NEIGHBOR NO. 13 (2005)

Country: Japan

Genre: Drama

Running Time: 108'

Director: Yasuo Inoue

Cast:

Shun Oguri
Shido Nakamura
Hirofumi Arai
Yumi Yoshimura

GHOUL RATING: 

**(*)  3- 

Story: Juzo is an introverted boy constantly bullied at school. Akai is the leader of the pack which douses Juzo with water and burns him with acid. The scars of these treatments remain. He grows up into a fine looking young man (Shun Oguri), but no one suspects that inside he harbors another self – the one which bears the marks of inhuman acts visited upon him. It is a scarred, ugly and more muscular version of him (Shido Nakamura). This dark doppelganger is bent on vengeance. As it turns out, it is no coincidence that Juzo lives in the same tenement building as his former tormentor. Nor is it pure chance that he starts working for the construction company where Akai (Hirofumi Arai) is still up to his old bullying tricks. Akai's cute wife and a small son do not suspect anything regarding their neighbor from the apartment no. 13...

Review: NEIGHBOR NO. 13 is the kind of a movie that can be hurt by false expectations. It is marketed as a vengeance saga (after all – vengeance sells! Don't we all dream of one kind or another?). The DVD package presents it as an over-stylized action flick: you see two cool dudes, one of them sporting a bloodied samurai sword, and the dark blue wall behind them is splattered with blood. Oh, yeah! The fanboys are drooling already. Below the title, you see the magic words: 'director's cut'! 'Aha', you think, 'so there was some other, censored cut? There must be plenty of gore and nudity to be cut from here!' On the back cover you instantly recognize Takashi Miike scowling from a photo. 'Damn! Miike is in this too? This must be cool beyond words!' If you cannot read Japanese, the rest won't tell you much, since there is no English on this DVD cover, but then you go on the internet and find reviews that mention that it's based on a manga ('Hell yes!') and you also find all the talk about 'brutality', 'gore' and... yeah – 'nudity'! Your hand, with a will of its own, is already in your pockets, counting the cash.

Wait a minute.

First you must be warned of the following: I am not aware of there being any other cut of this film, but if anything *was* cut, it must be mere seconds, since there is not much explicit stuff here to begin with. The most 'shocking' thing you'll see is a close up of a big fat turd. The violence is mostly off-screen, or shot from a distance, while its aftermath –if shown at all- can be seen only in glimpses. Of course, that's a legitimate aesthetic decision – as long as you're aware of it, and do not expect something else. Something more Miike-like. Talking about whom – his cameo is the smallest 'blink-and-miss' cameo you'll ever see in your life: he is onscreen for the whole three seconds. And as for the nudity: no, the cute wife (Yumi Yoshimura) does not bare much more than a single shoulder. The only bare flesh you'll see here belongs to the boyish Shun Oguri: of course, this being an Asian film, you cannot expect full frontal (that's still a big No-no!), but you do get to see almost every other inch of his slim bod. If that's your thing – you've been warned.

OK, now that we've discussed the exploitation parts (or lack thereof), let's talk about art. After deciding that this is neither action nor horror film that the package might lead you to believe, how about drama? Is it a 'revenge saga' along the lines of Chanwook Park's vengeance trilogy? Well, not really. The revenge is utterly uninspired and takes the most predictable route. No ingenious and convoluted plans here. Nor is it emotionally searing in the way that Park's films inevitably are. Admittedly, there is some creepiness involving the bully's kid, but that's about it. (Of course, if you're on a strict diet of recent American fare, then you *will* be shocked by a lot that goes on here, but I assume that readers of this site are well versed in Asian cult cinema, and are therefore not easily shocked.) Our protagonist is reduced to a cipher and his 'struggle' with the double (the two of them fighting in a lonely cabin in the wasteland under gloomy skies) is shown in stylized imagery where visuals from the director's commercials creep in. Unfortunately, none of that makes the drama any deeper or more layered – just prettier, especially in contrast with the drab, claustrophobic environment of the tenement building which takes the bulk of the film.

