ORBzine - Asian Horror 2007 Movie Reviews
Battle Royale 2
The survivors of the original film are now freedom fighters,
out to topple the oppressive government that condemned them to the Death Game.
Unfortunately, the government has discovered the rebels' hideout on a remote island.
Instead of fighting each other,
the next batch of school-children are used as the The Dirty Dozen.
They stage a beach landing that resembles Saving Private Ryan,
then fight their way into the ruins.
Sort of like how the SEALs did in The Rock.
Dragon Wars AKA D-War
A young television journalist (Jason Behr -
Roswell
) and his cameraman (Craig Robinson -
Hot Tub Time Machine
) investigate when a mysterious scar-faced man is up to no good.
Strangely for an American movie, the monsters are oriental dragons and the caucasian characters are reincarnations of Korean heroes. In fact this was produced in South Korea, which accounts not only for the Asian look to the production design but also for the high quality of the CGI SPFX, especially when one considers that the film was made on a modest budget several years ago.
The Evil Overlord's forces, looking like the Gungan Army in Star Wars: Phantom Menace , march into the centre of Los Angeles and take on the US Army's M1 Abrams main battle tanks.
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)
This is Internationally feted as a ground-breaking Iranian horror film.
Unfortunately, it may be ground-breaking in Iran (the English-speaking audience
would not know because we get to see so few Iranian films)
but it seems rather old-fashioned.
And not merely because of the fact it is in black and white.
The title character is a vampire who looks like a young woman. At night she prowls the streets of Bad City, an oil town in Iran. With her wearing of the traditional female headdress, and her targeting of hedonists like junkies and alkies, she seems more like an Islamic traditionalist than a feminist icon. This has more in common with medieval morality plays than with modern, intellectually-challenging films.
The Mimic (2017)
This is technically not J-Horror because it is a Korean film.
However, it has more in common with that subgenre than with American efforts.
The protagonist is a woman who is emotionally damaged thanks to the disappearance of her son five years previously. She and her family move to her husband's home-town. However, this merely brings them a whole new set of problems.
Their new house is beside the woods which contain a creepy cave. A supernatural entity that lives in the cave can mimic human voices and lure its victims inside. There is also a creepy little girl, which gives this movie shades of Dark Water . Finally, the monster's avatar can appear in mirrors. This is such a classic trope that it is not really worth discussing.
Oldboy (2003)
This is a wonderful example of Asian cinema, made in South Korea.
An average man is kidnapped and imprisoned in an apartment for a reason nobody will tell him.
While locked in the apartment he has nothing to do except watch TV,
so he trains himself to fight.
When he gets out, fifteen years later, he goes after whoever was behind his abduction.
There is a romance subplot as he falls for a young waitress. There are some great fights, and a twisted ending.
Parasite (2019)
This is the much-feted Korean movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020.
In reality it is about as original as La La Land - perhaps not even as much.
Basically, this is Treehouse of Horror stuff. The simpsons are poor, and live in a basement in a slum. Bart gets a job at the home of the rich Flanders family. He soon gets Lisa and the others jobs as servants too, replacing the existing staff members. Then, when the Flanders family is out of town, the Simpsons party. Of course, things go badly wrong.
The director ( ) has made a series of films that re-interpreted their genres. Oldboy (2003) is a revenge thiller, The Host (2005) is a monster movie, Thirst (2007) is a vampire film, and Train to Busan (2017) is a zombie movie. The reason that none of these was deemed worthy of an Academy Award seems to be that they were all genre-based films. In contrast, Parasite is a very basic film.
The Piper (2015)
This is a Korean movie, set in the aftermath of the war in the 1950s.
A man and his son travel to a remote village in search of work.
The village has been overrun by a plague of rats,
and the man – a piper – has a plan to get rid of them.
Of course, when the piper makes good on his offer the villagers do not want to pay him. They have a deep dark secret - the plague of rats seems to be a divine punishment for their collective sin. But when they turn on the piper they try to justify their actions, first by calling him a thief and con-man, then by accusing him of spying for the Commies. Evidently Cold War paranoia was a big thing in a country which was recovering from an invasion by Red China.
The setting may be nearly post-apocalyptic, but there is a strong undercurrent of eastern mysticism. The villagers look to their shaman for advice, and accept her prophesies as truth. This does not bode well for them when they get a prophesy of death and destruction.
