Grotesque: Take 2 – The Trailer

After seeing the trailer for Grotesque, I think I’ll stand by what I said in the last posting if it’s all the same to you.

Warning: Trailer contains a lot of unimaginative eviserations, and therefore may be unsuitable for those not yet desensitized. There might also be a boob under all that blood, but it’s OK. It belongs to Tsugumi Nagasawa, who was in Tokyo Gore Police, High School Girl Rika: Zombie Hunter, and Cream Lemon 7, so she’s pretty much used to being exploited by now.

Brits ban ho-hum-sounding flick

Japanese torture flick 'Grotesque' reportedly banned by British censors.

[This news courtesy of Japanese Horror's Twitter.]

The UK’s MovieMuser.com reports that a new Japanese movie called Grotesque (Gurotesuku) has been banned by the British Board Of Film Classification for violence. Here’s the MovieMuser’s summary of the film:

“A girl, Aki (Tsugumi Nagasawa), and her new boyfriend, Kazuo (Hiroaki Kawatsure), are mugged, knocked unconscious and kidnapped by an unknown assailant. They wake up to find themselves bound and gagged in a torture chamber-style basement at the mercy of a man armed with a mind-boggling array of kitchen implements and power tools whose only pleasure is gained from the suffering of others. So begins a slow and sustained assault during which the couple is gradually hacked, mutilated and degraded to the point where death becomes a more desirable option to living. Or is it? When one captive is offered the chance to die in order to save the life of the other, the question of how far one would go for a loved one is answered in the most unpleasant of ways.”

My first reaction to reading this plot synopsis was “sounds pretty…boring.” I don’t think I’m alone.

‘Noriko’s Dinner Table’: Chew On This

The Morning After

Japanese director Sion Sono needs to be given a strong infusion of capital and immediately isolated from any contact with Hollywood. Not only has the man successfully merged the art house flick with extreme horror, he has done more to pinpoint the plight of the modern middle class in two films than the world’s philosophers have managed to do in the last 50 years.

Together with Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sono has spearheaded a subgenre this Handbook’s dubbed existential horror, starting with his 2002 cult hit Suicide Club. In this breed of chiller, serial killers and supernatural entities take a backseat to ennui, social disintegration and alienation — the depiction of which Sono all but mastered in Suicide Club.

Though dubbed a prequel to that film (and marketed as Suicide Club 0 in the French market), Noriko’s Dinner Table is more of a “lateral” work than a prequel or a sequel, despite a timeline that embraces both what came before and after events in that film. (Though a 2005 film, it didn’t get a proper North American DVD release until this year’s Tidepoint edition.)

While it will further irritate fans of that earlier work by never quite answering the core questions it poses, it also will intrigue just about anyone willing to give it a chance. For those who complain about being bombarded by “dumb” cinema, be careful what you wish for.

Feeling trapped by parents who fail to see her and her sister as anything but two member of a happy family, teenager Noriko strikes up a friendship with a Tokyo girl online, and flees to that metropolis to find a more meaningful life. Her friend turns out to be Kumiko, the young ringleader of a bizarre group that hires itself out by the hour as a proxy family for lonely people. Seeing it as an opportunity to reinvent herself, Noriko joins the madness.

However odd the premise sounds, it is that much more poignant when seen on screen. A neglectful father like Noriko’s own hires her and Kumiko to play out an emotional reunion. Later, the pair joins three other “players” — two “parents” and their young “son” — to enact a tearful deathbed farewell for an old man who is clearly fine, but only wanted that catharsis, with the players presumably standing in for family members who couldn’t be bothered to show him that kind of love.

And before you ask, the answer is yes — all of this joins the original plot threads of Suicide Club at some point in the film. To reveal anymore here would be criminal so soon after its May 2008 release in the States. Suffice it to say that Noriko’s Dinner Table is well worth the $22 Amazon is asking for the disc, or at the very least, a rental. (Surprisingly, Netflix already has it.)

The only gripe I have with this film is the packaging, which features a blood-spattered Kumiko. While it’s a move one would expect when catering to horror fans, this movie would be even more rewarding for viewers who have no experience with Sono’s back catalog and simply watch it with no preconceived notions of what is to come. Like Miike’s Audition, the dramatic structure is such that nothing particularly horrific happens until you’re a good way through the film. It’s a small gripe to be sure.

While nowhere near as frenetic as its precursor, Noriko nevertheless pulls back the curtain a bit more on the former’s philosophy and, like that movie, offers up puzzles nearly as confounding. In an age where film plots have gone from being spoon fed to audiences to flat out mainlined, this quality makes this particular cinematic experience all the more precious.

Fantasia: Take 2 – Best Trailer Captioning!

Caption: "Run Away! They'll cut your leg..."

From the director of Battle Royale....II! [Sigh.]

Fantasia: Take 1 – ‘It’s Alive,’ Japanese Style

If you're one of the many who is trying very hard NOT to think about the fact that the Fantasia Film Festival is going on this month in Montreal without you, at least you can get a taste of what the fortunate ones are seeing this year. Head on over to the trailer site for some surprises and, admittedly, more of the same old nonsense.

