This post introduces a new category into the Uranium Café repertoire and that is The Uranium Café Quickie. That is basically what it is too. The post will be bare minium in some regards, though will still have images (though no original vidcaps) and necessary linkings. There will be minimal research and the film will be my gut opinion at the moment. I just want to do more posts and I am watching a lot of movies. My connection is poor and I simply cannot spend all my time uploading media or editing. The fact it is a quickie does not mean the movie will be one I cannot recommend. It simply means it is a post I am going to just slam out as fast as I can with few frills. And the very first quickie for the Uranium Café is a real winner called Girl’s Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers.

I watched this movie last night and wonder if I can really recommend it or not. It has been reviewed by Ghidorah over at Chainsaw Maintenance and he has some nice original vidcaps to go with his post. It is one of the new Japanese zombie movies that are being churned out and is heavy on cheesy, over the top gore and nudity and sex. Students at a high become infected by a “popular” virus (as the subtitles read, as if there they out shopping for viruses and this is the one every one is selecting) and after a psychotic doctor injects the students with an “experimental vaccine” they turn into murderous zombies. There is a cure or treatment in that the swimming pool water makes you immune to the effects of the vaccine (it is never explained why).  That is where the swimming team comes in. Since they all swam that day none of them turn into zombies later and of course have to stand up to the monsters. Later almost all of them are killed at oine time by an infected teachers. Some group of heroes. Aki is the new girl in school and unlike the students around her was brought up by the same psycho doctor infecting everyone to be a super assassin terrorist. But while browsing through fashion magazines in the training compound she decides she wants a normal life like other girls and escapes. Soon she is surrounded by zombiefied schoolmates and having hot lesbian sex with her new best friend, who happened to also be secretly trained by the psycho doctor and is a bad girl.

And this is a really bad movie but it may appeal to some readers out there who just want to kill some time and can enjoy a movie that basically has no redeeming value to it whatsoever. I enjoyed some parts but the acting is really bad and the gore is sort of fakey and very gratuitous. The girls are cute and you get to see a couple naked once in awhile, but it not enough to make the sex part of the film worthwhile. The lead actors try to be too serious as they often are in these new Japanese movies. You know the syndrome, all tortured and shook up inside. Who cares. They should act less and be naked more. And to be honest, there was very little of the swim team running around in those tight black swimsuits that seem to be the center of so many fetish type soft core photo shoots coming out of the land of the rising sun these days. The schoolgirl theme is cool but nothing much happens with it here. The gore will be too much for some people I think and like I said there is not enough sex or swimsuits to live up to that great title. See at your own risk.

MURDER SET PIECES

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2004/Director: Nick Palumbo/Screenplay: Nick Palumbo

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Cast: Sven Garrett, Tony Todd, Gunnar Hansen, Edwin Neal, Jade Risser

I was duped into this one by the so called rave reviews plastered on the DVD jacket, one comparing some of Palumbo’s shots “of visual brilliance” to “the best works of Dario Argento.” Well, that’s a load of crap. While I am not a big fan of Argento’s narrative style I do respect his technical ability with camera shots and movement. To say that even one frame of this movie comes anywhere near Argento’s best work is a blatant lie. I perused a few reviews before doing mine to maybe gain some sort of relevant insight in to the movie that I may be lacking and decided I was wasting my time. I am fully qualified to dismiss this movie as a load of garbage. Not because of the murders and gore and so called sickenly repulsive violence (which I did not find it to have but rather found the violence comic bookish in the way a Herschell Gordon Lewis film is) but because it is simply a poorly written, poorly acted and poorly directed movie.

The basic story is about some Nazi guy who takes porno pictures of women around Las Vegas but has a tendency to practice zero self-control and murders most of them as well as most other people he encounters. He seems to get away all this with utter impunity. He drives around and picks up hookers and kills them, kills his porno models, his girl friend and some woman who may be his German ex-wife or current wife, we never know, a little girl who is a schoolmate friend of his girlfriend’s sister, a fortune teller who won’t tell him what the cards say and a disgruntled porno book store clerk played by Candyman Tony Todd and it goes on and on into sheer absurdity. He is never questioned by the police or rouses any suspicion except in his girlfriend’s little sister played by Jade Risser but no one will believe her because SHE’S A KID!