This may be the Asian version of a well-known European fairy-tale. However, it is a refreshing change from the usual J-Horror ghost story.
Thirst
This is a much-vaunted Vampire movie from Korea.
A Priest volunteers to work in a clinic that treats patients who have E.V.,
presumably some form of Ebola.
He gets an experimental treatment there, as well as a blood transfusion.
Strangely, neither the Ebola not the experiment are the source of his later Vampirism
- it is a blood transfusion, apparently from an anonymous but civic-minded vamp.
Once out of the clinic, the vampire priest must combine his religious morality with his new-found bloodlust and heightened physical sensations. He befriends the lonely wife of a cancer patient, and starts an adulterous affair with her. This is the core of the story, with the vampirism merely as part of the backdrop. It is taken from a book by the French novelist Emil Zola, and is apparently the only version of the story to feature any vampires. Much like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies , this is a mainstream story with genre aspects added.
The problem seems to be the beginning of the film, which is slow-moving and concentrates on introducing the protagonist before he becomes a vampire. But since the story is about the affair, not the vampirism, this is not really relevant.
Grudge Franchise
Ju-On
This is the Japanese original that was re-made as the American film
The Grudge
. It seems that the US version was stretched over two films, with a much bigger budget.
It has a lower budget (although it shows good production values),
and effectively creates suspense.
Basically, the film is about a haunted house. There are several story threads that each take place at a different time over a period of several years. Anyone who enters the house is affected by a curse - they are haunted by the ghosts of a woman and a young boy. Not only do the victims of the curse suffer an unnatural fate, but the curse can actually infect people they come in contact with!
The Grudge (2004)
This is an American re-make of the J-Horror classic
Ju-On
. Because it features a uniquely Japanese ghost, Producer
Sam Raimi
left it in the original setting of a Tokyo suburb.
The big change is that it is in the English language,
and the main characters are American ex-pats living in Japan.
The story starts with an American man (Bill Pullman - Independence Day ) in Tokyo. Of course, this being a horror movie it all ends badly.
Next the story goes to the house of an old ex-pat woman ( Grace Zabriskie ). A young Japanese woman looks after her. Of course, this being a horror movie it all ends badly.
Finally we meet the main protagonist and Final Girl, Karen ( Sarah Michelle Gellar ). This was Gellar's first big job after Buffy the Vampire Slayer , and not exactly the best way to re-invent herself after such a career-defining role. In contrast, her co-worker Eliza Dushku only appeared in Wrong Turn (2002) because of assurances the monsters were human and not supernatural.
Karen's boss (Ted Raimi - Xena: Warrior Princess ) gives her an easy job. All she has to do is look after an old lady whose carer has mysteriously failed to turn up for work. And guess whose house it is.
The original film had a non-sequential structure. This version is a lot more linear, but includes a flashback to when Zabriskie moved into the house. She was accompanied by her daughter ( Kadee Strickland ), her son (William Maprother - Lost ) and his wife ( Clea Duvall ). Of course, this being a horror movie it all ends badly.
Another flashback, courtesy of Karen's investigations, we discover how Pullman fitted into the whole storyline. Yes, this is put together like a novel. It would be a nice touch if this was an original all-American production, but such things are standard in Japanese movies so we must hold them to a higher standard.
Karen's boyfriend (Jason Behr - Roswell ) goes looking for her, so she must go and rescue him. Yes, this otherwise superfluous character has a purpose after all.
The Grudge 2 (2006)
This is a sequel to the American movie
The Grudge (2004)
, not a re-make of the J-Horror classic
Ju-On 2
.
Karen ( Sarah Michelle Gellar ) was doomed by the curse from the first film. Luckily she has a sister ( Amber Tamblyn ) who takes over her duties as the Final Girl.
The story is told out of sequence. Scenes of the sister investigating the house are intercut with three school-girls messing around. One of them ( Arielle Kebbel ) falls victim to a cruel prank.
Finally, this is intercut with scenes of strange goings-on in an apartment in Chicago.
Ring Franchise
Ringu 0
This is set in the 1960s, in a small theatre in Japan.
Sadako is both the virgin protagonist and the monster!
