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Despite not being a particular fan of the rape-revenge genre, after watching the amazing Substance, I rushed to watch this director's earlier effort.
Definitely one of the more classier and polished rape-revenge films I've seen, focusing less on the act itself, and more on the juicy, blood spraying revenge. True to it's title, Revenge delivers on the goods, with the great lead skulking around, picking off her attackers one by one, until the fantastic blood soaked climax.
Plenty of stylistic choices here that were also featured in The Substance, and done better there too, just proving that she really honed her craft in her sophomore feature.

This started great, and just kept getting better, and better, until I was left in awe, sitting with the goofiest grin on my face for the final 30 minutes.

Having spent the last year dodging spoilers and averting my gaze whenever it scrolled past on social media was not easy, but I finally managed to catch it on the big screen, in an almost empty theatre.

I loved the rollercoaster of emotions and themes it went through, darting maniacally from intense, tragic drama that had me gripping my arm rest, to over the top comedy and gore. The practical effect were oh so lovely and some of the best I've seen in a LONG time! Those too going from incredibly painful to watch ( Ouch finger nails and teeth), to over the top canon blasts of gore and viscera to the face.

I would have liked to have known more about the company providing the Substance, what their motivations and gain are, but even without that information, this is one the best films I've seen in recent years and a top cinema experience.

I rarely double dip on a cinema trip, but I can already feel myself itching to see this again. I also can't wait until this gets a special release from some boutique blu-ray company stuffed full of extras!

I found this VHS tape on a random search one day and was surprised to see zero information about it online. The artwork is awful and cheap, but it was supposedly a necrophilia themed pink film from 2000 (the 2019 date on this Letterboxd entry is wrong), so I did a blind buy.

Thankfully the artwork is not an accurate representation of this film, and what we do have is a grim, low budget venture about a couple who are driven mad (and horny) by the corpse that is stuffed in a garbage bag, and lives in the closet. The corpse however, is just a figment of their imagination, caused by people that they both killed, separately, in a past life, who also just happen to have the same name. It's very convoluted and confusing at times...

But on the plus side we have a ton of ridiculous sex scenes, like when the corpse s a threesome, with its gross rotten hands coming in from out of frame to grope the wife as she gets fucked by her partner. Or when it's limp hand falls out of the closet as is used as a masturbatory aid.

The film climaxes in some kind of satanic ritual to try and rid the apartment of the evil spirit, which includes some severed penis munching fun.

Necrophilia aside, there's also a ton of comedy scenes in here that had me laughing out loud at times, making this a pretty grand way to spend 75min.

A horror comedy satirising the chaos of black friday, which is pretty tame in comparison to the real thing.
Falling somewhere in between a zombie movie and cosmic horror, Black Friday progresses awkwardly, delivering unfunny jokes and mixing up tone and genre from scene to scene. The practical effects are good for the most part, before climaxing in an epic unconvincing CGI showdown at the end.

A pretty gut wrenching and tragic love story, or lack of, that builds to surreal heights as the discarded house wife’s mental state reaches its limit. 
Noriko Eguchi is absolutely fantastic in the lead role and mesmerising from start to finish.

Mad Max if it were made by a bunch of kids on Super-8.
For its short 18 minute run time, and it's obvious non-existent budget, Doctor Death manages to pack in car chases, explosions, mutants, miniatures, cyborgs and even stop motion.
Oozing with charm and ion, this was exactly what I needed after coming home from a long day.

Mia Wasikowska is the driving force in what otherwise is a bit of an unremarkable affair. The concept is interesting, a bunch of kids are brainwashed into thinking they don't need food anymore and by ridding themselves of eating, they will elevate to a higher state.
They start to grow pale and waste away as they claim to feel great and have more energy than ever, all the while chanting cult like mantras.
Thematically it's right up my alley, but the execution and progression of the story, or lack of, left me wanting more.
The film slowly plods along with not a lot happening except for sick-looking kids saying "I feel great" again, and again.
Bar one scene, which was definitely the highlight, where character claims to have developed psychic powers through her lack of eating, and delivers a fierce monologue on how she could quite literally control the weather and summon disease, and then proceeds to consumes her own vomit. Great stuff!
And of course, Wasikowska plays a charming nut job perfectly.
An interesting enough one-time watch but not one I'll come back to.

Certainly one of the weirdest films I've seen recently.