The whole move feels like it was shot in the 70’s. Some great movies came out of the 70’s, but some shlocky ones did too. This one patterned itself on those substandard 70’s movies that are sort of fun now in a bad movie way. But this movie is not trying to be a bad movie and we do not need the 70’s done over except in parody. The music score is weird too, with some really poor heavy metal stuff that was probably done by friends of the director. The rest of the movie score sounds like typical incidental music from a 70’s exploitation film, which is what this feels like. I like exploitation films from the 70’s, they are campy and fun. This film is not either. Look, the murders here are not that shocking or brutal or original. There is one scene where the guy lunges out at Jade from a hole in the closet and is suppose to scare you, I guess, but it was so ridiculous I replayed the scene like six times for a laugh. I am tired of DVDs that advertise themselves as the “sickest movie of all-time” and then deliver Z-Movie entertainment at best. Sure, there is a ton of off color blood everywhere, again the type that looks like the too red goop used by Herschell Gordon Lewis, but so what. I like blood and gore and that is basically what I buy a DVD like this for, but to just pour blood all over the walls and on top of some moonlighting porn star because the film maker cannot do anything to get the story across simply gets boring after a few scenes and that is what this movie was, boring.

I cannot believe the reviews that seem to see something more to this movie than poor film making. The victims never seem scared and all look like porn actresses, which is what I read Palumbo hired for this film. Original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen has a small role as a Nazi gun dealer. Sven Garrett, who plays the photographer killer, is not really too bad in some ways as a serial killing, misogynist Nazi, but it is simply too unbelievable and poorly made to get anything but a weak nod from me. And it only gets that because Tony Todd was great as the burned out porno clerk and Gunner Hansen made an okay suburban Nazi.

JENIFER

2005/Director: Dario Argento/Screenplay: Steven Weber, Story by Bruce Jones

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Cast: Steven Weber, Carrie Anne Fleming, Brenda James, Harris Allan, Beau Starr, Laurie Brunetti, Kevin Crofton, Julia Arkos, Jasmine Chan

Some people simply worship Dario Argento. For years and years I just figured I was missing something or that I was not enough of a true film fanatic to see the brilliance in his work that his rabid sycophants did. Now I remember my reactions to films like Tenebre ( by the way, the second picture from the left in my banner is a scene from Tenebre I touched up in Photoshop) and Phenomenon and even his “magnum opus” Suspiria and do not feel I was so out of touch by feeling confused and bewildered. They were not really great movies at all in my opinion. Maybe not terrible movies, but Tenebre was so… so… terrible that I do not see what the big deal has always been about that movie. Okay there was a great axe murder scene with a spurting stump, but the rest of the film was so weird and Italian.

A pensive Dario Argento comtemplates taking a night

course in how to direct a sensible narrative.

Often supporters will admit his narrative technique lacks…well… narrative technique and that his story lines are illogical and incohesive and that his true skill lies in his camera work and atmospheric settings. I have even read some people compare his work to Mario Bava’s. There is no comparison and his technical skill and set designs are average at best even in his better work. The last thing I saw before Jenifer was something called Do You Like Hitchcock, and I figured it would have all these slick Hitchcockian references and gags but it had nothing of the sort really, not on any sophisticated level anyway. It was a goofy movie with a typical Argetno ending that was more like the ending to an EC comic book than a good horror/suspense movie. Well, now that I have expressed my general feeling about this “horror genius” let me give you my opinion of a short piece he did for the cable TV series called Masters of Horror (view my insightful comment on Takashi Miike’s ode to to incest and abortion Imprint elsewhere in the Café).

Poor Steven Weber comes home from working all day as actor and scriptwriter for horror megalomaniac Dario Argento and has to settle for cold cuts for dinner again.