All in all, this is actually a disappointing prequel.
Sadako Vs Kayako
This is basically
Ringu/The Ring
versus
Ju-on/The Grudge
. Counting the US remakes this was the twelfth movie in each of the series,
and it is certainly not the best.
We should take this as proof that twelve is too many movies for a series,
that double digits is a bad idea
and that the optimum number of films in a trilogy is three.
In the old days, Sadako gave you seven days. Now she has shortened it to forty-eight hours. Well, since the Internet runs in dog years it is only to be expected that digital monsters are up to seven times faster than analogue ones. Also, her movie-within-a-movie has been changed. The old one was a classic piece of arthouse film, while the new one is just her walking through a doorway.
Since nobody has VCRs any more, the chances of someone watching the cursed tape are slim. However, not impossible. As always, some college girls end up being cursed.
The changes have dumbed this down from a full-on horror towards the more ratings-friendly PG13-style movie that is churned out these days. Sadako does not do her classic appearance. Instead she merely causes the victim to comit suicide. Likewise, The Grudge does not have any creativity in its kills. Instead it will just break your neck. No imagination, so real suspense.
The Ring Two (2005)
This is a sequel to
The Ring (2003)
, the American remake of the J-Horror classic
Ringu
. It was written by
Ehren Kruger
, who penned the 2003 movie, but is directed by
Hideo Nakata
. Unfortunately it is a waste of potential.
A college Frat boy (Ryan Merriman - Jurassic Games ) gets a girl named Emily ( Emily VanCamp ) to watch a copy of the tape. Yes, somehow the tape is still in circulation. Naturally, it all ends badly.
Rachel ( Naomi Watts ) has quit the big city, and taken a job at a small town newspaper. By incredible coincidence, her new area is the same place that the Frat boy lived in. She gets dragged into the investigation.
Our heroine gets some reluctant assistance from her cow-orker Max (Simon Baker - Land Of The Dead ). The boy is taken into custody by a suspicious paediatrician, Doctor Temple ( Elizabeth Perkins ).
The reporter continues her investigations into Samarra's origins, in the hope that she will uncover a cure. A friendly realtor (Gary Cole - American Gothic ) points her in the right direction. Eventually she locates Samarra's birth-mother Evelyn ( Sissy Spacek ), and we get some exposition along with flashbacks of the younger Evelyn ( Mary Elizabeth Winstead ).
The climax is not a massive battle of good against evil. Instead it focuses more on the mother's love for her child. Shades of another J-Horror film, Dark Water .
Rings (2016)
The story starts on a passenger jet plane, flying over Seattle.
This is an attempt to make the movie look bigger
and more impressive than the previous episodes,
but it fails quite badly on this account.
The original Japanese film maintained suspense until the end,
when the audience finally got to see the true nature of the monsterous entity.
However, this effort ruins the whole film
by messing up the big scare and putting it in the pre-credits sequence!
A couple of years later, a copy of the VHS tape falls into the hands of Johnny Galecki ( I Know What You Did Last Summer ). Much like his character in Big Bang Theory he is a lecturer at a university. He sets up a team of college students to investigate the tape. His reasoning seems solid, but he makes classic mistakes like converting it from analogue to a digital format. Of course, it all goes wrong.
The Final Girl finds herself chosen to follow clues that Samarra set for her. Vince D'onofrio ( Men In Black ) pops up to help the investigation. They discover Samarra's origin story - apparently she was adopted. In the original story, Ringu , the video girl was Sadako who inherited her powers from her father - a sea-goblin. Remember, play with brine, goblins be thine. This film has a different, nonsensical origin.
There are no real surprises in this film. Despite the film-makers' best efforts there are no good shocks, scares or suspense. Some scenes are reminiscent of a far better film, Don't Breathe , which has no place in the same universe as Sadako, spawn of a sea-goblin.
21st Century Oz-ploitation
100 Bloody Acres (2012)
The story concerns a pair of brothers who live on a remote farm in Australia.
Their family business is manufacture and sale of organic fertiliser.
They started by collecting road-kill,
and then by taking human corpses killed in road traffic accidents.
Of course, it is only a matter of time before they target living humans.