A failing artist who makes mobiles (of all things) finds success when he develops a relationship with the monstrous hunk of talking flesh living inside his wall.

It's an interesting concept, and the story has a nice development, especially for what little we're given visually. The hole itself is something out of a body-horror flick - it bleeds, secretes and sometimes even bites - but never escalate to silly levels. A kind of cozy body horror film, if you will.

Time Walker has it's fingers in a lot of genre pies, however it never leans into any of them enough to be able to label it a film of that genre.

A mummy is brought back to life and hunts down the crystals that were stolen from its tomb, leaving dead bodies and highly dangerous mold in its path.

The mummy design is cool. Though we only get glimpses of it for the majority of the film, and all of its hunting scenes are told through POV green vision, which gets very repetitive and dull.

When he does attack, the special effects are great! Bloody, sticky green fungussy body horror! But those scenes too are far and few in between.

Time Walker keeps the same mid tone pace throughout the entire movie,
before going completely off the walls in the final act, which is both hilarious as it is a cop out. As things were starting to get interesting we get a "To be continued..." message on screen, which ultimately never happened...

I had a fun time with Black Maiden: Chapter Q so was looking forward to seeing how they tied up all the weird story lines in this sequel.

Unfortunately they answered all questions in the most boring way possible, by literally playing the entire first film again, but this time allowing scenes to go on for a little longer to reveal what really happened.

New footage makes up probably about 15% of this film, and all the "reveal" shots could have easily been added on in a quick montage epilogue to the first film.

Rarely do I feel cheated watching a film, but here I do.

A great cast come together to make a very mediocre horror comedy that isn’t scary nor funny. 
This started off pretty great and I was curious as to where it was going, but it soon starts to drag as the script proves it has little more to say than endless dick jokes.

Sibling rivalry over which adopted daughter gets to stay after the foster parents' financial situation worsens, soon turns into plots to murder, ghostly apparitions, monstrous captees and impending astroid doom.
There is a LOT going on in this film, perhaps even too much for its mere 60 minute run time, but despite being a bit bloated, everything is well executed. The tense scenes are tense, the scary scenes are scary and the funny scenes are funny.
The story concludes in "Black Maiden: Chapter A", which I'll be watching next!

I went out drinking with one of the main actors from this last year, and he said he has still never seen it, now I understand why.
Juvenile Crime has absolutely zero redeeming value and should never have been made.

A young couple stay at an inn where a Zashikiwarashi - a Yōkai that brings good fortune - resides, and after checking out, strange things start to happen...
A lot of common tropes of Japanese ghost films here, but the back story was well fleshed out and the scares never felt cheap, like the jumpy ones we get a lot of in other films of a similar nature.
Nothing mind-blowing but a good enough 40 minutes.

Daisuke Yamouchi's "Terrace House" style reality show horror film.
7 contestants enter the house, get to know each other and talk mindless conversation to fill 60 minutes. Highlights include finding a sex room, a door taped shut and some dead animals outside. That's pretty much it.
The film continues in Part 2, which I'm not particularly looking forward to, though will probably watch it anyway.

This Daisuke Yamanouchi pink horror effort sets itself up as a straight up horror film right from the start, with the "accident property" that was the site of a triple homicide, the ghostly, mangled figure drifting in and out of shots, and the new job overseeing the abandoned hospital.
From there, however, it goes into a straight up pink film that is less concerned out ghosts as it is the babe at the new job. This continues for the majority of the film until loosely tying them both together at the end.
As a pink film, its not bad by any means, it just seems a little lost in what kind of film it wanted to be.
The entire film is also monotonously narrated throughout, taking away what could have been a bit more exciting or scary with some mood music in place instead.
On the plus side, the boss is played by the amazing Manzo Shinra, who is as brilliant as he is utterly repulsive.

SOV teen melodrama wrapped up in a J-horror shell. For the vast majority of it's 60min runtime, we get mostly scenes of school girls in short skirts bullying a fellow classmate, and then the horror finally kicks in for the final 20 minutes.
"Scream Girls" (as it's oddly titled in English) got pretty bleak at times, though it failed to really pack the punch in both it's bullying scenes and the horror scenes. Both stylistically and tonally, it reminded me of Girl Hell 1999 in a few places, but never quite escalated to those heights.