The greatest fault with NEIGHBOR NO. 13, however, is its 'deliberate' pacing. The story is too simple and the characters too conventional to fill the two hours' running time, and the pace is too often too slow. Our debutant director shows signs of promise, especially in instances where he refuses to go the easy way and provide cheap thrills, but on the other hand, a story like this *requires* something more visceral – either in terms of imagery or emotions. The detached attitude (e.g. over-reliance on long, wide shots, which place the characters and events in the distance) is not the way to go; when mixed with a really uneven, stop-and-go pace (with more stopping than going) and an utterly underwhelming ending, it all boils down to a solid, if overlong exercise in nothing special, although occasional flashes of quirkiness make it more palatable. The patient viewers will certainly find some rewards in this film, but the common viewer might not be predisposed to enjoy a too-simple story unnecessarily complicated and prolonged.

DVD [NTSC, Region 2] :  The fine, but misleading package of the disc is already mentioned above: the DVD cover and the menus lack anything in English, so it may take some wandering around until you find what you want. Animated menus are good (although inappropriate for this particular film: they also try to 'sell' a cool, stylish action film – which this is not!), but of little use to English speaking viewers. When you click on 'SET UP' – all you find is a bunch of Japanese characters. Luckily, once you play the movie, the English translation is excellent and subtitles are readable. The visuals vary a lot, but that seems to be the way it was filmed: the scenes in the apartments are intentionally under lit and lacking detail, while the symbolic, stylized parts (in the cabin) are crisp and top notch. The sound (in 5.1. surround) is excellent, making a particularly good use of the brooding dark ambient score and sound design. There is also an audio commentary here, in which (at least) two Japanese talk and laugh, but there is neither explanation in the menus nor subtitle for it, so this was obviously not meant for the English speaking viewers. The bonus materials are scarce: a theatrical and TV trailer (again, misleadingly presenting the flick as a much weirder and gorier affair than it is) and cast and crew text info (only in Japanese, of course). You also get chapter selection (if that's an extra for you!) – and that's all.

SODOM THE KILLER (2004)

Country : Japan

Genre: Horror / Comedy

Running Time: 104

Producer: Kenzo Horikoshi, etc.

Director: Hiroshi Takahashi

Cast: Takashi Urai, Aki Miyata, Rena Komine, Shoko Nakahara

GHOUL RATING: 

**

2-

Story: Bad things happen when innocent blood is shed. In the early 1700s, Lord Sodom Ichibei is celebrating his wedding day when his bride-to-be suddenly vomits blood on her white gown and dies. Suspecting witchcraft, he kills his bride's two maids, but once he realizes their innocence, he becomes completely insane and kills everyone around him. 300 years later, his descendant goes through the same: one of the innocent victims is reincarnated and poisons all the guests at his wedding, while his bride dies in a similar bloody manner. This transforms Ichiro into the evil and vengeful 'Sodom the killer', a cursed man who becomes blind at the spot (except he can see cats, dogs, trees and flowers). He finds a group of minions and starts a master-plan for the world's destruction.

Review: SODOM THE KILLER seems to be a horror comedy, but it's neither funny nor scary. SODOM THE KILLER seems to be a spoof, but a spoof of what exactly? I don't know. SODOM THE KILLER seems to be intentionally bad, but does that really distinguish it (and make its watching worthwhile) from flicks that turned out bad while striving for the good? That is the key question, and on its answer depends whether you'll find it enjoyable or just plain horrible. The film opens with a relatively straight face: a typical prologue of 'how the curse started'. It becomes slightly suspicious when the bloodshed comes, and you see it shot completely bloodless, and extremely poorly staged. Once you spot the very modern pipes in an 18. century castle you realize that perhaps you're not supposed to take this seriously. OK, so far so good. But, once you see through the real intention, does that make the film any more enjoyable? Well, that's where SODOM THE KILLER lost me. 

