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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Guinea Pig Flower of Flesh and Blood/Making of Guinea Pig Double Feature Review

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(More customer reviews)I think nearly every horror movie fan is aware of the notorious "Guinea Pig" series by now. If you like horror films or gory curiosities and aren't aware of this explosive series of Japanese movies, you ought to rush out right now and see a few of them. Made throughout the 1980s and 1990s, "Guinea Pig" pushes envelopes few people in this country would ever conceive possible. After viewing one of these repugnant films, a natural impulse is one of extreme revulsion. Why would anyone create such soul shattering images? It's important to remember that Japanese audiences possess a different attitude about horror films. As far as I can tell, in Japanese cinema anything and everything is fair game. A typical jaunt through the wilderness of Asian horror cinema (in which Japan plays a significant role) typically reveals graphic scenes of dismemberment, torture, and other no-no nasty behavior that rarely, if ever, appears in American films. Some films containing such stomach churning themes do occasionally rear their heads on this side of the pond, but these films rarely play to a wide audience. In Japan, the "Guinea Pig" franchise was a spectacular hit.
I haven't seen all of the films in this series, but out of the two installments I have watched, "The Flower of Flesh and Blood" easily wins the prize for outright sleaze and nastiness. It's difficult to imagine any film approaching (or descending to) the levels seen in this mind blasting forty-minute movie. Even Pier Paolo Pasolini's sickening homage to the evils of fascism, "Salo," fails to invoke the visceral sensations that "The Flower of Flesh and Blood" wallows in. This movie is a sledgehammer blow to the head and stomach with its unrelenting scenes of carnage and depravity. They ought to sell copies of this wrapped in a barf bag.
Manga artist Hideshi Hino directed this nightmarish look into the activities of a sadistic serial killer. That we know this guy is a serial killer and that he likes to stalk his prey before committing a brutal murder constitutes the plot in its entirety. There simply isn't much more here than a short stalking scene at the beginning of the story followed by a thirty-minute dismemberment filmed in nauseatingly sadistic detail. That's right, folks: "The Flower of Flesh and Blood" exists to show the viewer what it might be like to watch a snuff film.
Forget about character development. Two characters exist in this movie: the poor young woman picked up by the killer, and the killer himself. At least they made the murderer look like a complete psycho, as the guy wears a samurai helmet, a full body leather apron, and some sort of black caps on several of his teeth. This gentleman does not fit the bill of a role model in any way, shape, or form. He's a degenerate who likes to wax philosophic between removing arms and legs, blurting out weird lines about how his next activity will imitate blooming flowers and the like. At the end of the movie, he sings a melancholy song about sending people to the underworld. He also shines a different colored light on his victim at various times, although why he does this makes little sense. The majority of the film takes place in some seedy basement splashed with blood and filled with numerous tools of pain. Then you watch this guy commit his atrocities and that's it. There is nothing more to "The Flower of Flesh and Blood" than close up shots of bloody mayhem.
The DVD contains many interesting extras. There are several trailers from the other installments in the "Guinea Pig" series, one for the zombie film "Junk," several text interviews with director Hideshi Hino, an overview of the controversy involving Charlie Sheen (who supposedly saw this film and believed it was a real snuff film), a behind the scenes look at the special effects involved in the series, and a reproduction of a manga comic book with loose ties to the film written and illustrated by Hino. The documentary on the special effects provides some comfort after watching the gruesome movie, showing that it is all nothing more than a well made horror film. Still, I'm uncomfortable with the knowledge that "The Flower of Flesh and Blood" made such a big splash with Japanese audiences. Remember, this is the same country that committed the atrocities in Manchuria during the late 1930s, and there are still people living in Japan today who were intimately involved in mass murder and mass torture throughout Asia during World War II.
I think this entry in the "Guinea Pig" series ultimately fails to deliver the goods. As a gorehound, I appreciated the awesome special effects displayed in the movie, but the movie never rises to the occasion in terms of character development and plot. I watched the other Hino directed entry in the series, "Mermaid in a Manhole," a few years ago and I thought it well developed and interesting. In that film, which contained numerous graphic scenes, Hino developed a plot heavy on human suffering that showed emotional pain as a real tragedy. In "The Flower of Flesh and Blood," he indulges in sadism for the mere sake of sensationalism. If you really want to see this movie, just steel yourself for the depths of degradation. If you have kids in the house, don't even think about buying this film if there is any chance your children might find it. This is not acceptable viewing for youngsters, and it probably isn't acceptable viewing for most people. Beware, oh beware! "The Flower of Flesh and Blood" is upon you!

