by ·Comments Off on Noroi: The Curse (2005, Kôji Shiraishi)

Found-footage horrors are rarely good – I’m thinking of Willow Creek and The Poughkeepsie Tapes and V/H/S and its sequels (which also suffer from being anthology horrors, which are also rarely good). If nothing else, the found-footage conceit is an excuse for shitty handheld camerawork, and we’ve got that here, and also clips from fake TV programs with insufferable narrators and graphics. Movie is also not nice to birds. Still, pretty good, I’d check out the director’s torture video Grotesque.

Ghost investigator on the trail of a kidnapped girl pieces together a documentary stitching various hauntings he filmed that turn out to be related. Doc guy Kobayashi pulls in haunted actress Marika and foil-hat “super psychic” Hori, and they have a blairwitchy experience at the dammed/damned lake where a village once existed. Apparently the village had a ritual to keep demons at bay, no longer being performed as everyone moved away, now wherever the demon-possessed abortionist from the drowned village goes, her neighbors are driven murderously mad from the sounds of her ghost babies. Our team tracks her down, the doc guy rescues her hostages, but fails to banish the evil, uh oh. Not to be confused with magic pirate revenge movie Noroît. The actors here also appeared in various Rings and Grudges, and two were in Kurosawa’s Retribution.

by ·Comments Off on Horrors of Malformed Men (1969, Teruo Ishii)

Wild 1920’s-set mad-scientist movie. The title and concept are more fun than the experience of watching it. I fell asleep with my finger on the screenshot key and had to delete ten thousand files the next day.

Can’t say you weren’t warned, I’m superdeformed (dig it):

Young doctor (lead actor from the also-nutty Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell) escapes from an asylum, seeking a half-remembered island, and finds a doomed circus girl who also half-remembers it. He makes his way to the shore right as his doppelganger dies, so he pretends to be that guy, saying “actually I’m still alive,” then hangs out with his weird family and sleeps with his sister.

Chair goals:

He makes it out to the family island and finds his madman web-handed dad who deforms people, and hopes to one day deform everyone… one at a time I guess, since he doesn’t have a Magneto-scale operation here. Dad reveals various hidden identities and plots and backstories – such as when he locked his wife in a cave, and she fed on the crabs that fed on her dead lover – then a cop who’d been posing as a family servant explains some more.

Dad is a disability-rights advocate:

But it’s true he has issues:

After all this, the young doctor’s sister-lover reaches the correct conclusion: “We will embrace atop the fireworks mortar. We will scatter magnificently across the great sky.”

by ·Comments Off on Uzumaki (2000, Higuchinsky)

Rewatching this standout from the great J-horror wave in anticipation of the troubled new animated version. At the time I enjoyed this enough to check out Higuchinsky’s follow-up (Long Dream, not as cool as The Jaunt) – now the mix of bizarre happenings with cool lighting and soft-focus soap opera reminds me of House.

Kirie’s boyfriend knows the town is spiraling and suggests they run away together but she doesn’t take him seriously and stays until it’s too late. His dad (Ren Osugi, Nightmare Detective chief, Shin Godzilla prime minister) becomes dangerously spiral-obsessed until he suicides in the washing machine, and mom (Keiko Takahashi, star of Door) develops extreme spiralphobia as a result. Meanwhile kids are becoming snails and growing mad spiral hairstyles. A reporter talks to the kids and does some research, has a breakthrough, and before he can tell them, Kirie’s ridiculous classmate who likes surprising people (Sadawo Abe of Yatterman) jumps in front of the reporter’s car and they both die. Closing apocalypse is shown via stills, presumably from the comic.

The lead girl showed up a decade later in Norwegian Wood. Denden is the local cop – I think he shot his partner in Cure – and among the schoolkids are the stars of Ring Virus and Ring Spiral (appropriately). Potentially useful list of “the best horror cartoonists” found on Lboxd: Ito, Burns, Carroll, Umezu, Corben, Freibert.

by ·Comments Off on Ichi the Killer (2001, Takashi Miike)

One of those movies I watched in grungy lo-fi copies enough times that I thought it would feel weird to see in HD, but Ichi is going to be kinda grungy no matter how much resolution you throw at it. It’s also a movie with two prolific actors who I see every year and call “that guy from Ichi The Killer” (most recently when BOTH appeared in Kubi). Lumped in with the Asian horror crowd when it came out, but its over-the-top death and torture scenes are mixed in with the perverse Ichi story, a yakuza war, fucked up music by Boredoms and much crazed humor.