OK this was VERY different from what I was expecting.
A rogue cop gets kicked off the force for cracking some heads and comes back to a regulated town, where the "peace squad" that enforces moral and safety, less protect the citizens as they do beat the living shit out of them.

There was a lot to like here, the cast, led by Yohta Kawase, as well as the ing cast and a few cheeky cameos, were all great! The Demolition Man-like story was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the ludicrousness of it all.
No 3 Sea Shells here, but just as absurd.
The violence, while not as plentiful as the poster and title suggests, was very satisfying, especially the epic finale where the underdogs rise up against the bent higher ups!

Though it's not all good, the violence on display was drenched in cgi blood quirts, which never, ever looks good. And in one truly baffling decision, after getting kicked off the force our main man is sent to America for his rehabilitation?.. He is put on a plane, because a small town committee has the power to exile someone apparently, and in a mental asylum, not that Japan doesn't have those, we get a lengthy sequence of not a lot happening before two American doctors show him his port, no dialogue, signalling it's time to go back to Japan.
It didn't make sense, nor did it add anything to the story, it was just odd..

Still, the good FAR outweigh the bad so definitely check it out if you get the chance!

Fun Christmas horror that jumps in and out of various sub-genres, with plenty of twist and turns along the way, all weaved into a ridiculous story that makes me hate kids even more than I did already.

Fun enough no-brainer disaster movie.

It sets itself up as a kind of found-footage fake documentary, with the story being driven by handy cam footage, fox pop interviews and TV weather reports. But then it also just doesn't and abandons that whole style of film making altogether.

This film feels very American. Every lead character in this has some sort of family turmoil that is fixed by the ing of the tornado, really cementing in those family values that are prevalent in American disaster movies. Not to mention the American flag blowing in the wind against a pile of rubble to top it off. It doesn't matter if we don't have a home, as long as we have each other...

Set in the Toei studios, 3 young aspiring actresses role up to the set of the new slasher flick they're appearing in. As time on the set lengthens, they become unable to tell what is just another take, or if the slasher of Yugami really is trying to kill them.

What an odd little movie. Produced by Toei, naturally, this script can't go 5 minutes without a line drop on how great Toei is, how they can't believe they're in a Toei movie, or how being in Toei studios is a dream come true! Not to mention a Toei sign or poster lurking around every corner!

The trio walk around the studio, checking in on various Tokusatsu and Kaiju sets and fan-girling out, as you would. These scenes, while gimmicky, are pretty charming and a lot of fun.
The Yugami slasher they're filming however, looks awful, and features a giant Funko Pop looking clown that chases them around the studio.
But the constant back and forth of never knowing what is just another take, or what is someone out to kill them, what is the the dead body of their best friend, or what is just a movie prop, is more than enough to fuel this 45 minute horror short.

I went into this thinking I was going to get an Amityville Horror type ghost film, but instead got Vietnam War PTSD and demon cabbage patch kids, and was pleasantly surprised.

I had forgotten how completely and utterly insane this film is! While known mostly as an unofficial entry to the Guinea Pig series, tonally, it feels very far detached from that. I also feel this is far more interesting than what the majority of Guinea Pig had to offer. 

This film is pure nightmarish insanity from start to finish. We never know what is real, what’s an illusion. The nightmarish surgical scenes. The comical cardboard monster man. The constant juxtaposition of relentless screaming to cheesy elevator music, bloody and bandaged kimono to the flower clad wedding dress. Cockroach eating brain fingering blowjobs. What the fuck is even going on here?! Nothing is answered. Do I care? No. This is a masterpiece!

Side note: watching a lady scream bloody murder for 60 minutes straight is extremely distressing, and I’m sure my neighbours hate me.

Finally got around to seeing this after it was given an extended run in Osaka, to a screening of about 10 people.

While I certainly understand the hate this film gets, I also understand the love and promises of being "The scariest film ever".

From start to finish, I did not understand what I was watching, nor from which angle. Skinamarink throws it's viewer into a vortex which makes it hard to decipher which way is up, which way is down, nor what we are even looking at, if anything at all.

The visual and audio fuzz that this is drenched in sent me into a hypnotic state, lulling away at the analogue pops and crackles, seeing (or maybe imagining) certain visuals within the grain, making the whole experience both physically and mentally fascinating.

I had no idea where this film was going, so despite its long time (for what little we're given) I never felt bored. I am glad I saw this in the cinema, because I think if I did watch it at home, I would have been tempted to check my phone every now and again...

