Tomie: Replay (2000)

2000
Directed by Fujiro Mitsuishi
Starring Sayaka Yamaguchi, Mai Hosho, and Yosuke Kubozuka

When discussing the true horror franchises that have graced us in the 21st century, it's somewhat of a mystery to me how the Japanese Tomie series never gets brought up.  They feature all manner of death, debauchery and deviant behavior, yet it seems that a lot of people don't even consider them horror movies.  One would think that movies that feature characters repeatedly killing the bejesus out of an attractive girl would be worthy of the "horror" label, but what do I know?  When it comes to stuff that can out-and-out disturb audiences, look no further than some of the better entries in this series.

Yes, folks, we're going to be doing another franchise review.  I inducted the original film into the Registry many moons ago, so here's the abridged version of the Tomie story.  Based on a manga series by Junji Ito, the formula for the story always stays the same - a pretty girl named Tomie shows up an a new location (a high school in the original manga), which is them summarily followed by all of the surrounding males falling in love with her while all of the females become insanely jealous.  Eventually, one of the characters murders Tomie, only for the girl to come back to life and start the chain reaction that invariably leads to a whole lot of murder and chaos that Alfred Hitchcock himself would envy.  For what it's worth, the first film in the series was actually a kind of sequel to the main-arc story in the manga.  This one, however, is a different interpretation based on a different "side" story within the literature, complete with a new director and a new actress playing the title role.  It's the hallmark of the film series, for better or worse - you can always count on new artistic drive and someone either hitting a home run or striking out colosally playing the strangest onryo ghost/demon/siren in the J-horror genre.

That's enough introduction.  On with Tomie: Replay, the second film in the series (and no, I don't count the godawful TV movie Another Face, and I'm not going to review it because I'm not that much of a masochist).

PLOT:  Advance warning about the Tomie films - watching them requires a viewer's full attention.  There's no "I'll watch this one while either half-stoned or eating a meal" potential going on here.  This rings true for THIS film more than any other in the series, as it weaves a lot of variable plotlines together.  It begins with a six-year-old girl being rushed to an ER with a severely bloated stomach.  The directors cut in and pull out a human head - a head belonging, of course, to the freshly rejuvenating Tomie, who soon goes about setting forth with her usual "chain reaction" madness.  The male targets this time are a pair of young college students (one of whom being a patient in the very same hospital), while the main heroine is the daughter of the hospital's director, who has disappeared in the days following the operation.  The action is a bit slower than it was during the original film, but if you give it your FULL attention, it's pretty engrossing stuff.
PLOT RATING:  *** 1/2 out of ****.

CHARACTERS AND ACTORS:  Sayaka Yamaguchi is your star actor, playing the aforementioned hospital director's daughter.  It was a good choice, as she is likable when she has to be and just fierce enough to hold your attention while also not being annoying.  Unfortunately, the two dopes playing the mismatched pair of doomed dudes damn near derail this flick every time they're onscreen - with or without Yamaguchi in tow.  I get that there is supposed to be a yin-yang comparison between them, with one of them being a ladies' man and the other a shy nice guy, but the actors overplay it to the point of parody.  As for Tomie herself, Mai Hosho is a bit disappointing after the angry fire that Miho Kanno displayed in the original film.  She does a decent enough job when it comes to the scenes where she's supposed to be sexy, but falls harder than Jennifer Lawrence (yeah, folks, I think she's overrated) during the more heavy dramatic stuff.
CHARACTERS AND ACTORS RATING: ** out of ****.

COOL FACTOR:  The coolness of Tomie films are all in the surprises and the impact of the horror scenes when they do hit, and Tomie: Replay does indeed have a couple of scenes that will have you glued to the television screen.  The flashback that reveals the fate of the team of doctors who initially preserved Tomie's excised head and the gut-wrenchingly tense bit with Yamaguchi arriving home to surprisingly find her missing father there are the flick's two money scenes, and they are the two scenes that will stick out in your mind after the credits have run.  Folks, that's two more scenes than All About Steve had.
COOL FACTOR: *** 1/2 out of ****.

