Eastern Standard - issue 4 by frequentbeef

JU-ON ∞ THE RING VS. RINGU ∞ JAPANESE HORROR GAMES ∞ VERSUS ∞ PUPPET-FU ∞ AND MORE …

JUNE 2004 ∞ ISSUE 4

YOU TO

DEATH! ALL THIS FOR ONLY

$4.00

NEW WAVE OF JAPANESE HORROR WHAT MAKES THESE NEW HORROR FILMS SO VISCERAL AND TERRIFYING? AND WHICH ONES WILL HAVE YOU HIDING UNDER YOUR COVERS?

JAPANESE TV DRAMAS More to JTV than anime

NEW ANIME WATCH

What to look out for and what to avoid

DOTHACK FRANCHISE Your guide to everything .Hack!

Eastern Standard Magazine Publishers Eric Chon Derek Guder

Japanese New Wave Horror by Derek Guder

Editor-in-Chief Eric Chon Senior Editors Sean Broderick Derek Guder Graphic Design Eric Chon Dean Solis Emilio Trench Front Cover Art Jeremiah Colonna-Romano Back Cover Art James Stanley Staff Writers Sean Broderick Eric Chon Andrew Cunningham Derek Guder Joe Iglesias Contributors Tim Den Eric Johnson Sam Flanigan

Pg. 12 A new style of horror movie swept Japan before spreading across the globe in a tsunami of terror. It felt new, fresh and distinctive, creeping us out before making us scream. But just what was this “Japanese New Wave Horror”? Mr. Guder breaks it down and analyzes what makes this movement different than your average slasher ﬂick. Find out why it’s so terrifying! A beginners guide to some of the more prominent movies is also included, as well as how to ﬁll your week with horror.

Ringu America Style by Sean Broderick

Top 5 Metal Band Names 5. Sharingan Eye 4. Cthulhu Is My Dad 3. Grragnorkrar! 2. My Bleeding Anus 1. Limo-Zeen! Comments and Suggestions letters@eastern-standard.com Contributions and Submissions submit@eastern-standard.com For Advertising, please write ads@eastern-standard.com Special Thanks

Friends, family, AnimeBoston, Naruto, DeviantArt, BitTorrent, and fucking heavy metal! Rock! Eastern Standard Magazine is published quarterly. No articles may be reproduced without prior consent. Zombies are for burning. Buddah’s name be praised! June 2004, Number 4

Pg. 20 Our very own Stalker guides you through the blasted cultural scapes of Ringu to reach its oneric wonders. The going’s perilous past the barbed wire, so bring your Google goggles. You need a guide to penetrate the darkness binding critics of the brilliant remake. We deliver you to The Room, but within you must discern delusion from poetic vision. All articles are copyright their respective authors and all images and characters are copyright their respective owners. If anything in this magazine is similar to any person who is dead, living, partially dead, not really living, or undead...this is pure coincidence and I promise it won’t happen again. Unless it does. ©2004

Mindless Gibberish

As usual Mr. Guder, our intrepid anime-spelunker, delves deeply - descending into the dark depths of new anime. What should we be keen on? What should be avoided? Check out the twelve shows that he wants you to know about!

Pg. 5

Living People Also Good You know, Japan isn’t all about anime. It may be shocking, but this is true! It’s also host to a vast array of great live-action shows. Mr. Cunningham invites you to get enlightened.

Columns and Departments

Anime to Watch For

What took so long for a new issue? What do we have to say for ourselves? Our editors, amazingly enough, bitch and moan very little this time! Instead, they offer enthusiasm and a reminder to enjoy your hobby. Isn’t that sweet? Pg. 4

Artist Info Get up close and personal with James Stanley - our back-cover artist. Find out all about what animes and mangas inﬂuence him, how he got started, and even what he looks like! An indepth interview that will be featured every issue (but with different artists each time - sorry James!) Pg. 39

Pg. 24 The Eye

Japan doesn’t have a monopoly on creepy, atmospheric horror movies. See how the Pang brothers bring Hong Kong into the terror fold! Pg. 30

DotHack//Franchise What’s the deal with all the dotHack shows, games, and manga coming out? What’s it all about and where does it end? Mr. Flanigan attempts to reign in the chaos with this organized look at all the hubub. We do it just for you.