Jenifer is a short made for TV film and to be honest, I did not completely dislike it, in the same way I did not dislike another shorter work Argento did in a double-feature called Two Evil Eyes with George Romero , where he did a graphic and psychotic version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat with Harvey Kietel in the lead role. Neither of the episodes were great pieces and hit and miss master Romero absolutely wasted one hour of my life with a Creepshow style “return from the dead and chase the girl ( played by the amply endowed Adrienne Barbeau ) around the house” story, but the shortness of the pieces made them endurable and somewhat enjoyable really. Honestly, I am not expecting Martin Scorcese or David Lean when I watch this stuff. Argento’s narration challenged approaches that undo his longer films were thankfully absent in these two shorter films (each about one hour long) and I found both of them decent little horror bits. Of course in Argento’s hands Jenifer has more than a few problems. Some of these can be excused if you realize the story is from a comic book story by Bruce Jones and illustrated by Bernie Wrightson ( I even found page samples below on the net). So we are not transposing Poe from paper to film here. Jones is a capable writer of suspense and horror comics that typically have a surprise twist at the end in the way older style horror comics did, such as the EC and Warren titles did, as well as the old Marvel and DC titles from the turn of the 70’s period.

Lovely Carrie Anne Fleming before Dario Aregento gave her a make over.

The general story is this: Police detective Frank Spivey (Steve Weber) rescues a girl from being murdered with a meat cleaver by an apparently homeless, deranged man. The man is shot and mutters the girl’s name with his last breath: Jenifer. As it turns out Jenifer is a mentally retarded and grotesquely deformed girl who happens to have a knock out body. For some reason Spivey allows the girl to live in his house where in no time she bites his wife in the face, rips the family cat to bits and is found sucking on its entrails in the bathroom, murders a carnival circus freak collector and chops him up and hides him the frig, then finally murders the innocent, little neighbor girl and does the same to her as the cat (I might add that no police ever appear to question anyone in the disappearance of the child… is this the same country that has the Amber alert?). During all this Spivey allows the slobbering freak to seduce him in bed and does not try to stop his wife and teenage son from leaving. To regain his balance and perspective on life he decides the best thing to do is to quit his career as a police detective and live in a run down , ratty cabin in the woods. Needing a career change he manages to beg a woman into giving him as job as a stock boy in a local grocery store. He lets Jenifer hang out at the cabin all day while he stacks pinto beans and toilet paper but she sneaks into town and sees him chatting with the woman and gets jealous and stalks her teenage son at an outdoor teenage party. Later Spivey finds her chomping on his guts in a tool shed. Needless to say he finally decides enough is enough (most guy’s would have decided that when he bit their wife’s face or ate the house cat and when they took a gander at her mutant face) and takes Jenifer out to kill her with an axe, but is shot by a hunter who rescues Jenifer and no not doubt the cycle starts all over.

Miss Fleming as Jenifer, a girl not concerned with the politics of vegetarianism.

The movie is a no brainer and to try and make anything more of out it is a lost cause. That a man like Spivey, no matter how unhappy, would throw away his family and career and cover up the murder of a child to protect a mentally retarded deformed girl who is “good” in bed is simply too unbelievable. Yes men can be slime, but most would not do this even to protect a Playboy Playmate! The violence is excessive and is simply exploitive gore. Every murder involves intestines and body organs and the scene of the nude little girl being gnawed on is simply bad taste. It the type of trick a no talent film maker would employ, the proverbial hammer on the head, trying to appear controversial because they are incapable of doing anything else. I put a photo of Argento in front of a fire place in this post that typifies the guy in my opinion. He is really trying to be this master of cinematic horror and wants us to be intrigued by his dark mind and black heart but ultimately his work is lacking and directionless and falls back over and over again on outdated shock and gore gimmicks to hold it together. You cannot say the same of Argento’s role model Mario Bava, though Bava did dabble amply in violence and even gore, but at his peak he was a brilliant film maker. While I admit Argento can be engaging and entertaining on one level I simply do not consider him to be in the same league as Bava.  Argento did do much to usher in the revival of the “giallo” style films in the 70’s and his use of color is sometimes interesting, but it is the continual lack of consistency that I find annoying with this guy’s work as a whole. All that being said, reviews on Deep Red, Suspria and Tenebre are coming one day.

