Reviews

This is awful. Really bad. Makes the original seem good. There is actually more (unconvincing) Octo in this one, but it never does anything interesting. And then they tag on some DAYLIGHT "inspired" disaster movie stuff at the end. Stay away. In Japan the video is known as OCTOPUS IN NEW YORK (it attacks Manhattan by the way, well actually it doesn't).

I love this. Short subject documenting a twist/ surf music demonstration at a fashionable high-society Chicago nightclub (apparantely). When everybody gets into it and even the old Chef comes out of the kitchen twisting, you'll have a big grin on your face. And just watch Joe Cavalier's wild twisting. Brilliant. Available on Johnny Legend's TEENAGE UFO ROCK N ROLL MONSTER SHOW comp.tape (which comes highly recommended).

This actually played for a while about 2 years ago at a theatre here in Tokyo. The English title was CREATURES FROM THE ABYSS and the Japanese title translated as OBJECT X. It was an English language print and watching this late 70's/ early 80's-look trash in a theatre was a nice experience that made me wish I could have experienced 42nd st. in it's heyday. At the time I thought it was a new release and that it copied the British PROTEUS. But if it was made in '94, I guess the opposite is true.

The Japanese Tarzan. Lots of stock footage. Woody Strode in an early role as a gibberish-speaking native chief. It was filmed in L.A. These reasons alone may it worth a watch (historical importance). Just don't expect anything superior to your average Jungle Jim outing.

If you read Rudolph Grey's excellent "nightmare in ecstasy", you will find a passage that refers to Edward D. Wood Jnr. directing Lon Chaney Jr. as a wolfman climbing up the outside of a building for promotional reasons. Is this a previously uncredited entry in the Wood CV?

This great, sadly neglected piece of 70's sleaze is much better than the later, more well-known NEKROMANTIK.For me, the most disturbing scene was not the corpse sex, but the blood draining sequence. This must have turned heads back in '72. Recommended.

Once upon a time you weren't even allowed to play Japanese music on Korean radio and now we get Korean cinematic copycats of the traditional Japanese haunted school story.Humdrum stuff competently made but lacking in excitement or originality.

When i used to live in a crappy room in a crappy flat in London, me and my girlfriend (now my wife) sat down to watch this video (which my mate picked up in a cheap cash exchange shop) one lazy Sunday afternoon. We both really enjoyed this minimal but captivating little tale, but i have no idea why and still find it hard pushed to find a reason to recommend it. Might make a good double-bill with the equally diverting NINJA 3: THE DOMINATION.

"William Snyder" is aka Bruno Mattei, the hack behind Zombie 3 (replacing Fulci), Strike Commando, Shocking Dark, Rats and other celluloid atrocities. As many pointless hours of "entertainment" as this guy has given me, i can't hate him,if just for his sheer audacity. And true to form, Cruel Jaws is the king of bad Jaws xeroxes. Most people will feel severely ripped off, but if (like me) you're a conoisseur of this form of twisted, inverted crap worship, you should have a ball (have some beer as well). My favourite part is the slight alteration of the classic line of dialogue from Jaws, feel your jaw hit the floor as a character actually remarks "We're gonna need a bigger HELICOPTER"!!!

The premise is fantastic.Nurses at a hospital are being murdered and their vaginas are cut out.The culprit is a mad doctor who works at the hospital,he is stitching together his own artificial womb from the bits he has collected.Why? Because he has had a sex change and is planning to conceive a child with his own (male) D.N.A clone, therefore producing a child of pure medical genius to carry on the tradition!!Wow.But,as great as all this is on paper,the end product is very dull due to it's cliche' horror movie trappings.And too many red herrings as well.A real shame.

I was not impressed by the first entry in this series and the second one was only a slight improvement.However this third entry remodels ideas found in both of those into a genuine masterpiece of voyeuristic cinema.Yuji Kitagawa (later a pop star) is a college student who collects people's garbage as a hobby.While sifting through Kanori Kadomatsu's garbage,he falls in love with her and obsessively collects all her throwaways (including her sanitary towels).He even eats her leftover food and drink.All the other characters in the film are equally twisted,including "dust hunter" Tomoroh Taguchi (TETSUO).If you're not easily offended (honestly,it's pretty strong stuff),this vicious slice of anti-social cinema is very very well made and will stay with you for a long time

Having lived in Tokyo for almost two years,i can confirm my suspicions that Sato is one of the most Japanese directors working today.His films could not be made anywhere else by anyone else.His unwavering,logical dissection of a central theme (usually something to do with psychosis and obsession) spiralling towards a nihilistic, doomed (and romantic) ending is in keeping with a dark strain that's been in Japanese culture since it's inception.Xenophobic film watchers who think this is a scary mirror of modern Japanese society should however,not take it so seriously.THE BEDROOM is a very hard film to write about.It has no asides.All the usual cinematic bull**** has been lyposucked away leaving a economic, tight and intense story that goes from A to B swiftly and leaves the imprint of a film behind without actually developing fully.But it doesn't need to.It's like a song that never repeats that riff you like so much enough to fully satisfy you,so you listen again.And (if his whole back catalogue was available in English) i would immediately put on another Sato movie after this.They are as obsessive and addictive as his characters.Unredeeming,anti-social and seriously well-made.One day,some film-maker will push forward Sato as an influence and maybe people will take notice.But until then,his small fan base will watch them in darkened rooms in dark cities trying to replicate a fever dream.