Legend of the Sacred Stone

Battle Royale 2

The Horror Never Stops!

Pgs. 36,37,38

What’s just as good as watching a great horror movie? Why, playing one of course! Three different takes on a common subject - where do they succeed and fail?

This sequel to one of the most talked about movies in Asiancult cinema has a lot to live up to. Will replacing Takeshi Kitano with Riki Takeuchi do the trick? Pg. 35

A Plethora of Horror

The companion piece to our New Wave Horror article. Check out how the big proﬁle movies stack up in the grand scheme! Pg. 15

Other Reviews

Pg. 26

When you think of wuxia ﬁlms, you think wirework, Jet Li, and epic stories. No one ever thinks kung-fu puppets! Pg. 32

FROM THE EDITORS So, here we are again. How long has it been? Over a year? My god, it has. Well, times have been good and bad - life has come and gone and we’ve suffered as a result. When your 40-hour-a-week job and lifeissues start piling up, something has to go. Ah, the curse of the amateur - if only this were my full-time job! But I try not to cling to dreams. However, despite this setback (major as it is), we’ve grown stronger in this time - more determined to give you the best we’ve got. And, by god, I believe we’ve done it. The idea of themes is mine. I wanted to re-focus this magazine and have it stand out from the rest (professional and otherwise). There are numerous aspects of Asian pop-culture to cover - and sometimes there are trends that need to be noticed. And so it is done with Japanese New Wave Horror - sure the rest of Asia has produced some stand-out work - but it always comes back to the one, Ringu. So we’ve tried to pry into that, see what the machinations behind the movement were and how the West has slowly started picking up where they’ve left off. I hope you enjoy our refined look and our newly focused (like a laser beam) format. With the talent included between these covers how can’t you? It’s been hell getting this together, but this final product hasn’t just drained me - it’s also rejuvenated a passion I had lost (hence the length between issues). I have the privilege to work with the finest friends in the world, and it shows. This is a team effort and I cannot stress how important they are to this endeavor. Watch out, Eastern Standard Magazine is back! Eric Chon Editor-in-Chief

It’s strange, this is the ﬁrst time I’ve sat down for an editorial and realized I got nothin’ to really say. Normally I’d have some recent pet peeve to rant about or something, but I guess this means things are goin’ pretty smoothly.

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I’m sure I could stir up some commentary on the militant trap so many fans fall into where they blindly defend their obsession, trying to justify it or proselytizing and annoying everyone with it. Or I could open the Pandora’s Box on the discussion of digital piracy and how I don’t think it’s as clear cut as anyone on any side wants it to be. I could say that until we get real facts about it or determine exactly what kind of effect it has, we’re never going to “solve” it. I could, but I honestly don’t want to. There’s not much to say, and the whole situation’s pretty much a holy war as it is. Hell, almost anything gets to be a jihad for most rabid fans, whether they’re particular obsession happens to be anime or not. What I do want is to just sit around, play some Disgaea, watch some movies and then shoot the shit about ‘em. That’s what the magazine is supposed to be for – discussion. Talking about the stuff we think is really cool or just too horrible to not be shared. People just gotta remember that this is supposed to be fun. This is our hobby – not our life and certainly not the end of the world. If you aren’t enjoying this, then why are you doing it? Derek Guder Senior Editor

Anime To Watch For

Words by Derek Guder

Convention season is well underway now, and before everything gets announced we thought we’d give a brief introduction on some of the more interesting and more disappointing shows from the recent anime season. You’ll probably hear a few of these come up during industry panels or in press releases and hopefully this will provide some context for the news ﬂurries due for the rest of the summer.