ONECHANBARA

2008/Director: Yôhei Fukuda/ Writers: Yôhei Fukuda, Yasutoshi Murakawa

Cast: Satoshi Hakuzen, Manami Hashimoto, Ai Hazuki, Hiroaki Kawatsure

Unlike Rottweiler which is a fairly lame flick but one I can recommend I cannot say the same of this mess of a film called Onechabara (or Oneechabara sometimes) and means something like “sword fighting older sister”. It is based on some role playing video game and the heros are a cowboy hat wearing girl in a bikini, a sawed off shotgun toting gal in black and a school girl samurai. They spend their time killing off hordes of zombies that were the creation of a mad scientist. This seems like it could translate into a reasonable movie really, but real fast this thing turns into a load of total horse hocky and only gets more fetid as the minutes grind away excruciatingly.

One thing people online say is that at least the action scenes are decent and well done, but I do not think they are decent at all. They are long and boring and the site of a hundred zombies hopping around and flaying their arms while the samurai girl is attacked by one or two at a times is too shlocky here. Of course this is a gimmick we all know from any Kung Fu movie and accept it, because if the entire band of bad guys actually jumped the hero at one time they would pulverize him, so they sort of hop around and attack one at a time. I live in China and there is no tradition I know of here like that. The opposite is true, huge mobs maul you here at one time. All the gun shot blasts and blood splatter are computer generated and I think that sometimes we just need “real” fake blood from a bottle or tube, and not a computer program. Seems this type of thing is becoming more and more common in Japanese action and horror films. I read the film was shot on video and it looks like it too. Washed out and the night shots are grainy.

The story is simply too unbearable. I display my masochism in just doing this post, but I am trying to save someone out there. I cannot walk away from my responsibility. Why Asian films dip into this maudlin soap opera hell with family ties and tragic love issues and long, sappy death scenes with goofy, over scored soundtracks and crying girls is beyond me. It is so prevalent. Look, the heroine goes on a quest to kill her little sister and does just that, so why this long, drawn out scene at the end with gobs of tears and melodramatic grief. And then during the final duel are all these flashbacks that make the damned thing even longer. She sits weakened and almost beaten, but then… flash back! and she comes back stronger.  And then… flashback and reattack again. If I were the bad guy with a sword at her throat I would recognize that she is having another flash flashback by the3rd or 4th time and is about come back ten times stronger and I would chop her damned head off while she is still looking at the ground and lost in heart wrenching memories.  And at the end of the film I wondered, where are the zombies? It stops becoming a zombie movie for about the last 20 or 30 minutes and becomes this attempt at a cry baby family story. Why? The director and writer can not do a zombie splatter film much less a human interest story. They try to show why the little girl became evil, and how she really  looked up to her big sister and on and on and on… and who cares. I wanna see zombie guts and Japanese boobs in a bikini!!!!

And yes, the girl is sexy and wears a tight, red bikini and cowboy hat… sometimes.  Usually she’s in some gunslinger poncho looking thing. And it is really not that sexy. The one thing the film had going for it and it never exploits it fully. We never learn why she has to wear this outfit as she trudges through the barren wastelands of a ruined, zombie infested Earth. I would think combat fatigues would be better. I do not think any explanation would make it reasonable, but we are deprived of any good shots anyway, so what the hell’s the point. And the zombies are not scary and appear out of nowhere in unreasonably large numbers. One moment their slow and lumbering the next they’re doing Kung Fu flips through the air. The battle scenes, as I said, are brainless. Low end. There is some useless fat guy who cannot do anything but hide when the fighting starts but he is “the brains” of the team, but I never saw him accomplish much of anything other than whimper all the time. Our heroine’s evil sister dresses like a school girl and is always in a clean and pressed looking pedophile uniform, despite the fact the world is in an apocalyptic condition. And why do these women in action movies have to look so intent and serious. Jesus. They frown and grimace more than Clint Eastwood. If you want to frown and grimace do not wear a bikini with fluffy little things on your boobs. It does not work. Squint and suck on a cigarello. And about the sawed off shotgun girl. A double barrel shotgun can only fire two shots then you have to reload. The gun cannot hold 500 shells. I know, suspension of disbelief, but enough is enough.

