The Happiness of the Katakuris
Dir: Takashi Miike
2001
*****
If you are aware of the works of Takashi Miike then you will know to expect the unexpected, the strange, the wonderful and often the disturbing. No one does weird like Takashi Miike and his 2001 musical/comedy/horror The Happiness of the Katakuris is about as weird as it gets, however, I would argue that it is his most accessible - while 1999’s Audition is his most mainstream film but certainly not for anyone with a weak heart or nervous disposition. The film is actually a remake of the South Korean film The Quiet Family that came out in 1998. A remake with a Takashi Miike, as the original was a comedy horror but none of it was animated and at no point did the cast break into song. Kim Jee-woon, director of The Quiet Family, is also somewhat of a left-field film maker, so this is most certainly a tribute to him. Much like The Quiet Family, the Katakuris are a four-generation family of failures: patriarch Masao Katakuri (Kenji Sawada), his wife Terue (Keiko Matsuzaka), his father Jinpei (Tetsurō Tamba), his formerly criminal son Masayuki (Shinji Takeda), his divorced daughter Shizue (Naomi Nishida), her child Yurie (Tamaki Miyazaki, who narrates the film), and their dog, Pochi. The idea is essentially to risk everything in pursuit of the family ideal. So the family uses the father's redundancy pay to purchase a large old home situated on a former garbage dump near Mount Fuji that they have named the ‘White Lover's Inn'. They have the intention of converting it into a bed & breakfast, since the road running nearby is supposed to be expanded up to the house, which would bring many guests and tourists. However, the road hasn't been expanded yet and the Katakuris subsequently have no guests. When guests finally do begin to arrive, the Katakuris find (through no fault of their own) that their guests have an annoying habit of dying.Their first guest, a TV personality, arrives naked and subsequently commits suicide during the night. The Katakuris make the decision to save their business by burying the body and concealing the death. The second guest, a Sumo wrestler, dies of a heart attack during a tryst with his underage girlfriend, who also dies. Somehow, each of their guests ends up dead, either by suicide, accident or murder and pretty soon the bodies in the back yard begin to pile up. The Katakuris soon find themselves sucked into a nightmare of lies and fear (not helped by the arrival of the daughter's con-man boyfriend, an escaped murderer with police in hot pursuit). Just to add to their many worries, Mount Fuji has, for the first time in many years, decides to erupt. After many minutes of mania, musical numbers and claymation, Shizue meets a Richard Sagawa (Kiyoshiro Imawano), a mysterious U.S. naval officer who looks suspiciously Japanese but claims to be the nephew of Queen Elizabeth II. Thankfully, just when Richard stumbles into a clue that might lead him to uncover the string of disappearing guests, Mount Fuji begins rumbling to life with the promise of wiping their little secret away – as well as everything else. There are cultural themes that will go over the heads of a westerner like me but the puzzlement felt after this surreal ride is universal. The film itself is reminiscent of the music videos and live concert performances staged by 80s & 90's J-pop group Kome Kome Club who are widely recognized as the only Japanese pop rock musical group which achieved commercial success by blending soul and funk musical styles and the only band to have ever used the style of rakugo in their act. Miike's choice of Sawada Kenji as Katakuri Masao further accentuates this similarity, since he strongly resembles co-front man `Carl Smoky' Ishii Tatsuya. It may look like a film made up of several different films and ideas but that is Miike all over. The film maker makes several films a year and each one is as original and strange as the next. I gave up trying to understand everything that Miike does in his films, instead I just hold on tight, grab a large tub of pop-corn (and an alcoholic beverage) and enjoy the experience. It’s like Jan Švankmajer and 1980s bubble-gum pop got together to make a Monty Python style horror film and every bit as brilliant as that sounds. That said, with Takeshi Miike there is no comparison, he is a genre unto himself.