Mahou Shoujo Tai Studio 4ºC is a rather low-profile studio that should be on everyone’s Awesome List. Everything I’ve seen pass their doors has stunningly unique design, from the animation and character designs all the way down to the simple color choices. Comedy, the animated short they did for the DVD magazine Grasshoppa!, is probably one of my favorite anime ever. When we got a new batch of trailers this year for upcoming shows, hidden in there was Studio 4ºC’s first television show: Mahou Shoujo Tai (apparently being called "Tweeny Witches" in English). Distinctive character designs along with shocking colors and cell-shaded digital animation turn what would otherwise be a pretty standard and average story of a schoolgirl falling into another world filled with the magic and wonder she’d

always been dreaming about into something truly remarkable and more than worth checking out. At times guilty of trying to pull off the GAINAX trick of conserving animation budget with "creative camera" angles and having the characters move and talk off-screen, the show seems like it doesn’t have a lot of money to toss around and what they do have is clearly being deliberately saved up for important action scenes. It’s not as deftly executed as GAINAX, but when Studio 4ºC is given the money to set everything in motion, that’s when their style and talent truly shine through and you’re forced to forgive them. The other ﬂaw of the show is the 10-minute episode format, which really hinders the ﬂow of the story. Once things get a chance to start

moving, it’s time to wrap them up, leaving everything feeling a bit rushed. Hopefully when we get a DVD release and can watch everything together, that won’t be as much of a problem.

Pugyuru

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With the amateurish character designs and talk about maids being involved, I was expecting the worst for this odd little show. When I finally got a chance to watch it, however, I was treated to a bizarre little piece of insanity instead of the pander I had anticipated. A heroine whose name is never fully pronounced gets a new maid, which is much different from what you might think. Maids are tiny people who come all the way from "maid kingdom" and are really just deranged. This little maid, Cheko-chan, is almost more like a living chew-toy or something. She floats in water, her head’s detachable, her body easily deforms, and she isn’t even capable of performing her maid duties ‘cause she’s just so small. The vacuum is dangerous. The show starts off weird even before the bumbling and maid-obsessed yakuza show up. Things escalate from there as we meet Chekochan’s friends, at least one of whom is a ghost who makes good shaved ice. To be more precise, she is shaved ice. Don’t be fooled by the simplistic and fan-art-ish designs, Pugyuru is a fine inheritor to the anime tradition of non-sequitor humor.

Disappointment From GAINAX: Kono Minikuku mo Utsukushii Sekai (This Ugly and Beautiful World) & Melody of Oblivion GAINAX has always been a "golden studio" for me: everything they’ve produced has turned out to be either brilliant or at least really good. Their worst stuff still has their distinctive ﬂair and measures up better than most other shows out there. This year, however, GAINAX seems dead-set on undermining that reputation with two shows that I desperately want to like but they just won’t let me. Melody of Oblivion has such a common premise that it’s almost depressing: demons actually run the world and only warriors who ride transforming combat motorcycles called Iver Machines can defeat them. It even lacks the usual GAINAX attention to detail and ﬂuid animation, since J.C. Staff is handling the actual anime production. It’s so thoroughly grounded in common anime clichés that the little distinctive GAINAX bits that do sneak in are shockingly out of place. The demons seem to have some effect where humans who witness their full power are literally turned into wooden puppets or stone statues. Conversations and battles are inter-cut with lines of giant baby dolls walking into a creepy bath house. Many of the establishing shots and expositions would be more at home in Revolutionary Girl Utena or even FLCL instead of what is otherwise a formula shounen story. It remains to be seen if the surreality alone can salvage the show, but so far Melody of Oblivion remains mired in its more mundane aspects.

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GAINAX’s other new show, however, is shackled by the mistakes of their last big hit. Kono Minikuku mo Utsukushii Sekai (This Ugly and Beautiful World) revisits the worst parts of Mahoromatic. Thankfully, it drops the whole maid angle and keeps the fanservice, but instead of indulging in the cute humor that made the previous show so great, KonoMini dives straight into the un-engaging and convoluted storyline that was Mahoromatic’s biggest ﬂaw. They even intentionally imported the same cast from that show to basically reprise their roles in new incarnations. Two girls with no memories of their past mysteriously appear in the forest and are basically adopted into the lives of the high school cast. Romantic antics ensue and every time the show seems content to wander down that familiar and amusing path, the plot manages to show up again to interfere. The laconic hero transforms into Devil-Man and kills a giant monster or something while there are hints that the mysterious girls are actually evil. Of course, the character who is introduced almost solely for the purpose of exposition just sits on the sideline being mysterious. Eventually we get the revelation that this is all tied to mass extinctions or something. Cue angstful moaning about "what’s the point of living if we’re all going to die anyway?" and it’s clear where this is heading. I’m still holding out hope that this train wreck can be salvaged, however. It’s gorgeously animated, of course, and all the details are executed with the deft skill that you’d expect from GAINAX – it’s the overall idea itself that’s the problem.