A trio of tweenagers hitch a lift with one of the brothers. They discover what he is up to, and things spiral out of control. There is no whodunnit element, and no hockey-mask to cover the killers' faces. Instead there is more of a torture-porn element as the victims are tied up and try to escape before they get mulched.
Australia's home-grown film industry seems trapped in the 1970s. Ironic, since that was the decade that it was kick-started by Picnic at Hanging Rock . These days their main product is the crime thriller, while supernatural horror is extremely rare. This movie adds an element of very dark humour to the mix. For example, the police sergeant who pops up is played by John Jarratt, best known for playing a more serious serial killer in Wolf Creek .
Better Watch Out (2016)
This is set in the USA, but filmed in Australia.
This explains the film-makers' ability to out-do American genre expectations
For example, this is not set in a remote
Cabin in the Woods
but in nice comfy middle-class suburbia.
And never has the suburbs looked so bleak and isolated.
Patrick Warburton ( The Tick ) and Virgina Madsen go to an Xmas party, and leave a babysitter in charge of their young son. Unfortunately the babysitter finds herself besieged by armed intruders.
This might be called a more grown-up version of Home Alone . However, the leader of the villains is a criminal mastermind who deserves a place in the pantheon of horror movie villains. He is far scarier than the generic Freddy and Jason clones who proliferate the genre.
Black Water (2007)
A pregnant woman goes on a road trip with her boyfriend and her sister.
They visit a crocodile farm, and then take a fishing trip on the big river.
Predictably things take a turn for the worse,
and they end up trapped in a tree by a man-eating salt-water crocodile.
It is a relief to see something that is not about the usual five archetypal teenagers. The dynamic is a lot different from what we are used to. Each character has their own ideas on how to proceed, but they need to convince the others on the merits of their plan.
The crocodile has an unusual feeding pattern, and chooses to menace the humans rather than just feed or move on. All standard stuff in a suspense film like this, where jeopardy must be ever-present.
Crawl
A middle-aged Croatian hitman arrives in a remote town in Australia.
He does his job, gets paid ... and inexplicably goes on a kill-crazy rampage.
He targets a waitress,
taking out several other people into the bargain.
All in all, this is not a morality tale.
As slasher films go, this is typically Australian. It lacks the Hollywood trappings (hockey mask, chainsaw) and instead is more like an amped-up crime thriller.
Horseman, The
This is an Australian rape-and-revenge film.
A junkie slut overdoses, and the cops tell her dad all the gory details.
Then he discovers she was a porn-star,
so he decides to murder everyone who had sex with her.
This is quite a list!
For the sake of moral ambiguity, in the third act of the film he runs into some real bad guys. Yes, it was not porn or sex that killed her, it was the drugs. So the real villain is a drug-dealer, with a gang of thugs and a penchant for making snuff movies.
Inhuman Resources (AKA Redd Inc)
A man is convicted of being a serial killer,
and sentanced to a mental hospital.
He is experimented on,
but the hospital mysteriously burns down ...
Six months later, the witnesses who testified against him are abducted and forced to live out office-themed Torture porn. The man wants them to prove his innocence. For every minor indiscretion, he cuts a scar into their forehead with his hook-hand. On the fifth strike, he cuts it across their throat!
Killing Ground (2016)
Some Australian tweenagers go for a day at the beach.
They discover an abandoned tent, like in
Long Weekend
.
Eventually we discover that the local thugs had something to do with this. It looks like the tweenagers will solve the mystery the hard way.
Loved Ones, The
This is an Australian effort, best described as
Carrie
meets
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. Yes, an outcast girl wants to be Prom Queen
so she and her crazy dad kidnap and torture the Prom King (Xavier Samuel -
Road Train
).
Rabbit (2017)
A young woman gets a psychic premonition that her twin sister is in lethal jeopardy,
so she takes the next plane and comes to the rescue.
If this sounds familiar, that is because
Natalie Dormer
did the same thing a few years previously.
Of course, the Dormer film was about an English girl in Japan
while this one is about an Australian in her own country,
so it is a bit less ambitious in its scope.
The Final Girl goes on a road trip with her sister's BF and the police officer assigned to the case, who has taken time off from his day job in order to help. They follow the trail to a caravan park, where the inhabitants are so creepy they would be expelled from Twin Peaks .
Things get creepier still, when the action shifts to a clinic straight out of A Cure For Wellness .
