Asian Reviews

SYNOPSIS: Facing goodbyes and graduation, Naomi Nakashima, her childhood friend Satoshi Mochida, and their classmates, are clearing up after their last ever cultural festival, when horror buff class representative Ayumi Shinozaki decides to perform Sachiko Ever After so they will stay friends forever. Instead, they were whisked away to a haunted graduation ceremony for Heavenly Host Elementary School, forced to …

SYNOPSIS: Three American late teens travel to Japan to escape a sad past and have some fun but end up trapped in a house with a demented Japanese host family who plans to offer them to their gods in a sick ancient Japanese ritual.

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: Stories about a man repeating a bloody day running from the Yakuza; a woman’s violent encounter with her mirror image; a woman and her laser gun fighting of a shadowy demon; and a man being cursed by the famous Hachi-statue to become a werewolf pining for a prostitute. REVIEW: Tokyo Grand Guingnol gets its name from …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: A successful doctor, Yukio’s picture perfect life is gradually wrecked, and taken over by his avenging twin brother, who bumps off his family members one by one and reclaims his lover who is now Yukio’s wife. REVIEW: Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s mystery drama Gemini breaks away from the master filmmaker’s customary conventions, but still maintains the same ferocious …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS A psychological thriller of a grieving mother turned cold-blooded avenger with a twisty master plan to pay back those who were responsible for her daughter’s death. REVIEW: Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2010 thriller Confessions offers genuine suspense, bleaker than bleak atmosphere and fantastic performances. It is a twisted tale to say the least, but one that will assuredly …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: A story about a video of a group of people going hiking and a mysterious little girl in a red dress following them. REVIEW: The 2015 Taiwanese box-office hit The Tag-Along draws its inspiration from a combination of old mountain mythology and modern urban legends, creating an entertaining but annoyingly uneven horror experience. The story centres …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: A man sees his life changed forever when his fiancee shoots herself. Baffled, he wants by all means to obtain such a weapon of destruction and he finds himself caught in the middle of a violent group of young vicious punks. They first beat him severely and then he seeks revenge with his fist, then with …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: A team of scientists has managed to capture the energy of a ghost child by using their newly invented device, Menger Sponge. They enlists a lip-reading agent in order to figure out how the child can shed light on life, and life after death. REVIEW: Taiwanese sci-fi/horror hybrid Silk offers a unique take on ghost hunting …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: Suspecting that his childhood friend, a professional boxer, is having an affair with his fiancee, a businessman starts training rigorously himself in order to take him down. REVIEW: Shin’ya Tsukamoto continues to explore the themes of metamorphosis, love and urban alienation in his 1995 boxing drama Tokyo Fist. It may not take the bodily transformations quite …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: A woman is being stalked by a stranger. His stalking turns to blackmail when he sends her copies of photos of her in an embarrassing position. Now he controls her and she has to do anything he says. Anything. REVIEW: While the name Shin’ya Tsukamoto is without a doubt most synonymous with the Japanese cyberpunk movement …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: A school was built on one of the Gates of Hell, behind which hordes of demons await the moment they will be free to roam the Earth. Hiruko is a goblin sent to Earth on a reconnaissance mission. He beheads students in order to assemble their heads on the demons’ spider-like bodies. Hieda, an archaeology professor, …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: A group of random strangers are invited to a cinema to watch a horror film called Admission by Guts (which resulted in the disappearance of a couple of audience members who watched it at the same theater a couple of years earlier). It isn’t long after the group arrives at the theater that spooky things start to happen and …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: A mistake of experiment may transform human into devil species. Dr. Diana and her father, Dr. Rung, discovered a new kind of snake-bite serum, X5N-1, was the great serum that could protect humans from snake poison. Both scientists were invited by World Health Organization (WHO) to receive a great award at Switzerland. Dr. Diana had to …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: A secret agent tracks a serial killer who murdered his fiancée. REVIEW: While we’ve seen our share of psycho-kills-for-the-fun-of-it films, “I Saw the Devil” actually is one of those stand out movies that might have you even questioning the morality of some of the content. In its gritty cold performances we meet up with secret agent …

Rate This MovieSYNOPSIS: A war-hardened general, egged on by his ambitious wife, works to fulfill a prophecy that he would become lord of Spider’s Web Castle. REVIEW: “The devil’s path will always lead to doom.” Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, Macbeth, is certainly one of the greatest representatives of its cinematic form. Portrayed by the great Toshiro …