The Eye (Gin gwai)

Dir: Danny Pang Phat, Oxide Pang Chun, Pang Brothers

2002

****

Following the success of The Ring, Asian Horror found a large global following and more and more films found a wider audience. This meant that more money was being spent on productions but the Pang Brothers wisely kept their 2002 horror The Eye as simple as possible. Twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang said they were inspired to write the screenplay for The Eye by a report they had seen in a Hong Kong newspaper 13 years before, about a 16-year-old girl who had received a corneal transplant and committed suicide soon after. "We'd always wondered what the girl saw when she regained her eyesight finally and what actually made her want to end her life", Oxide said in an interview. The conclusion of the film is based on an actual event from 1990’s Bangkok gas explosion on New Petchburi Road on 24 September 1990. It killed 90 people, injured 121 people, 43 cars were destroyed and total damage was 315 million baht. Blind since the age of two, 20-year-old Hong Kong classical violinist Mun undergoes an eye cornea transplant after receiving a pair of new eyes from a donor. Initially, she is glad to have her sense of sight restored but becomes troubled when she starts seeing mysterious figures that seem to foretell gruesome deaths. The night before her discharge from hospital, she sees a shadowy figure accompanying a patient out of the room and the next morning the patient is pronounced dead. Mun goes to see her doctor's nephew, Dr. Wah, a psychologist, about the strange entities that she has been seeing. He is skeptical at first, but as he gradually develops a closer relationship with her, he decides to accompany her on a trip to northern Thailand to find Ling, the eye donor. When they ask a village doctor about Ling and her family, he is unwilling to reveal anything but becomes more cooperative when Mun tells him that she sees what Ling used to see. Apparently, Ling had a psychic ability that allowed her to foresee death and disaster. However, her fellow villagers misunderstood her as a jinx and refused to trust her. Once, Ling tried to warn the people about an imminent disaster, but they drove her away in disbelief. When her vision came true, she felt guilty about the deaths and hanged herself. Ling's mother is both depressed and angry with her daughter and has never forgiven Ling for committing suicide, until one night Ling's spirit possesses Mun and attempts suicide. Ling's mother saves Mun and breaks down, saying that she has forgiven Ling and Ling's spirit leaves in peace. On the return journey, their bus is caught in a traffic jam and Mun sees hundreds of ghostly figures lumbering on the road. Believing that a catastrophe is approaching, she runs out of the bus and tries to warn everyone to leave, but no one understands her and think that she is insane. In fact, the traffic jam is due to a tank truck that has toppled over and is blocking the road. The truck starts leaking natural gas but nobody notices it. A driver restarts his engine and ignites the gas, causing a chain explosion. Dr. Wah saves Mun from death by shielding her with his body, but Mun is already blinded by glass fragments. In the epilogue, a blind Mun is seen roaming the streets of Hong Kong. Although she has lost her sense of sight again, she is happy that she now has the support and friendship of Dr. Wah. The dark figure that constantly appears in the film when the characters die is the Daoist form of the Grim Reaper. In Daoist belief, there are two Grim Reapers, the White and Black "Wu Chang". The Black Reaper is the one that escorts the newly dead to the "other world" of "afterlife". It is pretty basic stuff as far as a paranormal film goes and if themes of psychic ability aren’t quite your cup of tea then you might find The Eye hard to get along with. It is also far too melodramatic. However, it is a masterpiece of creepiness and about as eerie as you can get. The ghosts are in plain sight but are more frightening than they have ever been in a dark haunted house. The jump scenes are beautifully crafted and original. There are one or two scenes that I personally believe belong in the category of greatest horror scenes of all time. The scene whereby a ghost asks Mun ‘Why are you sitting in my chair’ is about as terrifying as it gets and it made me spill coffee all over my living room rug, causing an argument between me and my wife – the true sign of a great horror movie. More often than not, the pointless inferior Hollywood remake is a sure sign that the film must be good and it rings true here for sure. The Eye may not be greater than the sum of its parts, but like an ex-girlfriend once said to me, my goodness it’s parts are scary.

Ring (Rungu)