I'm not sure if I'll ever watch this again, though I am certainly interested in learning everything about it.

J-Horror takes on Tech-horror.

A movie editor notices a shot that has captured a ghost, which every time gets deleted from the edit, takes vengeance on one of the film's staff .

Even at only 60 minutes, this feels long. The script is dialogue heavy, and is pretty stuffed full of movie making and editing jargon, like they're trying to show off just how much terminology they know.

There is some greatness in here too, notably the special effects, which while far and few in between, shine bright, bloody red. When the spirit does take it's vengeance, it literally slices the face off people in brilliant bloody fashion.

If only there were more of that.

A short film about a man who receives some mysterious seeds in the mail, which after planting, sprouts and start to resemble a blackened human hand. After the man develops a bond with his new "plant", they begin communicating through text.

This short film is pretty charming, creepy and original, and comes and goes without ever really answering any questions nor concluding it's story. It plays out more like a human drama than a horror film, which is what I was suspecting from the cover, but by doing so makes it all the more memorable.

At only 20 minutes long before the credits role, I could have happily continued watching to see what the hand grew in to, and what it made of the made protagonist's new love interest.

Lots of big names and familiar faces in this horror comedy that is neither scary, nor funny.
From all angles, this was just a bit unremarkable from start to finish.
The throat slits were well executed at least.

“The Stare” follows the typical J-horror formula, of protagonists finding out about a curse or urban legend, going to investigate and getting themselves cursed in the process. 

Taking inspiration from Yokai folklore, the characters here are stalked by “Nozokime”, a spirit that lurks within the cracks and crevices, starring and taunting them to insanity. It’s pretty cool. 

The legend itself, the journey investigating, the acting, it’s all good here. Unfortunately the most important thing in the film, the starring eyes, look like absolute garbage. Awfully done CGI that is not scaring any body. This could have so easily been done practically and with better effect, that this just feels cheap and lazy. 

If only those eyes were done better, and this had about 20min chopped off, this would have worked so much better.

Found this on a Japanese streaming site and watched it on a whim.

A woman is seemingly stalked by an unknown presence and everywhere she goes inanimate object around her come to life.
She walks the empty streets of Japan, calls people on her phone for help but they can’t hear her. Her apartment becomes unsafe due to it seemingly coming to life, and she wanders the streets at night, endlessly.

After watching this I found it's just one of many "Minama" films in the series - a series that prides itself on minimalism and for "being a horror film that doesn't shed any blood"

Clearly shot on a very low budget, this works pretty well for what little they had. The black and white filter masks it's low production value, the long static shots add to the feeling of isolation and loneliness which I liked, though occasionally it would switch to a very jarring and wobbly hand held shot, which ruins the mood a bit.

This only works if you can allow yourself to get sucked into her world, and enjoy the subtle horror that’s lurking in each frame, and not get bored by it's repetitiveness. Those looking for big scares may find it a bit lacklustre.

After almost a decade of living in Japan, the whole "idol culture" is still one thing I just cant get my head around. Young girls singing and dancing to a backing track while (mostly) gross old men drool over them.
I've seen it first hand and it can be a grim old sight.

"Oshi, Mankai" (no english title as of yet) highlights both the fun musical side of things, with dance rehearsals and fans having a great time at their shows, as well as the dark side of things - toxic work places and fans working day and night to save up enough money just to buy 20 copies of the same CD, in the hopes that they can draw a lucky ticket which allows them to shake the hand of their favourite idol, for 20 seconds...

The main actress, Noa Eikawa, is fantastic in the lead, and her light and quirky performance makes this pretty damn enjoyable! She's also an AV star that happens to be in an actual idol group, so the casting is great, and she is 100% believable in the role. In her AV career she refers to herself as the "original lolita slut", which is something...

For a pink film, the sex scenes are far and few in between, when the are there, they are well woven into the story so it never feels like you're suddenly taken out to watch people fuck for 10 minutes, unlike some other pink films. They're also pretty damn funny!

Despite my initial reservations on watching this, it was definitely one of more enjoyable subtitling jobs I've had.

I'm far from what you'd call a Rob Zombie fan, nor have I ever really sat down and watched the original TV show, bar a few episodes when I was a kid, but I think this was the first Rob Zombie film I actually enjoyed.