Besides Ichi and Kakihara, we got Shinya Tsukamoto as Ichi’s handler/manipulator – everyone calls him an old fart then he’s revealed to be massively muscled, killing head enforcer Shun Sugata (Tokyo Gore Police chief). Sabu of Shinjuku Triad Society is an ex-cop turned bodyguard for Kaki’s gang to pay the bills, and Suzuki Matsuo (Shin Kamen Rider) plays their identical twin colleages. The rival who Kaki repeatedly tortures is Kitano regular Susumu Terajima.

Ichi’s traumatic backstory is only partly true, Kaki’s attacks on his rivals are based on misinformation and bad guesses, Ichi panics and kills the girls he likes and the boy trying to befriend him. Everyone’s a real mess – but at least Kaki gets what he wanted (to be killed).

by ·Comments Off on Doberman Cop (1977, Kinji Fukasaku)

The hero is a pig-toting bumpkin in a straw hat (I kept wanting the my-my-Mitchell theme song to play) and the villain is a gangster who fancies himself a talent agent (see also: The Girl Can’t Help It). Rough and active camerawork, but the human action is just whatever, except for Kano who is good with the roundhouse and the high kick. Sonny Chiba’s reputation was that he could fight convincingly onscreen – China had thousands of these guys and Japan just had Sonny. The cops are idiot assholes in this except for Sonny and the one who turns out to be the serial killer.

by ·Comments Off on Evil Does Not Exist (2023, Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

Lovely and not mysterious at all until suddenly it is. The community responds to a tourism company: “The very essence of this village is at stake.” The company has sent a couple of know-nothing PR types – main dude Takumi pokes holes in their plan but also drives them around and indulges the guy’s desire to do manly backwoods things like chop wood. Then Takumi’s daughter goes missing, and the PR dude must be killed to maintain nature’s balance (I guess). No big stars – the woman who runs the local noodle shop and wants to maintain the water quality for her broth costarred in Happy Hour. Hamaguchi reveals in Cinema Scope that it was put together rather experimentally, says his own perspective is usually closer to the invading PR people than the rural residents.

The PR people surprised to hear they have to protect their grounds from deer:

The deer they never considered:

by ·Comments Off on Perfect Days (2023, Wim Wenders)

Some unimportant details:
– He always plays classic rock hits in the car, and we’ll see the song start and end, but his trip has been edited down visually, so the music and the picture run on different timelines, Dunkirk-style.
– He won’t sell his cassettes for a coworker, but lends the guy all his cash then has to sell a cassette anyway to afford the gas home.
– I know the movie title references the Lou Reed song he plays in his apartment, but then is his niece Niko’s name a Nico reference?

Bilge Ebiri has got the important stuff.

by ·Comments Off on Kubi (2023, Takeshi Kitano)

I skipped the last couple Kitano movies – rude behavior to the great man after he gave us the commercial self-destruction trilogy – and am now delighted to discover that he’s still got it. This is an epic 1500’s warlord power-struggle story with about fifty characters, and he nearly keeps it to two hours without making the plot confusing (it really helps that they introduce and re-introduce everyone with onscreen titles). Plus it’s great-looking, fun, and full of beheadings and other gruesome stuff, and gleefully anachronistic – even not knowing any Japanese I can tell they’re conversing more like yakuza than samurai. But I didn’t realize until the name Hattori Hanzo came up that it’s based on real history – all these characters have wikipedia pages.

Kubi means “neck”:

Kitano plays Monkey, the most degraded of the warlords until his plans and alliances come together at the end. He’s scheming with bald Hidetoshi Nishijima (Drive My Car guy, Creepy cop), who’s having a secret affair with rebel-in-hiding Kenichi Endo (a major Miike guy). They’re working under/scheming against the current ruler Ryo Kase (an Outrage lead). It’d take all day to name the rest of them but I’ll note that both leads of Ichi the Killer are in here somewhere (psycho Tadanobu Asano plays a Kitano ally).

by ·Comments Off on Evangelion 3 & 4 (2012/2021, Hideaki Anno)

Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Where we left off, the movies were following the series pretty closely, except for one new character. That’s all out the window now, as Shinji awakens from a 14-year nap (but he’s the same age and temperament). He discovers all his friends are dead because he caused a mass extinction that destroyed most the world. But at least he rescued Rei – nope, this Rei is a soulless clone. But at leaast his coworkers are still supporting him – nope, they’ve formed an alliance to try to destroy him. But at least he makes an enthusiastic new friend – nope, a bomb collar blows that guy’s head off.

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Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time (2021)

Shinji is in one of his dark quiet moods, but at least Fake Rei (a clone of Shinji’s mom) is learning how to be human – nope, she spontaneously combusts. The characters and situations are making less sense than ever (“the cores that form the eva infinities are the materialization of souls”), but this is the best the show has ever looked. Shinji finally fights vs. his dad in identical evas in the anti-universe, then rewrites the world as a new place (“neon genesis”) where he won’t have to pilot no more giant robots.