I admit it. I am weak. I am a sucker for a pretty face and round butt. Take a look at that DVD cover. So promising. Sure, the girl cannot act and I did not expect her to. I did not even want her to. But I hoped to see her do something rather than try to actually act. And she does try, and that means what? Crying and feeling sad over the body of her sister that she kills. For some reason unknown to mortal man these lame soapy Asian films equate great acting with uncontrolled crying. And more crying. And more crying. The tsunami of hysterical crying must be accompanied by corny Asian soundtrack music that builds up and up like a melancholy, anguished bosom about to burst. Oh the sadness of it all. What is more tragic is that this stuff is played on the buses and on the outside PA systems here in China all the time, usually at woofer shattering volumes. Creating a dramatic soundtrack for our insubstantial little lives I suppose.

Asian movie posters are often very well done design wise. I was sucked into this one by the cover art. The covers are great, it is the actual movies here in Asia that seem to be getting worse and worse. God, this thing sucked. I have Machine Girl here too, but I am afraid to even try. The cover looks too damn good for the film to deliver on. Avoid this piece of crap please. But I did include a piece of 3D art of the heroine (I forget her name and refuse to watch the film again to find out or look it up on the net) that looks pretty nifty.

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2004/Director: Tanit Jitnukul/ Writers: SirLaosson Dara (writer), Ghost Gypsy (writer)

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Cast: Arisa Wills, Supakson Chaimongkol, Krongthong Rachatawan, Tin Settachoke, Isara Ochakul, Nirut Sutchart, Krittayod Thimnate

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Back to doing what I started this website to do and that is to do some movies reviews. Have been monkeying with widgets and MP3 players for a couple weeks now, and it is time to return to my roots, and I do so with a example of a Thai horror series that seems to be pretty popular here (in China) and back in the States right now:

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Strange being as I live in China now that little by little I come to really be bored with Asian horror in a general sense, considering a few years ago I was all but obsessed with the genre. I suppose back in Seattle it was all so different and I used to rent out tons of Japanese horror from the local Asian video store. Now it seems I am in the culture itself (though mainland China can hardly be said to be representative of what is best in Asian cinema especially after Li Ang ( Ang Lee in the west) won the Oscar for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and now every film maker, including good ones like Zhang Yimou, are only ‘going for the gold” and replicating that fine movie ad nauseum hoping to be the next to get the big prize). I now seem a tad jaded by all the Asian "shock cinema" I have seen and now even prefer a good formula Hollywood film once in a while, which I used to detest! But that is all for another post. This post is about a film that seems to be talked about rather highly online for the most part, people want more of it. But I guess I am once again missing it.

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To be honest it has been about a month I watched Art of Devil and my recollections are a bit hazy. If I really wanted to do a “good” review I would re-watch the movie. But that is not going to happen. Despite the praise the film gets from most reviews I read online I found it silly and boring and totally contrived, following the standard Asian horror movie formula established by Japan and South Korea. While voodoo is not a bread and butter staple of Asian films the rest of the film really is, and the target audience really seems to be Asian college girls who get frightened at almost anything, but really get frightened by people just staring into space or little weird looking mute kids popping out of closets or from under beds.