Road Train (AKA Road Kill)
Four Tweenagers (including Xavier Samuel from
The Loved Ones
) are on a camping trip in the Australian outback.
They get run off the road by a Road Train - a massive HGV with multiple cargo containers.
Mysteriously, the HGV waits for them to get on, and then they try to drive it to safety.
But spooky goings-on begin. Craig (Bob Morley -
The 100
) begins to show signs of psychosis ...
The plot seems identical to a George Kennedy film set aboard a mysterious ship. The only updates are that it is set on dry land (for a much lower budget) and the cast are all Tweenagers (to make it a cliched mainstream horror flick). Also, like most Australian efforts the supernatural aspect is played down. Their home market prefers crime stories, and thus their horror efforts like the supernatural underpinning.
Probably the most interesting fact about this film is that Sophie Lowe played Alice in Once Upon A Time in Wonderland , while her co-star Georgina Haig later played Elsa in Once Upon A Time .
Rogue (2007)
An American travel writer (Michael Vartan -
Alias
) goes on a boat tour up a river in the Kokodo National Park,
in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Despite the best efforts of tour guide
Radha Mitchell
, the boat runs aground on an island
and the tourists are picked off one at a time
by a massive twenty-foot salt-water crocodile.
The passengers include John Jarrett ( Wolf Creek ) and Mia Wasikowska . The guide's boyfriend (Sam Worthington - Clash of the Titans (2010) ) also drops by in his own boat. Yes, there are even more Aussie stars-to-be in this film than in the average episode of Neighbours.
The early kill scenes are very lacklustre, with nothing much shown on-screen. This is quite disappointing, even if it means the dodgy CGI is kept to a minimum. However, the director was just saving the good stuff for the second half.
See No Evil
A cop encounters a serial killer - a bald-headed wrestler.
They both end up injured - the cop loses a hand,
and the killer gets a bullet in the brain.
The crippled cop ends up as a prison warder in a teenage detention centre. He is put in charge of a work detail consisting of a photogenic group of teenage delinquents who appear to have been selected to be equally representative of race and gender.
The work detail are sent to clean up an old hotel. Unfortunately, and predictably, the monsterous killer starts to bump them off one at a time.
The most interesting thing about this film is that it was filmed in Queensland, Australia. This is apparently so successful that there is a sequel, directed by up-and-comers the Soska Sisters .
See No Evil 2
The original was filmed in Queensland, Australia.
This sequel, directed by up-and-comers
the Soska Sisters
, has a lot of Canadians in the cast so it may have been shot in North America.
The directors have their Hitchcock moment in the opening credits,
posing as a pair of corpses on autopsy slabs as their own names are on-screen.
After the events of the first film, the body of the serial killer is taken to the morgue. The place is meant to be closed down for the night, but Final Girl Amy Danielle Harris decides to stay and help out rather than go celebrate her birthday. Instead her BFF Tamara ( Katharine Isabelle ) holds the party in the morgue with all their tweenage friends.
The slasher character archetypes from Cabin In The Woods are all represented, with a slight twist. The Scholar (Michael Eklund - Wynonna Earp ) is in a wheelchair, the Athlete (Greyston Holt - Bitten ) is the heroine's pushy brother, and there is even a spare slut ( Chelan Simmons ). What really makes the movie unique is that we actually start to care about some of the characters. They are almost likeable, as opposed to the usual expendable fodder in slasher movies. The kill scenes are also impressive, a more realistic portrayal of violence than in a by-the-books effort.
Tamara decides to have sex in the morgue room, where the killer's body is stored. Unfortunately her performance is loud enough to wake the dead. The others later upbraid her, in what would get a male director accused of slut-shaming. However, the killer is the real slut-shamer, since his mother was an abusive puritan who makes Mama in Carrie look like parent-of-the-year. This plays into the trope of the medieval morality play, where the tweenagers are punished for having pre-marital sex. However, the killer turns out to be equal-opportunities and will kill just about anyone if he gets the chance.
Storm Warning
An Australian man and his young French wife go boating.
But they end up ashore in the Australian equivalent of Deliverance territory.
The main hillbilly is David Lyons ( The Cape ), who manages to be a much scarier villain here than he ever was in Revolution .