OVERALL:  To anyone out there who saw the original film, you would be well-advised to pick up a copy of Tomie: Replay.  It's a quality film, but it's a quality film in a very different kind of way from the first movie, in that it is much less concerned about female backbiting and rivalry and much more about the power that the character of Tomie has over the men that she comes across.  I WILL reveal that this movie, for this reporter, was an acquired taste - it took three viewings before I was finally able to honestly say that I "liked" it, but I believe a lot of it had to do with my state of mind.  Upon showing patience and watching it in one sitting front-to-back, it's revealed as a pretty damn badass J-horror entry and a worthy successor to the original.

OVERALL RATING: *** out of ****, and more than enough to tide you over until the "epic trilogy" conclusion that came next in the series.  Foreshadowing alert...

Thriller (TV Series, 1960-62)

OK, kids, we're going to be doing something different this week.  I'd been racking my brain for a film to review and couldn't come up with anything.  Fortunately, the minefield of my DVR listing provided me with some backup inspiration.  Really, folks, what is it about musty black-and-white TV programs from the early days of the medium that lend their stories such a creepy quality?  Is it the atmosphere, the occasionally melodramatic but mostly excellent acting, the soul-destroying violin-based scores or some combination of those traits?  Thriller, one of those very anthology shows from the early '60s, was one of the very best of the lot, and since the fine folks at MeTV have been nice enough to schedule the series in a wee-hours-of-the-morning block with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, modern television's decided lack of excitement has been the Lick Ness Monster's gain. 

It's actually a bit of a surprise to me that the series was far from the commercial juggernaut that I had pictured.  Running for two seasons on NBC from 1960-62, Thriller nonethless managed to crank out 67 episodes during that timeframe.  I really miss the days when bitching actors didn't limit TV seasons to 22-some shows.  It's kind of like how I believed Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories to be this huge, Brobdingnagian-deal when I was a kid only to find out that the only reason it stayed afloat as long as it did was because it was such a huge investment to take on.  Just like that series, however, whatever commercial failings it had, this show was a MAJOR creative success.  While it was initially patterned after Alfred Hitchcock Presents and a fair bit of the episodes are of the "false true crime" variety, it also took its creative license to go way off the beaten path that the Hitchman dare not tread and go completely batshit crazy on occasion.  Of course, it's those latter episodes that are preferred by this reporter.

The series is hosted by Boris Karloff (who also starred in a few episodes), and having seen both this and Mario Bava's Three Faces of Fear, this dude had the uncanny ability to present some of the most out-there material in celluloid history and sound completely dead serious when talking about this stuff.  Make no mistake; he was DEAD serious, as sure as his name was Boris Karloff.  I'm also a huge fan of the overall presentation of the show, with big-time cliffhangers before almost every commercial break followed by that awesome way-cooler-than-Andrew Garfield spiderweb logo design popping up and lulling us out of the action for the break.  And the score...yikes.  I mentioned it earlier, but the people behind the music of this show were the absolute masters at creeping you out.  There are episodes of this series that unnerve me as a battle-hardened 30-year-old nerdy guy (more on those in a bit) due largely to the music contained within.  I can't imagine watching this shit as a kid - this stuff would have scared me more than that godforsaken "Allegash Abductions" segment on Unsolved Mysteries ever did.

Which brings me to the money section of this review - the top episodes.  I haven't quite seen every episode of Thriller, but going through the episode list on Wikipedia, I HAVE paid witness to roughly 90% of them.  Very few of them qualify as clunkers, although a majority of the subpar ones fall into the "crime thirller" category.  Supernatural, gothic horror was this series' bread and butter, and nobody did it better.

Ladies and gentlemen, the top five episodes.  Punch these babies into Youtube if you've got 50 minutes and some sleep to spare.

1.  "Pigeons from Hell" - Arguably the most popular show with the series' fans, and for good reason, because it's frickin' awesome.  Based on a short story by Robert E. Howard (written in 1934, amazingly enough), it concerns two brothers traveling in the deep south and spending a night in a deserted plantation-style manor.  From there, we're treated to a tour-de-force consisting of part ghost story, part voodoo horror tale, and part holy-hell-creepy Deep South imagery visual fest.  If there is ONE thing I can bitch about, it's that the two principal leads (Brandon DeWilde and David Whorf) are a bit on the dry side in the acting department.  EVERYTHING else will stick with you long after the ending credits tick by.  Fantastic.