Back in my native South Wales,there used to be a store called Beewise which sold all manner of goodies at affordable prices.Including bottom of the barrel video junk.This is where i picked up a copy (sadly no longer in my possession) of Wu Kuo Jen's NINJA HUNTER starring competent leg fighter Alexander Lo Rei (also in Robert Tai's infamous NINJA FINAL DUEL).It's been a few years since i saw it, but suffice to say it does have ninja warrior bad guys who dissapear mid-fight scene and transform into killer magic carpets that fly through the air towards our hero.And if that doesn't make you want to see it,you've forgotten what cinema is all about.

A soon-to-be-married couple get lost in the woods near Otamo pond.When they stumble across an old house in the woods, we get a feature length flashback about the curse surrounding the house and pond (the usual edo-period tale of murder and revenge).The acting is pretty bad and most of it is boring, but it's kind of interesting for a "gaijin" (foreigner) interested in Japanese horror cinema (like myself).It's surprisingly bloody for the time (compared to European and American cinema), with a vividly colourful pond full of blood and a decapitation by samurai sword.What's also interesting is that it's beautifully photographed, the Japanese (to this day) taking non "respectable" genre films just as seriously as their arthouse dramas and more conventional "quality" cinema.Along the same lines, the Japanese seem to take film restoration seriously.Therefore even this mostly forgotten potboiler was perfectly realised in Widescreen on the videotape i rented from a Tokyo video shop.By the way, the human/cat monster is pretty laughable-just a long haired woman wearing furry gloves!

Movies involving suppressed sexual desires in a convent erupting into violence/rape/bizarre sexual behaviour (y'now,like THE DEVILS) are usually of European origin.But this cracker from Japan is one of the best of it's kind.It has some of the most disturbing yet hauntingly beautiful scenes of blasphemy i've ever seen.It has been screened in English as CONVENT OF THE SACRED BEAST,but i'm not sure how you'd track it down.But if you can,it's well worth seeing.

Sato's extension of his earlier GENUINE RAPE is an incredible transgressive horror movie.A teenage boy sabotages his mother's anti-pregnancy experiments by spiking the test injections with his own endorphin called "Myson".Myson is his own concoction which turns pleasure into pain.The greater the pain,the greater the pleasure.Without wanting to spoil any surprises,i can warn the more weak hearted that there are some shocking scenes (a woman eats her own vagina lips with a knife and fork).But for viewers up to it,it's a fascinating,intelligent dissection of a movie that unwaveringly follows it's own premise no matter where it leads (like prime David Cronenberg for example).And it's a top notch exploitation classic. Sato is a very prolific director who's made countless movies (usually in the areas of sex and violence) since the 80's-but as far as i know,only this and THE BEDROOM are available subtitled in English. Did i mention the Virtual Reality cactus?

There was a wealth of fast-moving gritty exploitation films made during the 60's and 70's in Japan that no-one bothered to translate into English.This is one of them. Tetsuya Watari is a big game hunter who returns to Japan after a hunting trip in Alaska to find his younger sister has killed herself after being raped by a biker gang.It's revenge time. This Nikkatsu action movie is satisfyingly violent and has a great theme tune. I saw it on early evening Japanese tv,my wife translated.

This is actually part 3.Blame Thomas Weisser for his useful but highly innacurate Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia,this is where lots of mistakes like this originate.The first two entries (on Midnight Video) in this series are DEVIL'S EXPERIMENT and FLOWERS OF FLESH AND BLOOD.This entry (which is curiously also called GUINEA PIG 2 in Japan) is from a completely different video company (JHV).You can tell because this is where the series switched from thoughtful and detailed meditations on sadistic behaviour (although you'd have to be an idiot like Charlie Sheen to really think it's snuff) to camp gore comedies like this. Toshihiko Hino (who can be spotted as a torturer in the first ZERO WOMAN-not the one available on Japan Shock video as Zero Woman,that's actually ZERO WOMAN 2) is a dwarf scientist trying to find a cure for his terminally ill girlfriend.He experiments on naked women.Parts are funny,and it's easy to sit through at only 50 minutes.Director Kuramoto is also responsible for the first two SEX BEAST ON CAMPUS sequels

Pochtath is excellent in this incredible,spooky feature with similarities to the more famous MARTIN (made around the same time).The image of him sucking blood from a corpse with a glass straw is unforgettable.It doesn't matter that some of the FX look hokey and the english dubbed version has awkward dialogue,this is one of a kind and should be required viewing for all horror fans.Incidentally,Pochtath can also be spotted briefly in Dario Argento's THE CAT O' NINE TAILS.

Bruce Lee lookalike vehicles often get a lot of stick from fans.While it is true that too many suck,some of them (like this) are truer in flavour to the world of kung fu fantasy than the watered down movies Lee starred in.Why on earth do we need another DVD update of the over-screened ENTER THE DRAGON when someone could be releasing this obscurity. Then more people could enjoy (as i did) the sight of Bruce Li fighting gorillas (men in monkey suits) with glowing red e

When my friend and i first spotted this in a video shop in Wales,we knew we had to see it after seeing the screenshot of Mikl Thor in metal pants on the box cover.For the most part i have to admit it's pretty dull (apart from the drummer Stig's awful fake cockney accent) until the fantastic ending that will leave you speechless.Wanna see Thor in teased hair make-up and metal pants fighting with what appear to be starfish thrown off- screen?this is the movie for you.Silence prevailed in our room for about five minutes after at the sheer awe of it's ineptitude.Forget CITIZEN KANE,this is more like it.An anti classic of sorts.And let's not forget the endless shots of an RV driving at the beginning to pad the whole mess out.