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Can anyone give some suggestions for J-horror? There seem to be a lot of titles out there and I'm not sure which ones are worth picking up. I've seen Ju-On, Pulse, the Eye, and Audition. Oh, and I'm mostly interested in new films of this genre. I enjoy the older Japanese horror, but that's not really what I'm looking for right now.

blindside8zao wrote:Can anyone give some suggestions for J-horror? There seem to be a lot of titles out there and I'm not sure which ones are worth picking up. I've seen Ju-On, Pulse, the Eye, and Audition. Oh, and I'm mostly interested in new films of this genre. I enjoy the older Japanese horror, but that's not really what I'm looking for right now.

Speaking of EYE what have the fabulous (I mean that) Pang brothers been up to? What innovative visual sense i e THE EYE & BANGKOK DANGEROUS.

blindside8zao wrote:Can anyone give some suggestions for J-horror? There seem to be a lot of titles out there and I'm not sure which ones are worth picking up. I've seen Ju-On, Pulse, the Eye, and Audition. Oh, and I'm mostly interested in new films of this genre. I enjoy the older Japanese horror, but that's not really what I'm looking for right now.

I would highly recommend Uzumaki which is a fantastic, visually inventive J-horror film and definitely worth tracking down.

believe it or not, I almost bought it the other day. Suncoast is going out of business and they had it on sale for 40 percent off 20 dollars. I figured I'd prolly find it online the same price though. It's always sounded neat conceptually. Oops, just checked, apparently I was wrong.

I just read Marebito was coming out on DVD tuesday. Does anyone know if it's any good?

Suicide Club was both entertaining and completely bonkers in equal measure.

I'm not a fan of Japanese horror, generally, because of the extreme violence (Yeah, I'm a wuss), but my girlfriend digs it so I've seen a few.

MAREBITO is really interesting, yes. It's a film that I think will suffer from your knowing anything about it -- it's best if the surprises are all surprises. I would advise you to protect yourself from reading even the back of the box and trust me (tho' you have no reason to). Shinya TETSUO Tsukamoto plays a voyeur obsessed with filming the sources of his fear -- that much I guess we can say. It takes us into uncomfortable places, with the form of the film meshing perfectly with the main character's obsessions and delusions... The horror lies in our being able to follow him down. Same director, Shimizu, who did JU ON and THE GRUDGE.

Anyone see ST. JOHN'S WORT?

Allan (alienatedinvancouver.blogspot.com)

i have only heard bad reviews of ST. Johns.

Was curious if anyone had seen/heard of the movie "cello" that came out today.

oops, this is korean, but I'll group it in anyways and be un pcu.

The EYE is NOT J-horror. It's not even Japanese!

I'm finishing up a book on contemporary Japanese horror cinema for Rodopi University Press and edited a book called Japanese Horror Cinema about a year or so ago...so you can probably imagine how burnt out I am on this genre. However, this discussion has me recalling a pair of recent Japanese horror films for which I felt some affection.

Perhaps more than any other recent Japanese horror films, Shimizu Takashi's Marebito (or, The Stranger from Afar, 2004) and Tsukamoto Shinya's Vital (2004) evidence the kind of innovation necessary to keep this vibrant cinematic tradition from falling into a stale cycle of endless sequels and tropological redundancies. Importantly, they accomplish this without deploying the increasingly clichéd strategy of clever self- or poly-referentiality. Thus, Marebito and Vital rarely partake in the tiresome strain of kitschy, postmodern rib-nudging that has become an all-too-frequent trend within fin de siecle horror texts, from Wes Craven's Scream (USA, 1996) to Miike Takashi's One Missed Call (2003) [I'm not hating on these films, by the way.... Shimizu's Marebito and Tsukamoto's Vital are unsettling narratives that confront audiences with novel re-imaginings of traditionally nightmarish scenarios. What's more, they provoke their audiences with intellectually challenging premises that not only realise horror film's potential for advocating new ways of understanding contemporary cultural transformations, but that also advance a reconsideration of the very ‘politics' informing the act of watching horror films (this is accomplished through an apportioning of the spectator's gaze a bit too complicated for me to go into here -- happy to do so if anybody wants)..

What sets Vital apart from other horror films, however, is more than Tsukamoto's persistent return to the human body's abject materiality, a thematic recurrence that, paradoxically, necessitates serious reflection upon the master-narratives we fabricate (and advocate) in response to our inescapable mortality. What differentiates Vital from other genre-bridging works of filmic terror is Tsukamoto's recognition of the ‘human condition' as a liminal state. Moreover, Hiroshi's amnesia, like his often tenuous grasp on ‘reality', makes him the ideal protagonist for this narrative. In the tradition of Voltaire's Candide and other variations on the trope of the ‘impartial observer', Hiroshi brings the illusion of objectivity to Tsukamoto's exploration of human mortality. Hiroshi's cool precision and initially impassive demeanour in the medical school's pathology lab, rather than conveying a callous perspective, discloses a profound and very ‘human' desire for meaning that steadily intensifies until it erupts in melodramatic bursts of emotional hyperbole. Thus, far from conveying an attitude of ghoulish prurience, Hiroshi's expressions of childlike wonder as he cracks his cadaver's chest plate and exposes the nexus of organs below suggests a complicated relationship towards the corporeal at once accentuated and compounded by his collection of finely detailed charcoal and ink drawings reminiscent of illustrations by both the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) and the Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger. Like these European artists' meticulous renderings of human physiology, Hiroshi's sketchings stress the human body as mechanistic in its complexity.