2.  "The Incredible Doktor Markesen" - The best episode of the series that actually features Karloff in a starring role, and for my money, it has that guy with head-screws beat by a longshot.  Dick York of Bewitched fame arrives at a creepy run-down mansion (noticing a trend?) with his pretty young wife to stay with his uncle (Karloff), only to discover a heaping helping of trouble on the horizon.  It seems that Uncle Markesen is involved in some very morally questionable activities involving the reanimation of dead corpses.  This episode features one of the most unnerving final shots of any horror story I've seen.  We're talking Sleepaway Camp territory here.

3.  "Waxworks" - A choice that is not listed by many fans of the show, but I love it.  Written by Robert Bloch (the author of the novel that Psycho is based on), this is one of the very early examples of the tried-and-true "wax figurines come to life to MURDER" plot that has been done to death since then.  I've got to go with this one as a favorite, because it has a closing swerve worthy of anything Vince Russo could conjure up. 

4.  "The Hungry Glass" - It seems like there wasn't an anthology series in the early '60s that did't feature William Shatner in an episode or two, and it was only a matter of time before he popped up on this one.  The material in this one is top-notch, as Shatner and his new wife purchase a seaside home only to disciver that it has a TERRIBLE SECRET (and capitalizing those words makes me all kinds of happy).  There was an episode of Amazing Stories called "Mirror, Mirror" that also had this episode's theme, with mirror images coming to life and attacking the living, and I've got to go with this version as the preferred choice.

5.  "The Purple Room" - This episode stars some very recognizable names, including Rip Torn, Richard Anderson, and Alan Napier.  They've got a great story to bring to life, as the heir to a big fortune has to spend a night in a creepy house in order to gain his will money.  Any student of the genre is well aware that this will not exactly go off without a hitch.  The ungodly creepy look of the specter in this episode is another one of those things that will take up some permanent residence in your psyche.

JUST missing the top five is "Masquerade," a story full of dry humor as a honeymooning couple (the female played by Samantha Stephens herself Elizabeth Montgomery) stopping at a countryside house for a night's sleep only to find a family led by the incomparable John Carradine who claim to be vampires.  It's also worth noting that the exterior location house is the freakin' BATES MOTEL.

Of course, that's just a sampling of the greatness contained within this series.  The series is available on DVD for all of you supposed normal people, and at sixty-some dollars for 67 hour-long episodes, it's an outstanding value.  Unfortunately, the DVD set doesn't have subtitles, meaning that it excludes me.  Lazy bastards.  Nope, for me, I prefer to watch Thriller the way God intended - on TV, with actual commercial breaks inserted after the music-and-logo transition, flickering away at two in the morning.  Just as sure as his name was Boris Karloff.

Frenzy (1972)

Boring trivia regarding the life and times of the Lick Ness Monster: outside of pro wrestling programming, there is not a single current fictional television show that I actively watch.  For a while, I was really into Castle with Nathan "Should be the new Indiana Jones" Fillion until a particular episode pissed me off to such a degree that I quit watching and have never gone back.  Well, that and the whole "Beckett's mother's murder" story arc was rapidly approaching X-Files levels of banality and unnecessary convolution.  Thus, I've been filling my spare time with old shows, and there is no show that I enjoy watching more currently than MeTV's reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Ahhh, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  The awesome theme music, the black and white format, the suspense stories gloriously free of anything approaching meta, the moral lessons on par with Rod Serling's eyebrows.  There is some truly awesome stuff to be had from that show, and I've been gobbling it up like a meth addict.  It goes without saying that Hitch is an amazing director.  In my humble opinion, he's the best film director ever.  And when I say "in my opinion," I do mean it in the way that Peggy Hill has the opinion that kindling is the best kind of firewood.  It's really more of a known fact.  The only problem with the Hitchcock kick that I've been on lately is that there are admittedly few of his films that qualify as out-and-out horror films.  There's Psycho, of course, one of the two or three best and most seminal horror opuses of all time.  There's also The Birds, but I've never been a particularly big fan of the Tippi Hedron period of his career.  But when it comes to Frenzy, his penultimate film, not only is it a true-blue horror flick, it's also pretty damn good.