Maria-sama ga Miteru Soft music and soft colors typify this shoujo romance with a twist: there aren’t any boys. At an all-girls Catholic school, all the old familiar plots and passions play out among the young ladies against a backdrop or a rather convoluted and political student government. Subtle characterizations and sharp dialogue on par with the best of the Crest of the Stars series made the show an instant favorite among both general shoujo fans and yuri (lesbian romance) connoisseurs. A second season was recently announced, so everyone who thought that 13 episodes was far too short will have more to watch come the fall. Like Crest, Maria-sama ga Miteru ("The Virgin Mary is Watching") is based on an extensive series of novels. In the anime, young Yumi idolizes the cool and sophisticated Sachiko but is deeply conflicted when she is asked to be Sachiko’s petite souer, or "younger sister," where the older student effectively mentors the younger. At first she is concerned that Sachiko had some ulterior motive for the offer, but their relationship only blossoms from there. Arrayed around them are a variety of other beautiful young women with secrets and passions of their own. We get mere glimpses of some but a few develop into subplots and storylines surrounding Yumi and Sachiko. Geneon (Rondo Robe) is listed in the credits for the show but no official licensing announcement has been made. I expect one will be forthcoming before the end of the convention season and fans of character-driven stories or shoujo melodrama (or even just cute girls blushing over other cute girls) should keep an eye out for it. It’s well worth the attention.

Panda-Z Newtype USA recently did an overview of this quirky little show, but provided more information about the design goals and merchandizing than about the show itself. Combining the giant robots and villains of Mazinger Z with adorably cute animals (rabbits, dogs and, of course, pandas), the show has a very humorous sensibility. Beyond just having a little panda pilot a giant robot panda to ﬁght evil giant robot animal robots, that is.

The creators speciﬁcally said that they were going for an older audience than you might think from just looking at the design concepts. Panda-Z isn’t for the little kids; it’s for the older fans who smirk when they see bad-ass heroes and villains re-done as chibi robot animals (or "robonimals" as the show would say).

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Panda-Z follows the short episode formats common to a lot of weird Japanese comedies, but its actual style has little in common with crack-comedies like Di Gi Charat or Excel Saga. Rather it’s a laid-back and slow chuckler like Azumanga Daioh. Cuteness is mixed with parody and silliness and then given plenty of time to blend together before the punchline is delivered. The gags don’t ﬂy fast and furious. Instead each 5-minute episode is built around one idea or joke and is given time to develop. It’s often pretty clear where each episode is going, but they’re so short that it doesn’t matter, and the laughs come from the details: the looks on characters’ faces or watching someone trying to pilot a robot with a wired remote control.

Le Portrait de Petit Cossette The staff behind SoulTaker join forces with Yuki Kajiura (music for Noir and .hack) to produce a "goth mood" anime that’s sure to enrapture fans who adore lush visuals and masterful music. Of course, the show isn’t really interested in making much sense, but only one episode has come out so far, so perhaps things will become clearer as it progresses. Young Eiri manages an antique shop in a rather gothic part of town and becomes completely entranced by a particular glass that seems to hold all the colors of the rainbow within itself. Before long, neither he nor the audience really know what is reality and what is illusion. The past and the present blur as ﬂashbacks and hallucinations tell a tragic tale of maddening love, obsession, murder and undying vengeance. In true gothic fashion, love is a chain binding people to sins they didn’t commit. As is to be expected, the visuals are gorgeous. The animation and color palate are immediately reminiscent of the stark shadows and bright stained-glass motif from SoulTaker and the music, from the jap-goth opening to the moody background score, establishes an atmosphere in which it’s entirely plausible that a young man might fall in love with a ghost of a girl who died centuries ago. It remains to be seen if this will make any more sense than their previous works, but since it isn’t saddled with the standard transforming anime hero premise, they may be able to take Le Portrait de Petit Cossette much farther.

