More customer reviews)Like a lot of the other reviewers, I'm a big fan of Asian horror of all kinds--I had overlooked this modest little film until now, but it was reasonably entertaining and, despite the occasional silliness, has a cohesive plot and some good effects. (There's a very brief moment when the shadow of a passing coffin falls over a young woman's face, which then contorts into the most terrifying expression I've ever seen. I don't know if it was CGI or not, but it's *really* creepy.)
It's not exactly non-stop terror and the young heroine's cluelessness occasionally gets irritating, but I still found it preferable to some of the earlier j- and k-horror movies that suffer from disjointed plots and ridiculous inconsistencies. Stylistically, it's much closer to the Pang brothers' Eye movies.


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Vampire Girl vs.Frankenstein Girl Review

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(More customer reviews)Based on a best-selling manga by Shungiku Uchida, this slice of dementia was fabricated for the hardcore audience of 'Tokyo Gore Police', 'Meatball Machine', 'Machine Girl' and 'Robogeisha', and ups the ante considerably when it comes to off-the-chain, over-the-top insanity, audacity and mind-melting hyper-violence.
A non-stop, balls-to-the-wall send-up of all the classic Universal horror flicks, we've got an adorable schoolgirl Vampire chick, a goth-girl gang whose leader becomes the Frankenstein girl after a fatal accident at the hands of the vamp chick, a hunchback dwarf who incinerates corpses left by the vamp, a school principal who's also the resident mad scientist / Dr. Frankenstein with a lab in the school basement, aided by an over-sexed faculty nurse who later becomes an undead killing machine at the hands of the good doctor. Have I got your attention yet?
And we're just scratching the surface of this psychotically-psychedelic celluloid centerpiece of all things absurd, offensive and voraciously violent. Imaginative beyond your wildest dreams, unapologetic in it's insensitive use of stereotypes (there's a group of girls who wear afros, facepaint, big lips, put plates in their lips and gangsta rap, ghetto dance and spew Ebonics about Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, Joyce Joyner and Michael Jordan - remember, these are Asian girls!), this flick has more WTF moments than anything I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot.
Then there's a parody of disturbingly real-life adolescent behavior in Japan, the wrist-cutting kids (who do this out of boredom, rebellion and status-seeking), and here we have a school sanctioned, annual wrist-cutting championship contest that the kids practice for after classes. Needless to say, the arterial blood-spray quotient has never been higher in one of these movies, and I thought that crown went to 'Machine Girl' when I saw it for the first time. Guess again. Noah's Ark couldn't withstand this sanguinary storm.
As the film progresses, the violence gets more vehement, the gore more grandiose, the larger-than-life lunacy now nearing apocalyptic proportions - there are no words that can adequately prepare your senses for this onslaught. It just keeps on building steam until the frenzied finale and a tip-of-the-hat parody of 'Let The Right One In' along with so much more. The only thing missing was nudity, but now I'm just being gluttonous...
For a low-budget film, the special effects work most of the time (even when not so special), and you can't analyze or over-think what's happening on-screen without ruining it for yourself - this is a roller-coaster ride, one of the largest you've ever been on. If you thought about this, you'd probably never get on one, and if you've never ridden one, you won't enjoy this flick. You need to turn your mind off for a spell and get sucked into the bizarre madness on display. It's not for everybody, hell, it's not meant for most folks. But if you've seen the movies referenced above, you're already in the choir and need to check this one out immediately. (By the way, it's much better than 'Robogeisha', which I found to be a let down...).


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The deranged genius behind Tokyo Gore Police is back with a chilling new flick that's re-writing the hallowed history of the horror genre. Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl is the terrifying story of two classic monsters re-imagined as super hot - and extremely lethal - Japanese school girls. Gore rules supreme in this blood-cake cavalcade of carnage chosen as the winner of the Audience Award at the 2009 NY Asian Film Festival. Fan boys and movie blogs are already buzzing over this bloodbath du jour, and aficionados of psychedelic blood-filled chocolates, mad scientist principals, sumo wrestlers from hell, and sex-crazed school nurses are guaranteed to lose their heads over this old school splatter-fest.