For sheer "You're putting me on" value, hats off to Tamami: The Baby's Curse (aka Akanbo Shojo), an odd, and some would say desperate mashup of the usual dead-chick J-Horror shtick with a monster baby right out of Larry Cohen's It's Alive series.

‘Karaoke Terror’: Unexpected Song

The Morning After

I've never been one for sport. But after last night's viewing of Karaoke Terror, I think I now understand a thing or two about the feeling of seeing a promising play end in defeat.

I should hasten to add that this is not a bad film, just a vastly different one than the trailer would lead you to believe. It is NOT another Suicide Club or Battle Royale, and I suppose it's a bit unreasonable to expect anything to fill those big shoes. The tragedy here is that it very easily could've gone toe-to-toe with those modern classics if only it had adhered less to the source novel by Audition scribe Ryu Murakami and more to the quirky traditions of modern Japanese cinema itself.

The plot: A group of young men who band together to stage impromptu karaoke sessions by the sea are pulled into a war of attrition with the Midoris, a group of middle-aged women who themselves spend a fair amount of time in karaoke bars, after the women seek revenge for the killing of one of their own by one of the boys. (Best to plot this one out on the back of a soggy karaoke bar cocktail napkin.)

The somewhat gory revenge attacks between the two groups escalate as each side claims a new victim. As the death toll mounts, the survivors rediscover the joys of life itself, for however long they have left to indulge in them.

Karaoke Terror is a farce somewhat in the vein of Battle Royale's early "education" scene, with an ending bound to rattle the cages of today's hypersensitive alarmists. There are quite a few laughs and several Japanese Golden Oldies sung by the cast as they go about their grim missions.

Is it an enjoyable film? Certainly. However, its lack of the underlying darkness that marked films like Suicide Club, and even All About Lily Chou-Chou -- both of which covered a similar alienation of young people -- makes it difficult to classify this oddity as a horror film.

Parting gift: The clip above is the first song in the Karaoke Terror trailer and the first in the film -- this from the original 60s-era artists: Pinkie and the Killers.

(And darn it, though The Blue Hearts song "Linda Linda" -- popularized in the recent flick Linda Linda Linda -- appears in the trailer, I'm pretty sure it wasn't anywhere to be found in the film itself. Playing some dirty pool there, film marketers.)

‘Karaoke Terror’: Off-Key Killing Spree

Love It Before I See It Dept.

While The New Horror Handbook covers a wide range of horror films from the US and Canada to Australia and beyond, I have to admit I have a particular soft spot for East Asian horror films -- those of Japanese origin in particular. One of the reasons for this is the sheer insanity that finds itself thrown before the camera lens in that country, especially since the virtual collapse of the studio system some years ago. Sure, there are dozens of movies marketed Stateside as those that "break all the rules" and are "madcap," but pleeease...

At the top of the "must see" list around these New Horror haunts is the 2003 WTF film Karaoke Terror: The Complete Japanese Showa Songbook (Showa kayo daizenshu), which received its official US DVD release back at the end of April.

Based on a literary work of Ryu Murakami (author of the novel upon which Audition is based), the movie stars Masanobu Ando (the stone-cold killer Kiriyama in Battle Royale) and Yoshio Harada (Another Heaven), and follows a gang war between young boys and middle-age women, both groups obsessive patrons of Japan's karaoke bars.

The plot, as often is the case with Japanese films of this stripe, is of no importance. Check out the clip above to see what has your's truly so stoked to see this spectacle.

J-Horror’s Long Black Hair Gets Bite

Love It Before I See It Dept.

It seems like the horror fan’s life is comprised of months and months of near boredom, sampling new movies you know are going to be bad only to discover that every one of them is utter crap, if not worse.

And then along comes a movie that appears so promising, you’re not even sure what aspect of the film to go gaga (or possibly in this case, GoGo) over first.

Coming July 29th to North America (at least according to Amazon) is a J-Horror offering called alternatively Exte, Ekusute and Hair Extensions that, if the trailer is any guide, promises to be that rare thing in shudder cinema: a genuinely fun movie.

Chiaki Kuriyama (fan-favorite GoGo Yubari from Kill Bill Vol. 1) stars as a hair salon apprentice who becomes entangled in the horror wreaked by a series of cursed hair extensions harvested from a murdered girl that seemingly have a mind of their own.

All right, forget the plot! This flick comes to us from writer/director Sion Sono, the force behind 2001’s addictive head-scratcher Suicide Club, so you know you’re in for something strange, creepy and a cut above the usual dump-it-quick J-Horror fare. Add to this the bizarre stylings of co-star Ren Osugi (the spiral-obsessed father in Uzumaki; also Cure, Sonatine) and you’ve got yourself a promising cult corker. Here’s hoping the finished product lives up to the promise. And for an in-depth look at the best in Asian Horror, you might want to reserve your copy of The New Horror Handbook today.