PLOT:  This movie has a very simple setup and wastes very little time getting the hell going.  By this point, you should know that this trait has the same effect on yours truly as a tall glass of bourbon with a recovering alcoholic.  A serial killer/rapist is on the loose in London, the common signature being death by garroting with neckties.  See that word "signature" in the last sentence?  I learned it from the book "Serial Killer Files."  Reading pays, people.  Anyway, the movie has what is admittedly a pretty short cast of main characters - the innocent man presumed guilty, a staple in many Hitchcock thrillers, is full on display, as well as two women connected to his life and the determined police chief who relentlessly tracks down the killer.  We are even introduced to the killer fairly early on in the proceedings, a move that can be suicidal, but it is done in a very artful way here that adds to the suspense as we watch this character get involved in the life of our main hero.  Anyone who has seen a serial killer film since is more than familiar with the things contained within this film, but it's hard to imagine anybody doing it better.
PLOT RATING: *** 1/2 out of ****.

CHARACTERS AND ACTORS:  There are some films in the Hitchcock library that definitely rank as some of the truly great "character-to-cast" strokes of genius, the most notable of which being Vertigo's James Stewart-Kim Novak-Barbara Geddes trilogy of awesomeness.  [i]Frenzy[/i] is not quite up to that level, but it's close, with Barry Foster being the man who owns this film as fruit merchant Robert Rusk, the guy responsible for all the death and debauchery floating around London.  Jon Finch is also aces as Dave Blaney, a personal friend of Rusk's and the aforementioned innocent man whom the police believe is guilty.  Blaney has an ex-wife (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) and current girlfriend (Anna Massey) who meet their ends throughout the flick's robust 116 minutes.  Of these principle leads, it's Massey as "Babs" Milligan who draws the Justin Timberlake card when it comes to acting ability.  She's not bad, per se, but she adds very little.  Amazingly enough, several well-known luminaries turned down various roles in this film at one point or another, and we could have just as easily had a cast of Michael Caine, David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren.  However, I prefer what we got, as the relatively low-key cast are able to vanish into the characters and go all stealth-ninja like on your senses.
CHARACTERS AND ACTORS RATING: *** 1/2 out of ****.

COOL FACTOR:  Frenzy was released shortly before horror became a body count game, but that doesn't mean that it can't be cool.  The two main murder sequences in this film really pack an emotional, repulsing punch, and according to this guy, that is just as important as any Tom Savini-created special effects blood geyser can be.  Much like all of Hitchcock's films, the visual style - most of it capturing the vibrant yet simultaneously drab (don't ask how that works) existence of London's Covent Garden district - is a sight to behold.
COOL FACTOR: *** 1/2 out of ****.

OVERALL:  You know, of all the things that have been written about Alfred Hitchcock, the thing that I have always been most amazed at is that, for years, the guy was considered the period equivalent of a bubblegum pop movie director and nothing more.  It wasn't until later analysis that film scholars held the guy up as the true genius that he is, and he deserves every bit of that praise.  He didn't stay in a comfort zone throughout his incredibly long, prolific career - he changed with the times, and that is VERY evident with Frenzy.  The study of serial killers was just starting to be an area of focus for major law enforcement agencies in 1972, and the horror genre itself was starting to reflect this with a marked increase in the violence level.  Hitchcock embraced both things with this film but never lost his artistry.  Whether you're able to get this film by itself or as part of the amazing 14-movie box set that my copy comes from, this is a flick that you can't go wrong with.

OVERALL RATING: *** 1/2 out of ****.  JUST misses out on being there with the Vertigo and Psycho main event one-two punch, but is firmly in the upper midcard tier of Hitchcock films.  Track this one down, kids.

Slaughter High (1986)

1986
Directed by Mark Ezra, Peter Litten and George Dugdale
Starring Caroline Munro, Simon Scuddamore, Carmine Iannaconne and Donna Yeager

Out of the pantheon of slasher flicks released in the wake of the success of Friday the 13th, Slaughter High has got to be one of the most downright STRANGE entries in the entire subgenre.  It's hard to explain.  It hits all of the familiar notes that slashers were known for, boasting gratuitous sex scenes, fake blood geysers and tits aplenty...but it does all this in a way that is just...different.  For starters, the killer.  This dude is completely unlike anything I've ever seen in the countless Friday-Halloween-Nightmare films and their ilk, and I'm not just talking about his appearance.  Yes, he's pretty weird looking.  Kind of like a decrepit Abe Vigora-esque court jester wearing a letterman's jacket.  But it's more the setup and the methodology that this movie truly differentiates itself and veers into true blue "the fuck?" territory.