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The story is about a less than naive girl who is jilted after her married lover discovers she is pregnant. He wants to buy her off and shut her up but she is not having it and soon teams up with a witch doctor to get her revenge on the man and his entire family. The second half of the film deals with her focused on the man’s widow and daughter since they stand to inherit his fortune, and she wants it all. During the course of events she is pursued by the obligatory nosy investigative reporter and by a creepy little Thai albino kid who I am not really clear about. Each death is unique (of course) and grisly. One guy coughs up razor blades and another has eels erupt from his bowels and drench a hospital room in blood and writhing eels. There is also a gruesome fetus sequence that is a little over done for even my bad taste. There are no surprises at the end and while there is an Art of the Devil II and III they are not really sequels but separate stories using the voodoo theme.

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Well, I like voodoo and gore, but it never worked for me here. The version I have has crappy English subtitles so I watched it with English language and that ruins it a little for me. I would always prefer to hear the native language. The English seemed okay but I have been across the border into Thailand and no one there can speak English the way the characters here do. Everyone sounds like they are from Beverly Hills. That is acceptable I suppose. But the story was just so lame and full of holes, and the acting at times was almost on the level of a cheap porno movie (compared, I guess, to the acting in a big budget porno). The gore effects are just set ups essentially, no real value other than to gross out the audience. I am not anti-gore in films and have seen my share, but the days of gratuitous, exploitive gore for gore's sake are really long gone except on the low end of the scale. It is like showing boobs now, it tends to bring the film down rather than raise it up. My God I am getting jaded, now I am knocking boobs!

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I do not know what other work director Tanit Jitnukul has done, and I am not much of a fan of Thai cinema anyway, but I am not impressed with this meandering mess. Some people have said this and other recent releases is Thailand’s stab at jumping into the Asian horror movie market, dominated by Japan and to a lesser extent South Korea these days. The DVD I have is distributed by Tokyo Shock and so I was sort of excited at first. While I often am bored by newer Japanese and South Korean horror films I still find something in the production and quality of those countrie's films that I am drawn to even when the story is the same old ghost formula. Unless things change I will stick to Thai kick-boxing movies because this thing, which I understand is supposed to be some high watermark for Thai horror, turned me off from seeking anything beneath its level. Look I didn’t like it, but a lot of people do. Give it a try and let me know what subtleties I am missing.

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Day of the Dead

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2008/Director: Steve Miner/Writers: Jeffrey Reddick, George A. Romero (They actually put George’s name on the credits)

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Cast: Mena Suvari, Nick Cannon, Michael Welch, AnnaLynne, Ving Rhames

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I felt it was time to review a newer film. I have really only commented on a couple newer ones so far ( Tetsuo the Ironman and Cat’s eye) and felt I did not want to slip into a groove of only commenting on “classic” psychotronic type films of the Something Weird variety. Most of the films I watch are actually newer movies and I want to start posting on those as well. I just felt the need to write something about this so called remake of George Romero’s 1985 true zombie classic Day of the Dead (yes, I stand by that statement, and I also felt Land of the Dead was a great Zombie movie and there will be posts on those films in time) . There is absolutely no connection between the two films whatsoever. Not to anyone who has not abused LSD within the last twenty years anyway. The closest connection would be that the film makers blatantly say “Based on the motion picture DOTD by George A. Romero” on the poster and assign co-writing credits to Romero during the credits. Another remote connection is the link between the sympathetic zombie Bud in this film and Bub in the original. But the similarity seems to be in the first two letters of their names and not much more.

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I love a good zombie film and always have, but the subgenre also has spawned some of the worst movies ever made. Some are of such a bad quality that I just cannot enjoy them at all, though I love a good bad movie. This film is not that terribly bad that is not worth a look but I just do not understand how these guys can have the audacity to call this a remake of the original movie. Since the credits included Ving Rhames I jumped to the conclusion that this was another decent remake in the same vain as 2004’s well done Dawn of the dead by Zack Snyder. That delusion was shattered in the first couple minutes really when the scenes open up with stock teenagers making out in a deserted old building somewhere in the wilderness of Colorado. The movie only descends into more inanity and never tries to pull it self out. It is like a drowning man who starts gulping water to end it all.

