Tokyo Zombie (2005) 1h 43m

I picked this film up at the one, and only, horror convention that has happened here in New Orleans since we moved here almost seven years ago.  You would think that New Orleans would have more horror stuff but mostly it's just lame Anne Rice shit.  Anyway, Tokyo Zombie has been on my to-watch list even prior to owning it.  I just never had the chance to get a copy of it until then, and then it sat on my shelf since then as well.

I will never feel bad about my
comics ever again.

Based off of a manga, I can only describe Tokyo Zombie as a live-action anime if they were still trying to make it as anime as fuck.  The film itself is actually broken into two sections.  The first half focuses on Fujio and Mitsuo, two guys that spend most of their time fucking around on mattresses with Mitsuo teaching Fujio jujitsu.  Outside is a large pile of buried trash (and bodies) known as Black Fuji for it's immense size.  When zombies begin to come out of it and eat people our duo decides to take their work truck and attempt to flee to Russia.  Instead Mitsuo gets "bit" and throws himself off a bridge and into the river below.  We're given a brief animated segue where we learn that the world has become this strange Hunger Games-esq land of upper class and slums and the only way to gain a measure of respect was in a zombie fighting arena.  Fujio uses his learned jujitsu to decimate his zombie opponents until he finally has to face off against a "zombie" Mitsuo.  Also there is apparently some strange revolution or Mad Max style raiders that exist here too.

Tokyo Zombie felt like I was watching a Japanese game show.  There were a lot of moments where the humor tried to be too absurd and you're expected to laugh along but it just didn't reach me.  The only solid comparisons I could give would be if you take Kung-Fu Hustle and put the Three Stooges as the main characters.

Now that I've said that, I'm okay with Tokyo Zombie, but that's it.  Just okay.  I'm concerned that I came into this expecting something else though so rather than complain about how this wasn't what I wanted I'm just going to say that I plan to revisit this again at another point and give it a fair shot now that I know what I'm getting into.  So I'm going to do something different here and I'm going to suspend my rating of this film.  In the future I will re-watch it and give it an honest go.

Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (1995) 1h 20m

Ever since I bought this film, I continually forget that I own it.  I wasn't even looking for it when I was searching for a film to watch, it just happened to be in the same binder as tomorrow's film and I found it first.  So what does that say about Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, aside from that title is too long?

Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (or Eko Eko as I'm going to call it from now on) opens with a satanic cult using magic to kill teenagers.  Their apparent goal is to take the lives of 13 innocent teens in order to bring Lucifer to Earth to do whatever.  This film is really vague on what the end goal is here so we get: Step 1: Kill Teens, Step 2: Summon Lucifer, Step 3: ????, Step 4: Profit!  At the end of their opening ritual they get a warning about a strong witch coming that they should not make an enemy of.  Enter Misa, said teenage witch that ends up trapped in the school with 13 other students and two perverted teachers.  Her goal is to find the head person behind the killings and prevent the rise of Lucifer as this is apparently all she does in each school she goes to.

I forgot this happened.

Eko Eko had this weird feeling to it, like it never sat quite right with me.  It looks like it was just a made-for-tv-movie and its short running time (at least compared to most J-horror films) only bolsters that sentiment.  The plot is relatively straight forward and some of the set-up and magick effects look okay but you can tell that this was most likely made for a PG-13 audience.  This isn't to say that films under an R rating are bad, just that in this case it all feels a bit immature.

Eko Eko was based off of a manga from the 70's and apparently spawned six fucking sequels and a short television series.  I don't know how I feel about that info.  I would like to go back and read the manga for a comparison just to see if they toned things down or if this was always as tame as I perceive it.  You know, because I perceive the magickal murder of teenagers in order to invoke the rising of Lucifer to be a mundane task.

I give Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness 2 I-no from Guilty Gear out of 5:

Helldriver (2010) 1h 57m

If you haven't noticed by now, this week I'm going through my J-Horror collection and reviewing those things that I bought mainly because they looked cool.  Surprisingly, I only just realized that a majority of these films that I own have something to do with Tokyo Shock (The Asiatic cinema/television focus of the larger company, Media Blasters).  It makes sense though since most of my favorites have high powered blood sprays, lots of action, and insane creature design.  So with that fresh in your brain, let's jump into Helldriver!