I do not deny, some of the jokes are not too bad: for example, an evil master-plan to replace one single bag of real money with counterfeits manages to create a nation-wide inflation and is followed by a starving family massacre of the entire restaurant because they cannot pay for the meal. Also, there are plenty visual jokes which try to make the film's deficiencies into its strengths, like using an obvious dummy instead of a human stand-in for a fight scene. Later on you see a life-sized photograph of an actress glued to the back window of a car in full-speed instead of a stunt double. If that's your idea of humor, you'll laugh yourself senseless. What else do we have here? Toy aero planes instead of real (or at least CGI) ones. Dodgy rear-screen projection in several cases: in one scene, a toy-train in stop-motion is 'derailed' in a fuzzy rear-screen projection while the video-sharp shot actors react exaggeratedly in front of the screen. In another, towards the end, a character abandons the 'car' and runs off the rear-screen projection down the corridor. Numerous such winks and reminders of the medium of cinema and its conventions make this flick a solid inspiration for another of those dry academic essays on post-modern discourse in contemporary film, layers of reality and their appropriation in genre cinema, and the like. Yeah, right. But does THAT make the film any more fun? 

How hard is it to make an intentionally bad film? It's cheap, and does not even pretend that there was anything remotely resembling a budget around. Shot on digital video, it looks cheap and ugly. Its look becomes tiresome pretty soon, just like its humor, or what passes for it. The whole thing leaves a strong impression that perhaps it could be palatable only with a strong dose of alcohol or some stronger brain-addling additive, in which case the silliness might be alchemically turned into entertainment and the time might no longer be a factor. You see, a good spoof should not exceed 85 minutes, whereas this one is at least 20 minutes too long. If you watch this sober, you'll feel almost every one of those minutes taken away from you.

SODOM THE KILLER also presents one of the more blatant cases of false advertising in recent times. The DVD case shows off a dark and gloomy, possibly satanic imagery, and promises that it comes 'from the creator of RINGU'. Uh-uh, I'm creeped out already! I wish they lied about the latter. Sadly, this flick is really written and directed by Hiroshi Takahashi, the genius who wrote the screenplay for the original RINGU - but also the dumb-ass responsible for its underwhelming sequels and even for the despicable American remake-sequel, THE RING 2. Why should a man like him want to be involved with an homage to Ed Wood and Ray Dennis Steckler right now and in this manner is anyone's guess. As it stands now, I think another RINGU is required from him to annul this mediocre (at best) endeavor. 

From the above it's quite obvious that you should not expect a horror film, or anything remotely similar in quality to RINGU. No horrors, no creepiness, not even a trace of sodomy - unless the latter refers to the feelings of those innocent souls who buy or rent this DVD expecting a scary movie and end up being f***ed in the ass by a completely different, dumb creature!

INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW MORGAN, THE DIRECTOR OF ARKHAM SANITARIUM

by Dejan Ognjanovic

 

Here at The Temple of Ghoul I've already published H.P. Lovecraft's ARKHAM SANITARIUM Script Review And Concept Art.

Now that shooting of the film is over, its director Andrew Morgan is subjected to a torturous examination in order for us to decide whether his Lovecraftian anthology is blasphemous or respectful to the Great Old One. The result is the exclusive, illuminating and quite promising interview below.

It's originally published on TWITCH – so you can read it there. Plus, there's embedded a short teaser to give you a better idea of what to expect.

CLIK THE LINK.

Interview about Serbian horror films

 Below you can find the interview I gave to Donato Totaro while I attended Montreal's FANTASIA 2010. The occasion was the program called SUBVERSIVE SERBIA during which I presented a selection of new and old Serbian fantasy and horror films. 