Is the movie any good?  Unfortunately, not really.  As is often the case with slasher flicks with micro budgets and grand aspirations of hooking up with a whole lot of hardcore genre fans, it shoots big and falls hard.  BUT...it falls hard in a way that is intermittently entertaining as opposed to the "please inject poison cyanide into my eyeballs" kind of way that, say, My Soul to Take is.  I still want my $3 3D deposit back, Craven.

With that, the movie.

PLOT:  One of the tried and true tropes of slasherdom revolves around building up some kind of past evil/heinousness to haunt the present day, and this movie gives us just that in the prologue sequence as we pay witness to a group of perfectly happy and hot teenage friends mocking and ridiculing poor Marty Rantzen.  Before you can say "exposition," a prank goes horribly wrong and Marty is burned beyond repair.  The movie then launches forward several years, where we meet all of the prankers in their adult forms.  They have been invited back to the ol' high school for a reunion, and upon arriving find out that their group is the only attendees.  Slasher fans, guess where we're going from here.  It seems that Marty has made his way to the local hardware and costume stores and has revenge on his mind, and it isn't long before limbs start flying.  Of course, the "nerd looking for retribution" concept had been done in other films and has been done a few times since, but enver in such as WEIRD a way as this movie manages to pull off, moreso in tone than content.  This is a movie where a group of characters are trapped in a building, eventually find some of said characters' corpses, can't leave the building, and it somehow seems even MORE laughable than usual.  I don't know, maybe it's just me.
PLOT RATING:  ** out of ****.

CHARACTERS AND ACTORS:  The main character of sorts is Carol (Caroline Munro), the girl who first lured Marty to the prankfest with the promise of bathroom sex as a teenager.  As an adult, she's a semi-successful actor, and Munro is able to give her a decent amount of chutzpah.  Let's put it this way - she's the only character in this movie that doesn't immediately stand out as future jester fodder, which should say something about the other jokers we have present for this round of slahser flick roll call.  We've got the usual douchy guy, athletic guy, slutty girl, etc., with the added bonus that all of these people were played by English actors using fake American accents.  It shows in the delivery.  Alan Rickman these guys ain't.  This is a slasher that falls victim to the unfortunate "root for the killer to wipe another annoying face off the screen" syndrome, and as such, my complicated math formula needs to dock some star points here.
CHARACTERS AND ACTORS RATING: * out of ****.

COOL FACTOR:  Many slasher films have cool-looking and/or simply cool villains, but this isn't one of them.  Take a good look at the above picture.  Just look.  Then extrapolate that to the idea that his every appearance is accompanied with drippy, dreary music that is supposed to convey endless terror and try not to laugh.  Fortunately, what this movie DOES have is plenty of effective and pretty darn violent murder set pieces.  There's electrocution during coitus, stabbings aplenty and one pretty damn nifty sequence where a girl is scalded horribly in a rigged acid bath.  Think the similar sequence from Halloween II times a thousand.  The kills in this movie are indeed a treat, and enough to lull you out of the state the catatonic state that you'll be stuck in for a majority of the 90-minute running time.
COOL FACTOR: *** out of ****.

OVERALL:  A real mixed bag of a movie, to be sure.  One thing that I couldn't point out above is that the film has a tiny budget and really looks it; some directors are masters of disguising their lack of funding.  This movie's THREE (and yes, three people manned the director's chair for Slaughter High, which is usually a very telling sign that something was amiss during production) directors are not quite as talented.  Of course, ANOTHER thing to point out is that this is a movie that has one of THOSE endings.  Advance warning: the ending of this movie will piss you off, likely a whole lot.  It's not quite up to the "it's only a dream" standard, but it is indeed a total copout that will leave you feel angry and cheated.  Either that or I need to take cheesy '80s body-count flicks less seriously.  Thus, while the flick has its moments of very entertaining ineptness in the form of its crummy camerawork and acting combined with some solid kills, I can only recommend it for a rental.
OVERALL RATING: * 1/2 out of ****.  Would have been a **, but man, that ending. 