Midori no Hibi

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There’s something special about a show where the basic premise is that boy’s right hand literally becomes his girlfriend (ah, the irony). Seiji is a delinquent with a heart of gold who really just wants to have a normal girlfriend. He doesn’t really want to fight, but he keeps getting challenged and uses his "Devil’s Right Hand" to knock out anyone who attacks him. One morning he wakes to find that a young girl named Midori who has idolized him from afar has replaced his right hand. Both are rather confused, but for Midori it’s almost a dream come true. Despite his protests, Seiji certainly enjoys the attention himself and thus wacky hijinks ensue as they both try to find out just what happened while keeping it a secret from everyone. This is one of those ridiculous premises you only find in anime and manga, and despite the fact that it sounds like a sick joke it’s actually very cute. Miniature Midori is adorable and very vocal about her love for Seiji. I expect her to jump up and start cheering him on at any moment. The show is rather light-hearted and filled with opportunities for Seiji to show his feelings about Midori without actually admitting them, like any good shounen romance hero. The designs seem a little off from the manga, but the animation is lively and vibrant. Even people who aren’t fans of anime can get the basic joke and Midori no Hibi is shaping up to be one of the better romantic comedies of this season.

Kenran Butou Sai: The Mars Daybreak BONES should be a household name for any anime fan by now. RahXephon and The Cowboy Bebop Movie made a big splash and now Wolf’s Rain is on Cartoon Network. Their current masterpiece, Full Metal Alchemist, is set to join it in October of this year. Understandably, the studio’s new show was met with some high expectations. Many of the BONES trademark elements were there: distinctive character designs; a varied cast with really interesting incidental characters; smooth and gorgeous animation. The whole is far less than the sum of its parts, however, and Kenran Butou Sai: The Mars Daybreak just doesn’t amount to much. The show is about a pirate submarine sailing the seas of Mars and is ﬁlled with get-rich-quick schemes and underwater humanoid mecha ﬁghts. That’s right, submarines and underwater robots duking it out. On Mars. The basic premise itself is a little off-center and all of those trademark elements seem misapplied. The large cast has great designs (and includes a talking dolphin) but all the best ones fall to the most tangential characters; the less important you are to the show, apparently the cooler you get to look. Meanwhile the central hero not only looks like the stereotype with his spiky hair, but he’d give Tamahome a run for his money for the title of "Most Mercenary Attitude in Anime."

Monster Based on a long-running and famous manga, Monster starts far from Japan. Beginning as a serious medical drama in Germany, Dr. Tenma loses his career and his ﬁancé for defying the director of his hospital to save the life of a pair of twins found at the scene of a violent murder. Then, the director and Tenma’s other political rivals are all found dead, and the twins are missing. The mystery is left unsolved and, a decade later, the doctor has risen quite far due to their deaths – and then strange murders begin again. Trying to save a patient’s life, Dr. Tenma discovers that the murderer to be none other than the male twin he had saved years before. The child has grown into a cold, calculating killer – even as a boy he could have been called a monster. Tenma saved the boy’s life, he’s almost a father to him in that sense, and feeling a sense of responsibility for loosing this terror on the world, he sets out to stop him. Meanwhile, the police suspect the doctor of being the true culprit.

There aren’t any cute, bouncy girls or humorous gags to distract from the dark tone, but this is a must-see for fans of more serious and mature anime that features three-dimensional protagonists instead of spunky heroes trying to be the strongest in the world.

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It sounds like some conspiracy story and the realistically drawn show could give any Hollywood thriller a run for its money. Its dark atmosphere and slow pace quickly draw the viewer in. It’s hard not to empathize with the conﬂicted doctor as he struggles to ﬁnd a way to do the "right thing" and wrestles with his guilt. The titular monster is a perfect amoral murderer, a killing machine with no conscience. And the obsessive-compulsive police detective on everyone’s trail has a stare that burns through the screen.