It is a lengthy interview, and it includes talk about general tendencies and close reading of certain aspects of specific films + some talk about Serbia's unfortunate recent history... There are also Donato's sharp insights into some of the films, so it's all pretty worthwhile, if you care to learn more about the cultural background that brought A SERBIAN FILM, among other films – but also to find out about other, not as publicized titles.

You can read it all in the latest issue of the excellent net-magazine OFFSCREEN if you clik the link in the title below:

An Interview with Dejan Ognjanovic ~ a reasoning voice behind Serbian horror ~

           

            Talking about FANTASIA, I also recommend you take a look at the new issue of their magazine, Spectacular optical ! Plenty of great stuff, especially if you're into cult, genre, horror, weird, avant-garde, bizarre, crazy, esoteric filmmaking!

            And, finally FANTASIA has announced some of its highlights for this year's fest, and it promises to be one of the strongest ever! I envy all those who'll be able to go there. It's just the best film festival anywhere... You lucky North American bastards!

MIRRORS (2008)

Director:

Alexandre Aja

Cast:

Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart, Jason Flemyng

GHOUL RATING:

**(*) 3-

Story: A burnt-out ex-cop turned night guard (Kiefer Sutherland) works in a burnt-out shopping centre with strangely preserved mirrors. There is something in them – some force which turns the reflections against their originals. If you’re killed in the mirror, the wounds appear on your own flesh and you die. Ghosts from the past need to be appeased, and Jack Bauer must find the truth about a certain girl before it’s too late for his family...

Review: Alexandre Aja burst onto the horror scene with his furiously ingenious apotheosis of slasher, HIGH TENSION (Haute Tension, 2003). His gloriously gory and gloomily romantic horror debut made him look like a messiah of this genre. Two remakes later, this role becomes highly questionable.

His re-imagining of Craven’s classic THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977), made in 2006, upped the brutality and stylization, but dulled the satiric and intellectual edge of the potent story, in his version reduced to a mere Grand Guignol. In his third horror outing, Aja wrestles with the South Korean spook fest INTO THE MIRROR (Geoul Sokeuro, 2003) directed by Sung-ho Kim. In this case there’s no aura of a classic to be afraid of, but the expectations of horror fans are understandably high. Alas, his MIRRORS have more than a few cracks.

INTO THE MIRROR is your average Korean horror flick: a good concept that’s, eventually, half-baked; a memorable opening scene that is never to be matched by anything later in the film; and a strong social criticism added so that the dull thrills and non-horrific scary scenes at least have SOME kind of ’weight’. There’s too much meandering between the solid opening and a fine closing scene, too many missed opportunities and a completely unnecessary subplot which ultimately reduces the scare factor to zero once you realize the whole thing is a revenge-from-beyond-the-grave aimed at very specific bad guys.

In his version, Aja wisely keeps only the start and finish, together with the essential premise, but changes all the rest, mostly for the better. From the very beginning of the USA version it’s obvious that this won’t be a carbon copy of the Korean: an elegant cut on the neck in the original produced a gentle trickle on a woman’s skin; in the remake, a gush on a man’s neck spouts gushes of blood all over the place. The opening credits are also borrowed from Korea, but made more dynamic and show-offy, and accompanied by the bombastic, impressive score by Javier Navarrete (TESIS, DEVIL’S BACKBONE, PAN’S LABYRINTH...). So much about subtlety.

Essentially, MIRRORS follows the trend of Americanizing the Asian horror films: Eastern subtlety, slow rhythm and suggestiveness are replaced by the faster, more aggressive and spectacular effects – but, at least in this case, such an approach improves the original. It is a more visceral, but also scarier film with a clever use of the elaborate set of the burnt-out department store, shadows, sounds, music and visual effects.