Carved 2: The Scissors Massacre (2008)

CARVED 2: THE SCISSORS MASSACRE
2008
Directed by Kotaro Terauchi
Starring Rin Asuka, Yukie Kawamura and Mayuko Iwasa

A few months back I reviewed Carved, the 2007 J-horror semi-classic (now that's a compliment) that gave us a sort of modern retelling of the Slit-Mouthed Woman urban legend.  At the time I ordered the flick off Amazon, I wasn't even aware that it had a sequel, but lo and behold, there is.  The universe works in mysterious ways sometimes, but much to my surprise, Carved 2 does an even better job than the original of taking the admittedly very frail framework of the folktale and making it emotional and resonant.  It's rare when a horror film leaves me sad in a good way.  Normally, sadness in horror equates to the "oh my God, I want to kill myself" kind of sadness.  So 15 Fonzie cool points to the movie in this regard.  If you're in the mood for something that will kick you in the gut, look no further.

PLOT:  The movie's handy-dandy Wikipedia page calls this film a "prequel" to the original movie, but nothing could be further from the truth.  It's more a straight-up redux - an alternate take, if you wiiiillllll (/Dusty Rhodes).  The main character this time around is Mayumi Sawada (Asuka), good-natured 16-year-old girl living a charmed life.  She's on the track team, appears to have a requited crush, and has two supportive older sisters.  All of that comes crashing down when one of said older sister's spiteful ex-boyfriends sneaks into the house and pours sulfuric acid all over her face (believing it was the older sister, natch).  Mayumi returns to school after the tragedy wearing a mask over her mouth, and it isn't long before the proverbial shit hits the fan, as various people who inconvenience/cross Mayumi wind up meeting a horrific end at the hands of the mysterious "red coat woman."  The twists in the movie are quite predictable, but this is one of those movies where predictability isn't such a bad thing.  Setup and payoffs.  Vince Russo could learn a thing or two from this movie.
PLOT RATING:  *** out of ****.

CHARACTERS AND ACTORS:  All three of the sisters in this movie are painted very well, with approximately 713% more development and heart than Rob Zombie could ever hope to muster.  The movie gives us decisions and quirks with all of the characters that make them genuinely memorable, and every actor in the film is more than up to the challenge.  A good portion of the middle section of Carved 2 concerns the family tragedy that stems from the aforementioned acid bath, with the father eventually committing suicide to save the family's debts with life insurance money, making this flick at its heart a story about three sisters dealing with internal (financial burden) and external (a whole heap o' murder) hardships.  Even Seichi - the guy at school whom Mayumi is smitten with - is written to be likable and thoughtful where pretty much any American writer would make the guy an emo douchebag.  Add another 30 Fonzie cool points to the movie here, because these people will stick with you after the movie's startling-in-the-best-way finale.
CHARACTERS AND ACTORS RATING:  A very Dave Meltzer-esque **** out of ****.

COOL FACTOR:  Like the first movie and most J-horror films in general, Carved 2 takes the less is more approach to murder and mayhem.  In fact, most of the actual death scenes take place only in flashback (until the climax, of course), but when these things come, they really hit you in the gut both emotionally and viscerally.  Everyone's milage on this suject might vary, but the LOOK of the Slit-Mouthed Woman is something that I just find infinitely cool, particularly in her "battle gear" this time around.  In another of my oft-repeated statements that are rapidly becoming cliche, see above photo for proof.
COOL FACTOR: *** 1/2 out of ****.

OVERALL:  I've got to hand it to Kotaro Terauchi (the director and also screenwriter) on this one, because he managed to take the original film and do it in an entirely different way that manages to, you know, not suck.  In fact, it's a damn good film - not just by horror standards, but by any standard.  If you're into J-horror in the slightest, I would quantify this as a must-watch, and even if you're not, check it out anyway.  It's hard to find horror movies with a more likale, less douchey group of characters than this one.

OVERALL RATING: *** 1/2 out of ****.  A little familiar at points to those with J-horror experience, but Ric Flair-esque in every other regard.