Asian Reviews

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: Daisuke Yamanouchi directs this shocking film that depicts a card game in which the winners dole out increasingly violent and perverse punishments to the losers. Just how creatively cruel can the winners get? And how much abuse will the losers take before they quit the twisted game? Miyuki Katô, Salmon Sakeyama, Yuka Takahashi, Yuuken Yoshida and …

SYNOPSIS: Mitomo Women’s College is having a major problem with its students. The teachers are unable to prevent them from peddling their ass in the streets after dark and stripping off their panties for immediate sale to complete strangers. To make matters worse, one by one, they are being raped and killed by a disgruntled customer who enjoys ripping whores …

SYNOPSIS: Ghost Game tells the story of 11 contestants who sign up for a scary reality show which forces them to confront the supernatural and their innermost fears. They’re brought to an ancient war museum in Cambodia, which was used as a Khmer Rouge prison twenty years before. Thousands of innocent people were tortured and killed there during the Cambodian …

SYNOPSIS: A pair of hard-boiled Tokyo cops are investigating a gruesome murder: after killing the victim, the murderer cut his skull open and cooked his brain in a stew. As they try to track down the killer, they discover that, quite literally, everybody is a suspect. Will they bring the terror to an end, or will they become part of …

SYNOPSIS: An expecting couple move to a rural mountain villa. Shortly after arriving, they begin experiencing horrific supernatural occurances. REVIEW: Midnight Hair is a Chinese horror thriller by the director Liu Ning. It starts as what seems like a bog standard haunted house movie, but changes pace towards the end morphing into a crime mystery. So, a young couple, A …

SYNOPSIS: A star, Miyuki Goto (Ko Shibasaki) plays Oiwa, the protagonist in a new play based on the ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan. She pulls some strings to get her lover, Kosuke Hasegawa (Ebizo Ichikawa) cast in the play, even though he’s a relatively unknown actor. Other performers Rio Asahina (Miho Nakanishi) and Jun Suzuki (Hideaki Ito) lust after Miyuki. Off …

SYNOPSIS: Sequel to “Tetsuo” this time has the Iron Man transforming into cyberkinetic gun when a gang of vicious skinheads kidnap his son. When the skinheads capture him, they begin to experiment on him…speeding up the mutative process! REVIEW: I like to think that I understand “art films.” Anyone who has ever pursued an English degree knows that after enough …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: Filmmaker Takashi Miike takes inspiration from Hideo Yamamoto’s manga, Koroshiya 1, to tell this bloody and bleak tale about the Japanese yakuza. Blond-coiffed Kakihara’s “mentor in crime” disappears, and Kakihara vows to find out who’s responsible. He’s also on the lookout for Ichi, a sadistic killer who may be able to inflict the level of pain …

SYNOPSIS: Devilman faces the tortoise demon Jinmen and birdwoman Shiranu. REVIEW: I have very specific tastes when it comes to anime. I’m more in “the Sailor Moon camp,” where sometimes heavy subject matter is flanked with pretty costumes and big sparkly eyes–I am very much a girly girl in that regard. The flipside of this is what I call “the …

SYNOPSIS: A man’s family is torn apart when his wife takes a loan from a loan shark who will stop at nothing to get his money back REVIEW: We love stories about organized crime. We love the idea of a world seemingly run by law and order, when in actuality it’s an underground organization of tough guys in nice suits …

SYNOPSIS: Based on the 16th-century Chinese novel Feng Shen Yan Yi (The Investiture of the Gods), the story tells of how King Zhou of Shang becomes a tyrant due to the wiles of Daji, a vixen spirit who is disguised as one of his concubines. REVIEW: Fantasy is tricky to pull off in film. Despite some of the most successful …

SYNOPSIS: Yoroi Samurai Zombie AKA Samurai Zombie is a 2008 Japanese comic horror film directed by Tak Sakaguchi and written by Ryuhei Kitamura, who had previously collaborated on Versus REVIEW: It’s safe to say that the most effective horror movies are the ones that wreak havoc on a happy family. It’s an old cliché that the genre is rotten with …

SYNOPSIS: In 2010, the people of Seoul, South Korea fight a virus that threatens to infect the planet. REVIEW: By and large, the American movie-going public is pretty much over zombies. The undead apocalypse trend was a mighty force in the mid-2000s consumerist culture, being relevant what with all our wars and recessions and such. For a while there, it …

SYNOPSIS: A Rich Heiress Receive a Third Butlerdroid for Her Birthday in Which She Begins Lusting After Him REVIEW: I’m a sucker for stories about robots. Whether it’s an android that longs to be human, or a computer that realizes its superiority to its creator, there is something about artificial intelligence that is immediately sympathetic and fascinating. It can be …

SYNOPSIS: Yosuke, a typical slacker kid dozing his way through school, showing nothing in the way of ambition as he quietly mulls over the death of a close friend the year before. He is clever enough and full of smart comments but just doesn’t seem to see the point of much in life. That changes when he meets Eri by …