However, the problems begin and end with the lazily written screenplay, with clichés that are neither overcome nor masked well enough: a tortured, pill-popping ex-cop with a trauma and guilty consciousness, his annoyingly mistrustful ex-wife (who still loves him!) and their sugar-sweet kiddies (ugh!) are too stale to swallow, additionally so due to Aja’s still imperfect English which reduces the dialogues to the cut & paste phrases from deja vu films. It doesn’t help that Kiefer Sutherland’s one-note acting is too reminiscent of his 24 role: too often he looks and sounds exactly like Jack Bauer, which makes the would-be scary scenes more laughable. It is more entertaining and eye-pleasing to replace the brightly-lit and dull-white setting of the freshly-reopened department from the Korean version with the blackened ruin in the American version, but even this triumph of set design, with its half-melted mannequins, becomes boring once you see that the characters roaming the film are not much livelier than the said mannequins.

The uninspired script abandons the satire and social criticism of the original, but can’t think of anything better to replace them with than yet another RING-circle: the hero must investigate the past of a certain female ghost; he goes to the rural backwoods to find her family (why are they always in the rural regions?); he discovers the history of abuse against her (mad scientist included!) and must literally wrestle with her embodied spirit in the store’s basement in the end. This whole thing is well directed: Aja knows how to stage an inventive gore set-piece, he’s good with suspense too, but the one-dimensional and unoriginal script prevents him from making a truly scary film. What we’re left with are two memorable scenes (the opening one, and the one with the jaw, seen in the trailers) an improved ending scene, excellent score, camera and effects and... that’s all folks! 

As a remake of an Asian horror MIRRORS stands pretty well above most of the other attempts, and –even without comparisons with the original- it is a perfectly watchable horror flick. The trouble is that it doesn’t bother to extract more visual and connotative potentials from the potent archetypal motifs of mirrors and doppelgangers than it has to. The final score is in accordance with the lowered ambitions. Crack!

KOMA (2004)

Country: China

Genre: Thriller / Horror

Running Time: 85'

Director:

Chi-Leung Law

Cast:

Karena Lam, Angelica Lee, Andy Hui

GHOUL RATING:

**

2

Story: An annoyingly noisy, drunk girl leaves a wedding party only to stumble upon a 'steal the kidney and run' victim. Instead of being cut up for her obnoxious ways, this broad becomes the lead character (her name is Ching). When sober, she's equally irritating, what with her pathetic whining about her illness (kidney failure) and uncontrollable bursts of anger. Then she's stalked by Ling (notice the rhyme there?), the main suspect in the kidney-case, who just happens to be her doctor-boyfriend's one night stand.  But, is Ching stalked by Ling? Perhaps Ling means well? Oh, the suspense! Who will survive and how many kidneys will be left of them?

Review: The publicity for KOMA is based on the fame of its two female 'stars' whose faces are blown over posters and DVD covers as the film's chief draw. Both of them became famous for seeing ghosts: Angelica saw them after THE EYE operation, while Karena was helped (or cursed) by her INNER SENSES. Both of these films were ludicrously overrated: if you believed the hype that surrounded them, you'd bee fooled to expect at least something above average. While decently directed (at least as far as slick visuals pass for good filmmaking these days), they both suffer from unbearably shallow drama, uninvolving characters and infantile, unimaginative 'scares'. In short, they are both dull attempts of Hong Kong and Thailand cinema to jump the bandwagon of Japan's and Korea's serious horror, leaving the obligatory Chinese comic reliefs and action scenes behind them, and embracing 'drama'. Nice ambition – slightly undermined by the lack of any purpose more serious than a pure economic one. The end results are mere aping of the approach mastered by the modern Japanese and Korean horror, but – they were both immensely crowd-pleasing, and therefore commercial.

