(2001)
Dir - Yoon Jong-chan
Overall: MEH
The first full-length offering from South Korean filmmaker Yoon Jong-chan, Sorum is a bit of a detrimentally slow boil. The small cast of characters are aloof as soon as we meet them and they stay that way throughout. Meanwhile, it is practically vacant on plot and poses an endless stream of ambiguous details that it makes no attempt whatsoever to dig into. No doubt this was deliberately done and does create a thoroughly consistent, dour mood, but the movie does not seem to be saying anything, which makes it rather difficult to sympathize with on any level. None of the horrific elements are explicit and instead they are used to make the storyline even more murky, which is an interesting idea. Are these characters ghosts, children of ghosts, lost, eccentric souls, abandoned orphans drawn back to a cursed location, or all of the above? This would make for some interesting things to ponder, but the film could afford to explore some of these avenues itself a little bit more instead of letting the viewer do basically all of the work.
(2004)
Dir - Takashi Shimizu
Overall: GOOD
Filmed in between making Ju-On: The Grudge and the American remake, Takashi Shimizu's Marebito, (a.k.a. Unique One), is a bizarre and challenging work. Casting none other than cult filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto as a man off of his meds and presumably going insane for the entire movie, it provides Shimizu with an ideal pallet to explore the psyche of someone very troubled indeed. Along the way, everything from vampires, to Richard Sharpe Shaver's detrimental robots, to underground, supernatural cities, to Dante's Inferno, to voyeurism, to Lovecraftian mythos are thrown into the mix and it is anybody's guess what is going on in the head of the main protagonist, let alone going on in "real life". Some of the editing near the beginning is a bit off-putting as the film seems unclear as to whether or not it is going to be a found footage movie and to what degree. Yet once things settle into the main arc revolving around a feral woman and cryptic phone calls, the tone gets more focused and endlessly puzzling. Despite some technical limitations and a few dragging spots, it still ends up being an adequately unique, deep dive into psychological horror.
(2008)
Dir - Yoshihiro Nishimura
Overall: MEH
Amazingly void of humor and instead sacrificing such a necessary thing for mindless gore montages and a completely wooden lead in former model Eihi Shiina as a badass monster assassin, Tokyo Gore Police is almost impressively boring and dull. The cheap, nasty, and utterly ridiculous splatter effects are relentless which all logic would dictate would make at least a visually entertaining and disgusting end result. This is not the case though since the tone is botched, the plot is not at all interesting, and the movie seems to forget that it is even telling a story at all throughout the majority of the running time. Shiina being terrible in the lead is not even that big of an issue amongst the other more paramount ones and the whole film has the wrong kind of odd feeling where it should be a hoot yet just seems a conceptual mess instead. Director/editor/co-writer and prolific make-up artist Yoshihiro Nishimura would do far more engaging work with collaborator Naoyuki Tomomatsu with his follow-up Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, but left to his own devices here, his absurd, gross-out fetishes make for surprisingly lackluster results.
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