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Dark Water (2005) Review

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(More customer reviews)I have gotten to the point in watching horror films that when I watched the American production "Dead Birds" I was wondering if this was another adaptation of a Japanese horror film. Apparently the Japanese approach to the genre, which has become well established on this side of the Pacific because of the success of "The Ring" (nee "Ringu") and "The Grudge" (nee "Ju-on"). However, with "Dark Water" ("Honogurai mizu no soko kara") I found myself thinking how different this 2002 effort from director Hideo Nakata (who did the "Ringu" films) from contemporary American efforts in a different way. Too many American horror films go the route of "Jeepers Creepers," where there is a pretty good set up and then the film goes down hill and the payoff is disappointing in the extreme. But with "Dark Water" I was not overly captivated by the set up, but found that the payoff really hit home.
At this point let me warn you that when you start watching "Dark Water" on DVD it goes right into the dubbed English track, at which point I start having flashes back to all of the badly dubbed Japanese movies I grew up on (which inevitably leads to thoughts of Woody Allen's "What's Up Tiger Lily?"). My strong recommendation is to stop the film and make sure you have the original Japenese language track and the English captions. Fans of the horror genre should be at the point where they can appreciate the natural language and rhythm of Japanese cast. Most of the key sequences here do not require you to do a lot of reading so it is not a great sacrifice and the nuances of the culture are totally lost in the dubbed version.
Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) has divorced her husband and is in a custody battle for her six year old daughter, Ikuko (Rio Kanno). In an attempt to make a new start, mother and daughter move into an apartment, where strange things start happening. The weirdest are the huge water stains that appear on the ceiling and start dripping away and the red children's bag that start popping up every place Yoshimi goes. Then the dead child to whom the bag belongs starts showing up as well. So we have what we would now be thinking of as your basic Japanese ghost story. But there is a bit more going on here as well.
You see, Yoshimi has some trouble being a working mom. She needs a job to survive, and too often Ikuko gets lost in the shuffle, which sometimes means the kids is left standing outside her kindergarten waiting for her mother when all of the other kids have left. As you would anticipate, there is an attendant irony in this as well. But the pressure is getting to Yoshimi who thinks that she is slowly going insane, which works well given all of the above. Characters in these sorts of movies often get so scared that they might go insane, complete with wild eyes and mad cackling, but you do not have them questioning their sanity as often.
"Dark Water" is a less complicated and more subtle horror story than "The Ringu," which is the obvious point of comparison since Nakata and his co-screenwriter Takashige Ichise did both films (the story here is from a novel by Kôji Suzuki. So it is inevitable that this film seems a lesser effort, but that does not really take away from its effectiveness. When we got to the conclusion I found that I liked what happened, and when the inevitable epilogue reinforced the fact, I liked it even more. I do not think this is a great horror film, but I think it is a solid one and I certainly liked it more than the original "Ju-on."

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No one loses their mind instantly –Sanity seeps away one drop at a time. Yoshimi simply wanted a better life – for both herself and her daughter Ikuko. Unfortunately, such wishes may sometimes be hard to come by. The custody battle has grown embittered and hurtful, her new job is less than desirable, and Ikuko's schoolwork has taken a turn for the worse. But, Yoshimi has something bigger to worry about. Something upstairs. Something cold and dank. Something that should have never been.

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Living Hell: A Japanese Chainsaw Massacre Review

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(More customer reviews)I am a huge fan of Japanese horror. I try to get my hands on as many of these films as possible. One of the things I especially like about J-Horror are the originality of the ideas and the emphasis on truly scaring the viewer by taking the horror seriously instead of reverting to self-referentiality and comedy. "Living Hell" seemed to promise a different type of J-Horror; instead of subtlety and spookiness (with little blood) this one was advertised as a gory bloodbath, "the Japanese TCM" in other words. It also compared it to other modern horror chef d'oeuvres as "Evil Dead" and "Cabin Fever". Huh? Have I watched the same film? Frankly, "Living Hell" does not in any way approach the level of ferocious originality those films had and I fail to see the similarities.
2 brothers and their sister, all in their twenties, share the same house that is owned by their father, often away on business trips. One day they receive word that two distant relatives (a 70-year old grandmother and 22-year old granddaughter) whose family were murdered will be moving in with them. As they move in, we see right away that the two are mighty strange; the grandmother is senile and barely says anything, same with the granddaughter who is completely mute. Not only do they never talk but they are curiously devoid of any expression. Wheelchair-bound Yasu will soon discover there is something mighty wrong with these two and soon falls under the guise of their torture techniques.
The film started off okay, as we were presented to some very intriguing characters. You wouldn't think a 70-year old grandmother and her frail 22-year old granddaughter would look scary...but they are! The way they just stood there looking like ice statues totally devoid of expression, except for a trace of madness in their eyes definitely creeped me out. You just know something seriously bad is bound to happen. They are about as unlikely a pair of killers as you're going to get and that's part of the problem; I never believed for one bit that these two could be so dangerous. For one, none of their victims even try to defend themselves and these are two frail and physically weak women! The worst is Yasu, who is one of the wimpiest guys I've ever seen in a horror movie. I kept wanting to scream at my TV "Get a backbone for pete's sake!". I realize the poor guy is in a wheelchair but how about using your upper-body to ward them off...But no, he just spends the whole movie whining and wimpering while they torture him.
I don't speak Japanese so it's hard for me to truly gauge quality of acting but that didn't stop me from noticing how poor it all was, just by the intonations of voice, wooden expressions and awkward movements. To people fluent in Japanese, it must come across as a real turkey. As for the gore, yes this movie is gory but not in a splatter sense, most of the gore is related to torture and I must admit that several of these scenes were especially creative (Root canal, cockroach, etc.). Too bad the creative ideas of gore were not supplemented with creative storytelling. To top it off, the film takes a further nosedive due to a completely nonsensical ending. It tries to be clever and tie up the illogical aspects of the story but instead drives it ever deeper into its grave. If you love Japanese horror as much as I do, you might still want to give this a try as it is mildly entertaining at times and due to the gore. As for me, I would gladly take those 90 minutes back.


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Bound to a wheelchair, life has been difficult for poor Yasu (Hirohito Honda of Battle Royale). His mother has vanished, his father and brother think he's crazy, and his sister shelters him from the outside world. But Yasu has yet to experience the true meaning of torture until new relatives mysteriously move in. Labeled "The Japanese Chainsaw Massacre" (minus the chainsaws) by fans, director Shugo Fujii has fashioned a mysterious horror film with stylish sequences that pay homage to directors Brian De Palma and Alfred Hitchcock. Filled with moments of sheer terror, Living Hell joins ranks alongside Ringu (The Ring) and Ju-On (The Grudge) as a masterpiece of modern Asian horror.

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