The first several episodes revolve around our hero falling in with the pirates and ultimately joining them to make some easy money. There are a number of underwater mecha fights, and to make sure that he’s not left out, a super-advanced "Round Buckler" (humanoid fighting robot) shows up out of nowhere, takes him into the cockpit only to reveal that he’s a natural ace pilot. Who’d have expected that, right? There’s an interesting subplot between the male lead and a new female military recruit hunting down the pirates, but that’s resolved before it can be fully developed and the show is left with his Robin Hood act and a supporting cast that should have its own show instead. I suspect that a lot of these flaws derive from the fact that this is all based on a PS2 game, and we all know how anime adaptations of games usually turn out.

Sensei no Ojikan Comparisons between Sensei no Ojikan and Azumanga Daioh are going to come up and they are far from unfounded. Being a show about a number of bizarre students and their strange teacher through humorous mis-adventures, it’s inevitable. This new show isn’t as consistently funny as the latter, but has much of the same charm. It’s got simple, cute characters designs and gag-centric storylines featuring a classroom full of freaks. There’s the gay guy who obsesses over an idiotic classmate, the otaku, the sarcastic girl, a cross-dresser and a tall, beautiful girl who is in love with the teacher – because she looks like a grade-school student. Most of the jokes are centered around the handful of character traits each cast member has. Not often surprising, they do usually elicit a chuckle and in particular the teacher’s interaction with her family and her exasperation with her students are the funniest running gags. A lot of the appeal of the show lies in the clean and simple designs that are almost chibi or SD, as well as the general aesthetic that appears in the coloring and title cards (very similar to that of Bottle Fairies, another recent show from the same director). There’s some cute meta commentary on the characters during their antics. On the whole, however, it would be a fairly average show with a nice style and sense of humor were it not for its similarities to Azumanga Daioh. Fans from both shows are sure the have a knockdown, drag-out ﬁght over which one is a clone of the other, but everyone else can just go enjoy Sensei no Ojikan when they’re going through Azu-withdrawal.

Sergeant Keroro

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The manga is already on the shelves under the title Sgt. Frog thanks to TOKYOPOP, so the Keronian invasion of Earth (and America in speciﬁc) has already begun. There’s just something about incompetent aliens trying to conquer Earth that’s just so much fun. Created by the mind that brought us Arcade Gamer Fubuki, this series is far more family-friendly. No passion panties in this one, just alien frog-like beings who would easily take over the world, if they weren’t so easily distracted by Gundam models or pressed into indentured servitude doing housework. Starting in media res, unlike the manga, the anime jumps right into the Hinata household, which has just about adopted Sergeant Keroro – they’ve even given him his own room, though Nastume, the sister, abuses him and seems to be the only one who remembers the frog’s stated goal of world domination. Not that the show is really overly concerned with that itself. The invasion is far from imminent. The show itself is well-produced and quite funny. Manically swinging from one mood to another, all the characters are so bizarre that the writers just need to set them in motion and let them bounce off each other and the jokes just about make themselves. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the opening song is a duet between a karate master and a pop star, and that the funky ending features dancing CGI frogs sporting enormous afros.

ARTICLES Why do certain things frighten us? Is it the threat of our untimely demise? Or the horrors of the unknown? How does Japanese New Wave Horror differ from the usual “jump and frighten” formula so popular in the West? What are the similarities between the two? This issue, we try and take a look at this very basic emotion and how recent movies and games tap into it. We also cover the entirety of the DotHack world and help you realize that there’s more to Japanese TV than anime. Read on if you dare!

Artwork by Jeremiah Colonna-Romano

Japanese New Wave Horror p. 12 Ringu vs. The Ring p.20 DotHack//Franchise p.24 Living People Also Good p. 26

There’s something distinctive about it, something both familiar and unsettling. It’s an uneasy feeling, a foreboding dread settling on your spirit. The unique atmosphere of a Japanese new wave horror movie is alien to most Hollywood horror productions. Spreading like wildﬁre in the late 90’s with huge hits like The Ring (Ringu), the new style immediately established a strong cult following and drew worldwide attention. Indeed, Holly-

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wood purchased remake rights to a number of films, not just The Ring, whose American version was released in theaters last year. There are a number of things which separate Japanese from traditional horror films. Under a subdued atmosphere, everything feels almost stifled or oppressive, with slow or even languid pacing as the film concentrates on heightening tension instead of brief shocking scenes. Characters often have a cold or distant demeanor, suffering in a world where the mundane has been twisted into the horrific, often for little or no reason, possibly without even any hope of release.

