Tag: Japanese Cinema
Today I want to talk about a little film called Avatar. No, not the bloated CGI-laden thinly-veiled sci-fi retelling of Disney’s Pocahontas directed by James Cameron Avatar, I’m talking about the 2011 J-Horror movie directed by Atsushi Wada. Sure, it’s the only Japanese horror film with the title but unfortunately, the general headspace for most
Biotherapy is a Japanese 1986 sci-fi horror that’s aptly described as a slasher merged into a splatter creature feature. The short movie was released as a project from the limited career of director Akihiro Kashima and it dismays me how we never had the opportunity for more of such fun productions – the splatterpunk scene
In this short article, I want to write something about Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997). Yet, I do not want to present a common review, but I want to offer a somewhat more poetic piece on the rather scandalous truth of Kiyoshi’s mystery-horror masterpiece. Cure follows Detective Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho) as he is tasked to
Susumu Nokoshi once worked for a top foreign financial company. He is now a 34-year-old homeless man, usually found around a park in Shinjuku. He then meets medical school student Manabu Ito, who is looking for volunteers to undergo a surgical procedure known as trepanation. The surgery involves drilling a hole in the skull. Susumu
It is safe to say that the global coronavirus pandemic has drastically changed our world and the way we both operate and interact within it. Nowhere has this been more overwhelmingly true than in the film industry. What started with horror fans celebrating their favorite on-brand pandemic themed features has slowly devolved into a mired
Pinku Eiga, the taboo territory for many enthusiasts of Japanese Cinema. What exactly is it? Are these pictures merely exploitation flicks? Where to begin with the genre? Let’s explore the intricacies of steamy tales straight from Japan together with Jasper Sharp, a film historian and the author of “Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History
One of the many perks of Blu-Ray re-releases is the granted ability to revisit a film that you otherwise might not have, or in some cases, the chance to check off a much-anticipated first-time-watch from your bucket list. When it comes to Meatball Machine, I fall into the former. In fact, if memory serves me
In 2017, a little movie from Japan called One Cut of the Dead arrived on the scene and took everyone by surprise. Being a micro-budget movie that was only made as a conclusion to an acting workshop, it received a mere week of theatrical run initially, but reviews were rave, and positive word-of-mouth spread quickly.
The Japanese horror game franchise Forbidden Siren (Siren), created by Keiichiro Toyama (also the creator of the first Silent Hill game and Gravity Rush) was created in 2004 and is made of three games (1 and 2 on PS2, a reboot for PS3), but its success led to side stories and eventually a huge extended
The popularity of Ring increased exponentially in 1998 with the Hideo Nakata movie,but it was not the first movie version of Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel. That honour belongs to the feature length drama from 1995, widely known as Ring Kanzenban. Ring (‘Accident, or unnatural death? A young girl’s hatred that steals four lives’) premiered on