Tsukamoto's accentuation of the body's mechanics in Vital, then, depicts human physiology as at once cold and sensuous, discretely material and warmly erotic. Extending important conceits that have long dominated his oeuvre, the human and posthuman (or variably biomechanical) entities populating Tsukamoto's vivid technoscapes persistently blur assumed distinctions between the ‘human' and the ‘nohuman'. However, it is our base corporeality, in all of its porous fragility, which remains, for Tsukamoto, the most recurrent site of horror. The reasons for this include not only the body's propensity for undergoing radical biological transformation, but also its locus as the ultimate target for, and last point of resistance against, the circulation of disciplinary power in many late capitalist cultures, including Japan's. The larger implication of Tsukamoto's focus on the human form, then, includes the potential for viewing it as an apparatus for resisting oppressive ideologies through an embracing of the processes of adaptation and change that has always comprised our inexorable organicism. Thus, the primary concern of Tsukamoto's film is nothing less than the very ontology of fear. In this sense, Vital and Marebito might be considered companion pieces. In foregrounding human physicality through an almost clinically orchestrated mise-en-scène, Vital dissects – or at least purposefully agitates – those sickly logics most fundamental, or vital, to our comprehension of the human as always already, and necessarily apart from, the ‘other'. For this reason alone, Tsukamoto Shinya's Vital (like Shimizu Takashi's Marebito) is not only an important contemporary Japanese horror film, but an indispensable contribution to world cinema.

Tsukamoto's Latest, _Haze_ is also very fine, as is Miike's unsettling _Imprint_.

Although there is a tendency to paint east asian horror cinema in general with a wide brush, I caution against such a mistake. As everyone on this forum surely knows, nations like South Korea, Hong Kong, Tailand have their own rich film histories (including diverse approaches to cinematic horror).

Even though not entirely J-Horror, I can't reccomend the anthology film Three... Extremes enough when it comes to the genre. The full version of Dumplings is also reccomended, since it's superior to the pared down version in the film.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure I also believe is better than Pulse.

Although its K-Horror, I'd also direct you towards Ji-woon Kim's A Tale of Two Sisters which is much more quiet and poetic entry into the genre, which I thought was wonderful. I also loved the score.

And Shinya Tsukamoto's entire catalgue, which is completely brilliant from what I've seen. Most of them don't fit neatly into the category of J-Horror. However, it's all some of the best cinema to come out of Japan in the last 16 or so years.

Oh, I'm also wondering about what people hear have heard, if anything, about the anthology film Rampo Noir. I know it was included many times in Midnighteye's top japanese films of 2005, and while I'm not very familiar with Rampo's work, I was a fan of Blind Beast.

I've been watching the 3 extremes series and started with miike's entry which was amazing. Then I watched Cut which I found sort of boring. Had it not been paired up with The Box I might have been more interested, but putting those CGI shots beside the beautiful camera work of miike's entry seemed sacreligious. I haven't watched dumplings yet, but probably will tonight.

A film that I have grown to love is Living Hell by Shugo Fujii.

Ste wrote:Suicide Club was both entertaining and completely bonkers in equal measure.

I've read that TLA put out a re-master that was 16x9, but also that the box set that was supposed to include it still had the old 4:3 letterbox version. Does anyone have a TLA 16x9 Suicide Club DVD? Is there really such a thing? If it exists, any reliable place to get it?

PS. I understand the r2fr is 16x9, but helas, no English subs.

I got that set, and had the 4x3 problem, and they said they'd send a replacement. They did, and it was 4x3. So.

yoshimori wrote:PS. I understand the r2fr is 16x9, but helas, no English subs.

If it's any help, the Madman R4 release is apparently 16:9 and anamorphic, and it seems the best english friendly version at the moment. It's on my Christmas list so I can't check it as of yet, but this snippet review states:

Digital-Retribution.com wrote:Presented in 1:85 widescreen and enhanced for 16x9 screens, this Eastern Eye release is a step up from previous versions of this title, as we get an anamorphic print. Kudos to Madman there. That said, for some reason the picture is quite soft, though it is clear and mostly free of artifacts. It would seem this print softness stems from the source material, as the various other versions in alternate regions appear to be much the same. English subtitles in an easily readable yellow font are also provided.

Does anyone know of a way to see Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on: The Curse 2? This is the second part of the original straight to video 2000 release, not one of the innumerable sequels, remakes or reboots.