Visually, it's fantastic. The set designs are beautiful, the characters look great, lots of cheesy transitions from scene to scene, and the whole thing is oozing with cheap halloween novelty.

The plot is paper thin, and is stuffed to the brim with filler scenes and cheesy one-liners - some work, some don't. But I had plenty of chuckles throughout, and loved all the side stories and random montages they went on. Tea date with the creature from the black lagoon?! Hell yeah!!

Sherry Moon Zombie still can't act, but with this film's heightened state of nonsense and over-the-top atmosphere, she fits in perfectly and was delightfully sweet throughout.

The ending is so absurdly abrupt, which I kind of love. It breaks all the rules of current cinema, and is more in tune with 1960's sitcoms. Though I do wish we got to see a bit of how the Munsters transitioned into their new lives in Hollywood. Oh well.

I was expecting to hate this, but actually kind of loved it.

Watched on Friday February 21, 2025.

Easily the most unsettling film I watched on the flight!..
I didn’t even rate Anna Kendrick as an actress so she double surprised me here with her directorial debut. 
Extremely unsettling throughout, without ever getting too unnecessarily visceral with the murder scenes. The dating show scene in particular was entertaining as it was terrifying. Solid film all around.

This film is absolutely bonkers, how the hell it got made is beyond me.
It jumps around genres and tones as it pleases, going from silly dance numbers to grotesque torture scenes. Teen horror, social trauma, torture porn and slapstick comedy gags, this has the lot!
Multiple moments caused me to laugh at it's ridiculousness of it all, like the black kid being held captive getting his face painted white, because there can only be one black person, or the queueing up of Earth Wind & Fire's "September" after a bloody hit and run. It's a lot of fun, yet always played with a straight face.
And of course, Juliette Lewis is fantastic, as always.

I liked how they seemed to have come up with this big old plan that was going to save the sister from being murdered, which turned out to be just drive a truck through a barn door right at the last minute.

For the past few years Japan has been pumping out “accident property” films riding off the success of Stigmatized Properties , based off the much better book.

This film, however, turns the genre on it's head and tries something fresh, focusing on the LEAST scary property in Japan - the last ever apartment that no one has died in.

Upon becoming the last ever unstigmatised property in Japan, there’s a mass media frenzy, people turning up at the tenants door to see the "last happy place in Japan" and a nationwide fight to live there.

This film balances social commentaries, horror and comedy, but never leans enough into one to make it the primary genre. It's a bit of a mish mash of things, sometimes providing some great laughs, and other times getting too silly for it's own good, like when a priest revives the dead with the power of fermented soy beans...

Still, definitely a fresh take on the oversaturated genre, that I enjoyed for the most part.

There is something irable about a single man making an entire horror anthology about baths. 
Stories range from home invasions, haunted properties, stalkers and found footage. This thing is stuffed to the brim with baths and bubbles. 

Amongst the stories, some are good, some are pretty bad, all are very cheaply made and amateurish, but still entertain well enough. 
For some reason this leans HEAVILY on stalkers and pervert based stories. For every horror based bath story with a ghost or killer, there’s 2 with someone with a hidden camera, spying on someone bathing or sniffing their pants.

Unfortunately this does one of my most hated horror tropes, relentlessly. And that is before each segment concludes, the protagonist laughs maniacally at the camera. Crazy laughs are hard to pull off without coming across cringe, and unfortunately none of the actors here can quite manage it. It also just shows that the director doesn’t know how to write endings, so just has everyone laugh before cutting away instead.

Judging from the first 30 minutes of this, I thought I was going to love it.
It had a fresh take on an old tale - the family moving into the new house with a troubled past, a home schooled girl with mysterious scars on her body, jars full of dead insects and a mysterious visitor. Lots of intriguing questions to be answered, and I was well up for the ride.

Unfortunately, it just dawdles around from then on, barely answering most of the questions it set up and ditching the horror elements in favour of out-of-place artsy shots, and long drawn out sequences of two teenage girls bonding, and coming up with their own cool little logo..

There are good scenes among the fluff, and the cast all do a pretty good job here - the dad figure is especially hateable. As well as a few good laughs as cake is thrown around mercilessly and whatnot, but it all just feels like style over substance, and that the director just couldn’t decide on which genre he wanted the film to be, nor in which style he wanted to shoot it in. It all just came across a bit messy. 