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The cast is led by Mena Suvari (who had Kevin Spacey spanking his monkey in American Beauty) but she really does not have the acting power to rescue this bomb. I will tell you, I am a reasonable man. I know that when I watch a film like this I am not reading Wittgenstein and I basically want lots of action and gore and zombies blasted through the cranium and brains being evacuated against the wall behind them. But still, can we all agree, there must be standards to adhere to. If not we are lost as a species. The fact they use the name of one of the greatest zombies films of all time means they are expected to deliver us something above the average gut eating fare. If they had called the film Teenage Zombie Freak Out or The Night the Dead Rose and Got Really Pissed I would not have a problem. But if you remake Apocalyspe Now you expect some Viet Cong and a boat of Americans at least, right? There should be obvious thread that shows it is in fact a remake.

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The story is simply lame and has so many gaps I cannot undertake the task of describing them here. I will simply focus on one criticism and then let this stinking corpse rest. There is a big debate on the net amongst zombie fans about which is better, fast zombies or slow zombies. Personally I am fan of both. And for the record fast zombies are not something new that came into being with Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead or Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. Dan O’Bannon had running, manic zombies galore back in 1985’s Return of the Living Dead. I feel that when a person initially changes into a flesh eating zombie they could be fast and furious but would slow down in time as rigamortis and rot set in. Now, I feel they can be fast and strong, but no faster and no stronger than when the person was while still alive. Here they bounding through the air like an old kung fu movie and even scampering on the ceiling via ceiling tiles and crawling across walls like Spiderman. One even jumps through the undamaged windshield of a Hummvee and that just cannot happen unless the thing is super human, and why would a virus that kills you revive you in a super human state? Of course this is a zombie move and I understand suspension of disbelief. I do not believe in UFOs or Psychic powers or demonic possession but I watch this stuff all the time and enjoy it typically. Yet there has to be some base line of believability unless the film is a spoof, like the more enjoyable Fido was.

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There is even another “remake” or sequel of the movie out there called Day of the Dead: Contagion, but I did not fall for that one. I was had this time and I just want to give any discerning zombie hound out there fair warning: this has nada to do with the original film and the film makers should all be bitten by rage infected monkeys and set loose on one another in a dungeon. Is nothing sacred anymore?

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IKI JIKOGU (LIVING HELL)

2000/Director: Shugo Fujii/Writer: Shugo Fugii
Cast: Hirohito Honda, Yoshiko Shiraishi, Rumi, Kazuo Yashiro, Naoko Mori, Shugo Fujii

If it has not become evident in the few posts I have made already I should clarify that love Japanese cinema. I am a really big fan of older Japanese cinema, from the late 50’s and early 60’s but am often luke warm when it comes to a lot of contemporary Japanese cinema (while some new stuff I have seen is simply fanatstic, such as Shohei Imamura’s The Eel) As a relevant side note I am currently living in Beijing China and therefore it is easy to find droves of Japanese, Korean and Hong Kong films here at a cheap price. So even if I buy a real dud I am not out any real money. A DVD here usually runs about a buck American. I did not completely hate this film written, directed by and starring (in a less than minor role) Shugo Fujii however I confess I was disappointed after it was all over. The DVD cover I have (it is not the one I have posted here in the review) is pretty misleading and often here in China DVD covers can have little to do with the movie contents. The reviews that are posted on the back are often negative and panning the film and the credits can be from a completely different film. For a while it seemed every other movie I bought had the credits for Spielberg’s Munich on it. And when the language of the film is something other than English you have no clue as to what you may be getting. There are some scenes on the cover here that never even appear in the movie. All those trifles aside some people on the net seem to enjoy the film and the complaints they have (i.e. the terrible score) are the same ones I have, but I may have a few more that prevent me from being able to recommend this movie.