And now they are joined by KOMA, a new flick by Lawrence Cheng, the perpetrator of INNER NONSENSE. The supernatural paraphernalia is left behind, but what his screenwriter, Susan Chen, has come up with is an even more unimaginative affair. Basically, what you get is a silly and utterly contrived soap opera 'enriched' by even sillier exploitation of the trite urban legend (a laced drink from a stranger in a bar, after which you wake in a tub filled with ice: the opposite wall offers a friendly advice to 'Call the police if you want to live!', the mirror reveals a nasty cut on your side, and you realize you're one kidney short). The above-described situation is responsible for KOMA's single exceptional scene, and you get it in the very first 10 minutes. After that, you're left with characters you'd rather see as victims in some elaborate slasher horror than as people you're supposed to care about and fear for. What's worse, there's not even a decent villain to root for!

 

Let me spoil the movie for you – if a turd can spoiled, that is. In a surprising twist at the end, it is discovered that the villain is – Ling, who's been the main suspect all along. She was also the ONLY suspect! Susan Chen's amateurish script did not even bother to provide a red herring or two so as to create a half-decent whodunit. No, ladies and gentlemen: what you see in the very beginning is what you get in the end (unless you fall asleep by then). Let me tell you how amateurish the script is. In case you don't get the nuanced relationships between these people, you're helped by the dialogues along the lines of (and I quote here): 'I hate you.' 'Why?' 'I'm jealous!' For the more profound psychology, Ching & Ling (who, unconvincingly, become friends for a while) at one instance go to some pseudo-self-help-rebirthing-whatnot group, where they sit on the floor and follow the advice to 'look deep into each other's subconscious'. After approximately 6 seconds of meditation, they manage to see their innermost secrets, and spell them out to the inattentive viewer: Ching is insecure because of her illness, while Ling is lonely because her mommy is in a coma. Somewhere in the background of it all is Ching's boyfriend, a zero character who's barely more than a plot device to have Ching & Ling meet and interrelate. This questionable type oscillates between faithfully protecting his sick girlfriend Ching and violently banging Ling (who's unable to pay her mom's hospital bills but the kind doc is willing to oblige); at least we're treated to his nice demise (involving an unexpected scalpel in the eye), which is more than could be said for the hateful leading ladies.

 

KOMA's inconsistencies, contrivances, strains of logic, suspensions of disbelief, psycho-babble and plot holes would require an essay to enumerate and analyze – but they're not worth the trouble. The despise it has for its audience's intelligence is most obvious in the following exchange. Ching: 'Did the woman have one kidney removed, or two?' The police inspector: 'One. Is there any difference?' Ching: 'With one left she won't die.' The police inspector has a look saying: 'Now is that so? Damn, every day on this job a man learns something new!' And this from an 'inspector' working on the kidney-case for 5 months now! Yes, dear viewer: this is the kind of film that treats you to the most basic Psychology 101, Medicine 101, etc. without having covered its bases in Screenwriting 101. Direction, on the other hand, gives its best to elevate this mess. The pace is OK, excellent cinematography makes the most of the good production values, and there are a couple of decent gore sequences. Nothing innovative, mind you: it's strictly 'been there, done that (much better), got a T-shirt' material. The stalk'n'scare scenes are created through the usual 'subjective camera' moves, and the action is overscored by the over-melodramatic music. Any self-respecting horror fan may expect only the mildest kicks out of this (say, on a dull wet afternoon), but otherwise – stay clean off KOMA. This is soap-horror directed towards the lowest common denominator.

A SERBIAN FILM PHOTOS

 Here are some exclusive behind the scenes photos from the making of the notorious shocker you may have heard of, called A SERBIAN FILM.  

As can be seen, the making of the film was not as grim as the final product appears to be. From my visits to the set I can vouch that the atmosphere was rather usual: the crew people were in their usual professional, but also fun-loving & cheerful attitude.

The photos below show the EFX crew, led by Miroslav Lakobrija; the sculpture and the puppet of the baby from the infamous "baby scene" (aka "newborn porn"); the director Srdjan Spasojevic with a decapitated head and various details from the film's probably most gruesome splatter set-piece – and so on.

If you like the pics, but still haven't seen the film – what are you waiting for?!

--- click on each pic to see it larger ---