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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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All Night Long Collection (2003) Review

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(More customer reviews)Japanese people are just plain scary. I'm not being prejudiced, because I love the Japanese but they have created some of the most gut wrenching and mortifying movies ever made. Audition and the Guinea Pig series come to mind. But this puts those to shame (except maybe Devil's Experiment, and Flowers of Flesh and Blood) as one of the most unsettling films ever made.
All Night Long:
The story in this one is three guys are one day standing at a railroad crossing waiting for the bars to raise up, when a crazed man comes up to a girl. The man kills the girl right in front of the three guys. And then was about to murder one of them when another rams the guy with his motorcycle. The three decide to celebrate by having a "party" in which they are all to bring a girl over for some fun. One of the guys actually falls in love with the girl he was going to bring to the party, but is murdered by a group of young men that bully and harass people. The guy goes insane and gets the others to come with him to kill the group. When one tries to back out. He is threatened that when they are done with the group they'll come and kill him.
The movie is quite unsettling and quite graphic in its portrayl of rape and murder. It especially show rather effectively one of the character's descent into insanity.
All Night Long 2: Atrocity:
The best of the three on this collection in my opinion. The story focuses on a nerdy student named Shinichi during his summer vacation. Shinichi is a shy and quiet individual who's only solice in life comes from painting a model of a nude manga girl. One day A rich kid and his gang of thugs start picking on Shinichi. They beat him up and torch his model. Then one day Shinichi is visited by the leader of the thugs. Claiming that he wouldn't be harmed, Shinichi takes the invitation to go to the leaders home. There the leader shows Shinichi a girl that one of the thugs have kidnapped, and raped. the leader shows Shinichi how he is capable of being abusive, and cruel to people that are "trash." This movie is more F***ed up than the first ANL movie. Maybe it is because it looks like it was filmed with a personal camcorder, and was made on a relatively low budget. This movie was actually more upsetting than the most vile of the Guinea Pig movies. This one is definitely not for the weak of heart or stomach.
All Night Long 3: Final Atrocity:
First off I would like to say that the title is misleading, there are two more All Night Long movies that were made after this one. This one was actually sort of a letdown, especially after the great horror that was Atrocity. Although this one is a bit more offensive. It focuses on Kiku, a mentally handicapped guy who works in a love hotel. He is a normal person until one night he comes across some of a female neighbor's garbage. He takes it home and nails some of it to his walls. I'm talking everything even used tampons. He then starts becoming obsessed with this girl. Always stealing her garbage, leering at her at her work. He even gets pissed when a guy takes her to the love hotel he works at. He also meets up with an old man who has been doing the same thing Kiku has been doing, stealing people's garbage, but he's been doing it for years. Kitamura (the director) really shows off the message of the movie series, that message being, humans are garbage, in this movie.
In short this is one of the most f***ed up series of movies to ever have been released. If you are the type that is easily upset by this style of movie you should avoid it like the plague. It is deeply disturbing and makes you say WTF more than once after you have watched them. If your into Guinea Pig, Audition, or Ebola Syndrome you would like this collection. Just be prepared for a sickening experience. Also if you're thinking about buying these movies, buy the boxset. It only costs thirty dollars, for all three of them. That is more cost effective than buying all of three of them seperately for around ninety dollars.

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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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