I have now watched enough of this new Japanese horror stuff that I am getting the sense that I tend to like it less than I think I ought to. I feel like I should enjoy it more but I am consistently disappointed for the most part. This low budget (under $100,000 I understand) and quickly shot (nine days) psycho-thriller shows the limitations of its budget and schedule. It contains several Japanese horror clich’s (piles of worms and eyes peering through long strands of hair) that are repeated over and over until they become irritating actually.

The general story is about a 79 year old lady, Chiyo, and her granddaughter, Yuki, who kill a couple and their fluffy dog at the beginning of the movie. A woman even has her eye eaten out by some sort of carnivorous beetle. So it all seems to start off promising enough but the movie gets stuck real fast after the initial murder sequence. The story shifts to a year later and a family takes in the old lady and the girl who are distant relatives in need. In no time they begin to torment wheelchair bound Yasu in various and often inexplicable fashions to which he never tries to defend himself. Director Shugo plays Mitsu, a tabloid reporter, who gets involved to a dangerous degree while writing an investigative story on the murders from a year before and the recent escape from an asylum by Chiyo.

It turns out that Yuki and Yasu were actually once conjoined twins that were separated during their teenage years. It is not explained why since they seemed to have been only connected at the hip and such surgery normally takes place immediately after birth. However they were the products of a mad doctor’s experiments with the evil and perverted Chiyo so maybe that has something to do with it. Nothing much is really explained. Now, in many ways all of this has the ingredients for a great horror suspense movie, eyeball eating beetles, conjoined fraternal twins, people in wheelchairs being tortured, but it really goes no where and stays there forever. I cannot express enough how distracting and terrible the film score is. It is one of the worst I have heard in years. A good score is crucial to a horror movie.

Another odd thing is that the old lady is supposed to be really scary, but the truth is that she is just an old lady whose face never alters expression. She and Yuki spend all their time just staring. In Japanese films this is supposed to be really creepy, old ladies or little girls just staring at you, or showing no emotion as they torture you. But it goes on so long in some scenes in is simply absurd. The old lady kills people but she has no super powers or anything. They simply do not resist, because if they did they would whoop her butt. Yuki does the staring out through long black hair gimmick and nothing else. The expressionless faces are simply boring and never once freaky or terrifying. As it turns out Yasu¡’s entire family are totally insane and they have been hiding it from him all these years and his mother is actually Chiyo, the evil old lady.

The movie ends on a more preposterous note when it is revealed that all of the murders were all actually committed by the crippled Yasu himself and that Yuki is his dead sister he murdered during the surgery to separate them that he keeps alive in his mind to excuse his evil deeds, for example, the murder of the couple at the beginning. But the problem here is that we see Chiyo and Yuki kill the couple long before Yasu is introduced into the story. And he is wheelchair bound and how was he at the house of this couple who had no relation to him or his family? Even all the tortures are his own self-mutilations. But the other people in his family are insane and his brother, Ken, kills a couple people too. Why make the plot so unbelievable by making Yasu the real killer?

There are scenes where the actors show their insanity simply by giggling hysterically and ranting and crawling around on the floor. It is the type of acting that a non-actor would do if told to act insane. The annoying screaming that Yasu makes all of the time and the camera focusing on his open mouth as he does it is very annoying and it happens a lot.

I have read that this movie has been billed as the Japanese Texas Chainsaw Massacre (see the print on the cover graphic), but that is simply not the case at all. The violence here is not that intense or unnerving. There is a scene where all the family gathers together around a dinner table ala every Chainsaw movie made and acts weird and insane and cannibalism is inferred (and an eyeball eaten out of Shugo Fujii’s face), but the acting is bad and nothing is really shocking. The actors just act stupid and giggle and bounce around. The ending where Yasu winds up with a split personality is simply hurried and contrived. The only more ridiculous alternative would have been to have Yasu wake up screaming and find it has all been a dream, only to then have Chiyo and Yuki actually knock on the door at the end as the hokey synth-pad soundtrack goes into the end credits and the camera into his open mouth. So I guess it could have been worse. But as always, do not take my word for it, you may really enjoy it. I liked Brando’s Mutiny on the Bounty, so what do I know?

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