It tries to bring the horror back for the final epic showdown, but unfortunately, that is ruined by a bunch of terrible CGI blood.

I recently watched the highly absurd "Drum Limit:Hole" and upon looking into the directors other films, turns out that wasn't the only girl-in-a-drum-can film he's made!

Thankfully I watched them in the wrong order because if I had watched this first I probably wouldn't have gone onto the much better, far more entertaining sequel.

Here, a naked girl wakes up in a drum can, this time armed with a flash light and a mobile phone. Instructions on the inside of the can tell her to use these resources to find a way out, or she'll she shipped overseas to a human trafficking ring within 3 hours.

This starts off pretty great, I love a one situation movie, and a feature film with a single character in such a confined place is definitely intriguing.

She calls what numbers she can , and the police for help, but with that 3 hour time limit, homing in on her location is going to be pretty tight! It's genuinely a pretty exciting and well written thriller, for a pink film that is..

She s a video online of herself begging for help, which sparks a series of perverted callers, one of which convinces her that he is a doctor and will guarantee her safety.

Unfortunately this is where the film runs out of steam, as we spend the next 30minutes listening to their conversation about every day life, past experiences, the sexual harassment she experienced, and in lots of detail of course. This goes on until she runs out of breath and we're given the BIG twist at the end! Turns out he wasn't a doctor after all?! Shock.

What is it about Japanese people putting girls in drum cans? Thankfully this is not a Junko Furuta story, but it’s hard not to make the connection.

A girl wakes up naked in a drum can with a hole cut out for a face hole. After a man in a white lab coat walks in, he explains that this is all part of the experiment for medical testing that she signed up, and must endure it for 2 months or else pay a hefty penalty fee for withdrawing. 

Of course, it’s not long before the Dr starts getting creepy and has her fellate a banana as her only source of food. I was thinking it’s only a matter of time before he puts his dick is in that hole, but when he does, through some bizarre stylistic choice, or censorship workaround, this man’s dick is an actual carrot! There’s even some text on screen that says “penis type: carrot”!

After a while the Dr starts farming in various men to get their veggies sucked; yes, all the men in this film have vegetables instead of dicks. Cucumbers, eggplants, asparagus, mushrooms, you name it. After receiving a cocktail of vegetable juice, one customer gets frustrated as the drum can girl evaded his radish cum shot, leading to an altercation and bludgeoning. 

I thought this was going to just be another exploitive trashy pink film, but it was so ridiculous that I actually had a lot of fun with it. Nothing is to be taken seriously here, and the blood spraying across the screen towards the end was a great way to cap off this stupid little film.

Beautiful observation of life in a movie where nothing really happens.
Hirayama wakes up, waters his flowers, shaves and sets off to his job where he cleans toilets throughout Tokyo. This cycle repeats throughout the movie, only ever breaking the loop to interact with the various people that come into his life for a fleeting moment, only to then return to said cycle once they leave.

Woke up, logged online, saw that a new Joe Meredith flick had dropped and watched it immediately!

Joe does the lo-fi dystopian sci-fi horror genre right, and much like the previous entries in the series, here too we are treated to monstrous mutations, fuzzy analogue aesthetics and a suffocatingly lonely and depressing story via voiceover.

Less action scenes here than previous entries, which is a shame on one side. When that fly creature reanimated I was hoping to see it in action!
But without said scenes or a big flashy ending, it adds to the ominous tone and the feeling that this nightmare reality is just going to go on, and on, and on...

Amongst the horror Joe always manages to capture the beauty in what has survived - the flowers blooming, caterpillars crawling, the sound of crickets chirping. It's good to know that there's still hope for some creatures, for now...

Free to watch over on YouTube!

I absolutely loved this! The special effects, of course being the selling point, were utterly sickening, and I was genuinely amazed at the gross, gloopy heights that they went to. Not to mention, some of the most imaginative kills I’ve seen in a long time! Speaking of which, no one is safe in this movie! Introduce a main character? Fuck ‘em. They’re blobbed!
And not just killed, utterly annihilated!
The gloopy cherry on top being that shitty little kid that I’m sure everyone wanted to punch throughout watching this. 

There’s so much fun to be has elsewhere too. The one liners - “ribbed,” endless explosions, riding a motorcycle through a sewer system, the anti-authoritarian themes throughout.
This is like one big joy ride of “fuck yeah” moments.