Kika's home life isn't ideal. She comes home one day to find her mother and uncle eating her still living father.  During her escape attempt a meteor crashes through the mother's chest but her mom pulls Kika's heart out to replace her now missing one.  At the same time, the meteor was an alien which takes over the mother and encases her in some sort of amber-like shield.  Kika is thrown to the side but not before she gets the same shielding.  The mother than shoots space spores into the air which turn those that breath it in into zombies with strange fungal antenna on their forehead (like ophiocordyceps unilateralis in ants).  Kika is rescued and turned into a cyborg (although they say android here) with a metal chest plate and a chainsaw katana.  She and a small group of sudden friends attempt to take out this zombie queen and save the world.

Look at this Silent Hill shit!

All the things I love with these Japanese hyper-gore films are present here.  There's a lot of blood, intense action scenes, absurd and nonsensical things that only work for this movie (ie. a car made out of zombie body parts), and the overall feeling of not taking itself too seriously where it would ruin the film.  If I had any real complaint with Helldriver then it would be my usual gripe about pacing.  I was about 45 minutes into it before the title card appeared which made me feel like the whole first half of the film was meant to be an intro to the latter half, and in a way it really was.  We have so much time spent establishing our characters and the world that, when we get to the heart of the matter, doesn't really need to exist.  It's like playing an RPG and you have to grind for a few hours before you're even able to leave the first section and get to the actual adventure.

Helldriver is really a niche film.  This isn't something I could just drop on a friend and tell them to check it out without advanced knowledge of their cinema tastes.  In this case, it would have to taste like blood... a fire hose of blood all yelling at you in Japanese.

I give Helldriver 2 zombie ants out of 5:

Ju-On: White Ghost Black Ghost (2009) 1h 1m / 1h

In the rivalry between the two, I prefer Ju-On over Ringu.  Maybe it's because Kayako has the additional striker of the small semi-naked child that just makes cat noises which gives her the advantage to topple Sadako, or the fact that I just find the entire concept of a Ju-On much more frightening than a well ghost creeping on you with outdated media.  Either way,  I've owned this for longer than I'd like to admit after claiming to be a fan of something.  Also, post script to this, I've had Shudder for like two years and still haven't watched Sadako vs. Kayako, but that's mainly because I watch so many horror movies for this website.

Why must you haunt me cursed ghost?!

White Ghost Black Ghost is actually two separate films.  White Ghost kicks things off with someone that I refer to as Sentai Sanata (due to his clothes and motorcycle) delivering a Christmas cake to the Ju-Oh house.  After a short time he realizes the woman interacting with him is actually acting on a loop and his investigation of the house causes him to find the bodies of a murdered family before finding the Ju-On spirit.  In this case it's an older woman holding a basketball because she's about to bring the Shaq Attack and dunk all over his ass!  Actually you find out why later but she does have a basketball each time she appears.  The rest of this film jumps around in regards to the characters and their spot in the timeline.  It leaves you a bit bewildered at first until you begin connecting the threads.

Black Ghost focuses on a young girl in the hospital.  Following in White Ghost's steps with an erratic time line, we find that after an episode where the girl freezes, screams until the Kayako noise comes from her mouth, and then face plants, her parents are concerned for her health.  Her father checks on her only for her to grab his right hand and say "you killed a woman with this hand."  It was an awesome moment.  Most of this is focused on trying to find out what is wrong with the girl but when we learn what is wrong with her and how it gets handled it makes this the far superior of the two films.

I have a ton of notes on White Ghost Black Ghost, a lot of which is me popping off at different moments with "OMFG!" or "That's fuckin' rad!"  It helps to come into these knowing the previous two films.  Kayako is absent from both but I like that since it allows us to apply the Ju-On curse to anyone that dies in a rage, not just this one specific individual.  It also prevents the staleness that can happen with the "slasher" genre where screenwriters attempt to break things up with a fake Jason or an evil Halloween mask company.

If you could only watch one of these, then I would say to definitely watch Black Ghost, but both are pretty great.

I give Ju-On White Ghost Black Ghost 5 oni masks out of 5:

The Bloodthirsty Trilogy 2-Disc Blu-Ray + Extras (Arrow Films)

Oh shit!  We're coming back with another Saturday Screamers and this one is huge!  Today we're going to be talking about Michio Yamamoto's The Bloodthirsty Trilogy 2-disc set that was lovingly sent to us from our friends over at Arrow Films.  So thank you, Arrow Films!