Dir: Hideo Nakata

1998

*****

It’s fair to say that director Hideo Nakata changed the world of horror dramatically when he released his 1998 adaption of Kôji Suzuki’s novel Ring. The impact of the film was huge but its origins are easy to spot. The themes deal with folk-tale devils and simply mixes mythology within a contemporary situation. Suzuki was inspired by two things; the story of Chizuko Mifune 1982’s Poltergeist (although he clearly saw David Cronenberg's Videodrome)  Mifune was born in 1886 in Kumamoto Prefecture and was rumored to have the gift of foresight. After a demonstration in 1910, she was proclaimed a charlatan and committed suicide a year later by ingesting poison. It is essentially Mifune’s ghost that our protagonists are being haunted by. The story begins with two teenagers, Masami and Tomoko, who talk about a videotape recorded by a boy in Izu which is fabled to bear a curse that kills the viewer seven days after watching. Tomoko reveals that a week ago, she and three of her friends watched a weird tape and received a call after watching. Tomoko goes downstairs and witnesses her TV turn on by itself. She later hears startling noises and turns around, only to be killed by an unseen force. It’s a classic horror opener, highlighted by the film Scream that was released two years previous and every bit as compelling. We then follow Reiko Asakawa, a reporter investigating the popularity of the video curse who discovers that it was her niece Tomoko, along with her three other friends, who mysteriously died at the same time, on the same night, with their faces twisted in fear. She also discovers that Masami became insane from witnessing Tomoko's death and is institutionalised in a mental hospital. After stumbling upon Tomoko's photos from the past week, Reiko finds that the four teenagers stayed in a rental cabin in Izu. It all gets a bit ‘Evil Dead’ from there on in but with a certain X-Files vibe. It’s quite a slow-building film with many gaps between horror but it has an eerie quality that influenced many horror films that followed. However, the now infamous scene whereby the film’s evil spirit breaks down the wall between recording and reality is iconic. Sure, Pennywise did it eight year before to great effect and it has happened elsewhere in sci-fi many time over, but somehow Nakata made it his own and the most terrifying it had been. Many have speculated was Ring is about, with a majority agreeing that it is an exploration of contemporary anxieties, technology being the method in which the repressed past reasserts itself. It’s tradition vs technology, old Japan fighting against new. Others have suggested that it is about ambivalence about motherhood and the dangers that come from it – again, a bit of old world thinking. I think its just a neat idea, and not really original. The 90s saw the rise of home video to the high of its success. What is scarier than watching a video come to life and kill you while you are yourself watching a similarly themed video. It’s like that scene in Arachnophobia when the spider comes out of the popcorn – I’ve never heard screams like that come from a cinema, a brilliant and simple move. It is Ring’s simplicity that make it so clever, indeed, it was simplicity that saw a resurgence in modern horror rather than technology – technology making things simpler. The special effects are very simple too, Nakata being the first to develop the now overused method of filming backwards and forwarding the tapes during the editing process. I also think the found footage horror sub-genre owe a great deal to Ring. I’m not too sure what is so scary about long-haired Japanese women and pale Japanese boys that have seen them appear time and time again in such horror movies but somehow they become more frightening the more we see them. I found Hideo Nakata's Dark Water to be a more intriguing film and Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge far more terrifying but you have to give credit Ring for upping the game.

A Tale of Two Sisters
Dir: Kim Jee-Woon
2003
***
Although based on ancient Korean folktale "Jangha and Hongryun", A Tale of Two Sisters feels like a mixture of other films of the popular genre from that part of the world, such as The Eye, The Grudge and Audition (No, I'm not going to lazily say The Ring as it wasn't like it at all). As stylish as it is, the twist ending isn't enough of a payoff for having to watch an hour of very little, both in action and content. It has its moments here and there but they are too far and few between and a also little predictable. I'm a bit disappointed to tell the truth, maybe because I was expecting something special but it does look good and is still worth a look, particularly if you like your Asian Extreme Cinema.

I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK
Dir: Chan-wook Park
2006
****
Chan-wook Park's style seems to lend itself well to violent action films, so it is nice to see him try something a little more tender and accomplish at it. That's not to say there isn't any action or violence but it is done with the right tone, context and with lots of humour. I absolutely loved it from start to finish, it's original, colourful and completely nuts (well, it does take place in a mental institution). I loved the ending too. You'd be 'nuts' to miss it! Just look at the pretty colours....

Pieta
Dir: Kim Ki-duk
2012
**
Kim Ki-Duk is trying to tell an interesting story but the shock tactics used distract from the overall message. There is absolutely no depth to the story or characters what so ever. Not important you cry? I totally disagree. Is this the same guy that directed the wonderful Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring? The direction is visually sound but everything else is second rate, cheap and lazy. There are about 10 existential 'Oedipus complex' French films that I need to go back to and award an extra half star to thanks to this film. Honestly, there are countless South Korean films that tell the same story but in a much more successful way.