This started off great! The concept of a newly deceased couple, their spirits bound to the house that they once owned, now forced to watch on as the new tenant brings home and murders multiple women, is fantastic! 
Oh how I wish it had carried on in that same horrific, distressing vein. 
Instead, a gender flipped Momotaro ( here, Momo), recruits an “all star” cast of ghosts and spirits from various myths and urban legends to fight said serial killer, and it all just gets a bit messy, silly and most unfortunately, boring.
I completely lost interest when Kokkuri-san , portrayed as a person hiding under the table, sticks her hand out from underneath to talk to other characters like Addams Family’s Thing, all the while the serial killer dances around the room in his tighty whities to some silly pop music. 
Such a shame since the first half was so great!…

This was a blast! Right from the very beginning this film pulls you in with the after math of an occult ritual, the corpses of 6 teenagers, and telekinetic mad man who can shoot lasers from his fingers!

From there, however, it goes into teenage rom-com with high school hazing initiations, which was less exciting, but still a fun watch nonetheless. The two stories meet when the hazing candidate has to spend a night in the mausoleum, where there telekinetic mad man is resting.

This film is relatively restrained throughout, up until the last 20 minutes where it then goes off the fucking walls, as multiple, maggot ridden, corpses reanimate to attack the guests of the mausoleum! It is pure nightmare fuel and a hell of a fun ending in contrast to the film's middle ground where not much really happens.

That aside, the film just looks very nice and is pretty pleasing to watch with it's beautiful sets and 80s nostalgia, not to mention Meg Tilly in the lead role!

I shamefully jumped straight forward to this version without having seen the 1950's original, nor the much praised 1970's version with Donald Sutherland, but that one is next on my list.

Despite being a classic in the horror genre and having multiple adaptions spanning multiple decades, I only had a vague idea of the basic premise and was able to go in mostly blind to this.

For a film less than 90 minutes I was surprised at how slow it moves in the first half, not that I wasn't enjoying the build but I just wanted that hit of Sci-Fi body horror and was waiting for goods!

Thankfully they come in full gooey, wormy form as the residents get taken over by the alien species that mimic the hosts, or sometimes getting interrupted half-way through the take over, that leaves them as a half human half alien bastardised version of the host a la Ripley's "KILL ME" clone in Alien Resurrection, or Bennings in John Carpenter's The Thing.
I think they were supposed to be creeping roots from from kind of alien plant life, but they're so worm like that I was having flashbacks to Mermaid in a Manhole - in other words they're fucking gross and had me squirming in my chair.

All utterly amazing and sickening practical effects, then one ridiculously silly green screen shot that'll have you laughing away your queasiness.

Pretty fun comedy horror that balances well the respective genres, without either one going too over the top.
The gore, while not in abundance, is pretty well done with some nice prosthetics.
The Satan worshiping orgy with the masks and edgy music was a tad overkill, but a good, casual watch nonetheless.

Tragically based off real events, this retells the story of 2 children, 1 & 3 years old, who are left to look after themselves after their mother abandons them.

This is about as upsetting on every level as you can possibly get.
I was already getting towards my limit at the kids having to eat mouldy old rice and clean up after themselves because the toilet had literally been taped shut, but I lost it when one of them stopped moving...

This gets bad, and it just keeps getting worse and worse until the credits role, and this is based off the incident dubbed "The Osaka Two Children Starved to Death Incident," so you know there's no happy ending here.

For reasons both good and bad, this doesn't follow the events of the real case so strictly, good because this would have been a whole lot more graphic. Trust me, you don't want to look up the details. And bad because the scenes that were added in add a level of unnecessary exploitation to the mix. The fictional scenes did work very well within the film, but I just wonder why they chose to go down that route in favour or authenticity.

Doing some digging, it's crazy how many times I've walked past the apartment that this case happened in, and not surprised that it's still on the market 25 years later after the incident.

Do a double bill with Writhing Tongue to really ruin your day.

Watched on Sunday January 12, 2025.

A man has a baby in a trash back which he pokes at every now and again with various tools, walking towards and away from the static camera while giving his best "crazy person" laugh for 40 minutes.

Text on screen gives some back story and is some serious teenager "edgelord" type stuff.
The text, the silly constant laughing and the garish filters over the footage all make this a pretty annoying watch, along with it just being a boring static camera shot for the majority of its 40min runtime.