To catch you up on what The Bloodthirsty Trilogy is, from 1970-1974 Mr. Yamamoto combined Japanese and European vampire lore in order to create three movies.  Released by Toho films, The Vampire Doll, Lake of Dracula, and Evil of Dracula can be sited as one of the first instances of our modern gothic take on vampirism seeping into J-horror.  Their pale visages with golden eyes become wrapped in flowing white gowns or dapper gentleman clothing to create a mash-up previously unseen.  Shot and scored similarly to the U.S. Hammer Films with a dash of the Universal Monsters and, of course, Toho's style, this is a great collection of rare J-horror that may have been overlooked in the past.


The first film, The Vampire Doll (a.k.a. Legacy of Dracula) takes us to an affluent home where a man has come to visit his beloved, only to find that she died two weeks prior in a car accident.  He is still given room and board while he deals with his feelings but he begins to see his lady friend in the house or running through the grounds at night.  The product of a curse brought upon her family by her father, she can only rest once the her father pays for his crimes... and then she deflates like a balloon.

The second of the trilogy is Lake of Dracula which was the weirdest for me to watch.  When a woman was five years old she lost grip of her dog's leash and followed him to a strange house where she was almost attacked by a man with golden eyes.  She woke up safe later and it was assumed to be a dream.  Flash forward to the film's present day and she's now a full grown woman with a totally different dog that has the same name.  She is haunted by the golden eyes in her dreams and when a coffin is delivered to her town without any return address then vampire shit goes down.

The reason this one was the weirdest to me starts with the dog thing, but then the score and foley work.  At one point the music sounded like the composer was playing a slide whistle through a series of effects pedals or at least an odd theremin.  Then, when our main character is an adult and finally catches a glimpse of the vampire the sound cue right before her discovery sounds like a quick deep fart.  It's hard to stay in the movie moment when I assumed the vampire farted and that's how she found him.

Rounding out our trilogy is Evil of Dracula where a girl's school becomes terrorized by their vampire principal.  I'm not quite sure if he's been doing this all along and just upped his game or if this just all started because he was grooming a new man to be his replacement principal.  I watched all of these in a row and this one was probably the loosest and least attention grabbing of the three.

Despite my waning attention span with the third film, I definitely enjoyed this collection.  There is really only one big extra which is the journalist/horror author Kim Newman talking about the vampirism in the films.  Other than that you get the OSTs and film trailers but compared to something like The Addiction that I covered last week, there is less additional content.  Although if they brought Michio Yamamoto back from the dead for an interview then that would've been awesome.  Unfortunately I don't think Arrow has the money for that.  Anyway, you get three films with this, so it's a fair trade off.

If you like real vampires (not sparkly ones), J-horror, or just look and feel of Toho or Hammer then I recommend picking this set up.  Thanks again to Arrow Films for the hook-up with this.

Also, if you're interested in picking up this film you can do so here from Amazon.  It's currently running around $26, which for a blu-ray with three films on it is a steal.  Also, if you order by clicking that link then that means Amazon kicks a little back to us so that we can pay for this website and fuel it with canned energy drinks.

Friday's Choice Cuts: Hisako (from Killer Instinct) figure (Ultimate Source)

I have a lot of toys that are related to horror and/or video games.  A majority of which sit around and look cool.  This Hisako figure sits around and looks badass!

I haven't even played the new Killer Instinct game (as I don't have an Xbone or a computer that could run KI) but as soon as Hisako was announced I was all in on her.  The character moves in that jerky/shaky J-horror style while bending her body in impossible ways and even distending her mouth and elongating her teeth to razor sharp points.  Hisako is known as an "onryō,"  a Japanese spirit that has been pulled back from purgatory in order to extract revenge upon the living.  She fights using her father's naginata.

The sculpting on this figure is fantastic.  It's not so much an action figure though so you can't have cool battles with, say, the Tyrant from the Resident Evil toy line of the 90's, but the pose is awesome.  She comes with two naginatas (one with a ribbon as seen above and one that has tiny orange skulls) as well as a replaceable head so if you want to switch to the razor teeth and elongated jaw.

As I said, I haven't played the game so I didn't buy this as a diehard KI fan.  I bought this more because of my love of J-horror and I haven't regretted it to this day.  And at some point I will be able to play KI and I will pretty much only play as her.  Hisako, you're so dreamy!! <3 <3 <3