Japanese new wave horror is not a cathartic journey of danger and ultimate victory over evil. There is no guarantee that the “heroes”, such as they are, have any chance of surviving or even understanding what is happening to them. Even the audience may remain in the dark, only able to grasp at hints and suggestions. Instead of sharply illustrating a moral lesson or illustrating the triumph of justice, the ﬁlm tries to do just the opposite, engendering a sense of uneasiness or a suspicion that the world has been warped and twisted - even perverted.

Style You can often immediately recognize a new wave horror film with just a few scenes or images. Slow, quiet, subdued and dark all describe the movies for what they are. With exceptions such as the slick and polished Inugami, film quality is poor or grainy (either by design or budget constraints) with dull and washed-out colors while the lighting is often limited with long shadows stretching across the screen. Many new wave films play with the medium even further by using hand-held cameras to create very personal and immediate scenes, serving to draw the viewer even farther into the subtly unnatural world depicted. While much of this was due to financial concerns, especially for the first few movies that started the movement, what would otherwise be a handicap has been coopted to further bolster the atmosphere.

Perversion of the Familiar The most prominent and unique themes of Japanese new wave horror is its continual perversion of the familiar and mundane. Elements from daily life are

The infamous videotape in The Ring is a perfect example of something so utterly mundane and undeniably harmless becoming an object of terror. In Inugami, however, it is a traditional Japanese family living in a remote village that is subtly and almost imperceptibly warped. Similarly, Nami in St. John’s Wort reveals more and more about her intensely tainted nuclear family as her own horrific history unfolds before her. In all cases, whatever is twisted is omnipresent in the film, and something that is normally completely overlooked or harmless. No one fears a videotape or a cell phone, after all. There is nothing inherently horrific or frightful about it, until it is reshaped and warped as the focus of everything that is terrifying in the movie. Very quickly, the most mundane of things takes on entirely new meaning in this new context as our perception of the world grows increasingly skewed as the tension builds. This rarely happens with just one thing. Instead, that first distorted, but familiar, object or action becomes a catalyst affecting everything it contacts, even if only mildly. Little is safe from this tainted touch; the most common targets are the innocent or pure, particularly children, women, nature and close familial relationships, or those with life-long friends. We are robbed of symbols of safety and security, tilting the warping of the universe within the movie even further.

Isolation Just as apparent, and actually serving to conceal this perversion in some cases, is a pervading sense of isolation. From their friends, from their family, from each other or from the entire world - the protagonists never feel comfortable with anyone. Perhaps as a reﬂection of the stereotypically cold Japanese family life or the increasing percentage of marriages ending in separation or divorce, broken families are common. A single parent and only child often struggle to save themselves or protect one another, usually with limited success.

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Beyond the technical production, what defines the style more than anything else is directorial method. Understated and subdued, the new wave horror movie relies more on suggestion than clear depiction for virtually all of its impact. Slow and deliberate pacing slowly brews a sense of tension that is rarely released until the final climax of the film, instead of having several startling peaks designed to frighten the audience more and more as it progresses. The viewer is aware that something is lurking in the shadows, but rarely gets more than a glimpse until everything is revealed in the end, if then. There is no rush to expose the horror and lay it bare. Not only does that run counter to the mood created by the rest of the movie, but the emphasis is never on the monster or force itself. Instead the audience’s attention is focused on the story’s background and the characters’ motivations, adding in elements of mystery to the horror atmosphere.

swept up in a greater horror and recast as something ominous and frightening. This isn’t limited to physical objects, either. Indeed, it is social relationships that are often the ﬁrst victim of this corruption.

In the iconic Ringu, the single mother Reiko stumbles across the deadly video tape and races to save herself and her son, leading her back to her ex-husband in desperation. In St. John’s Wort, despite being coworkers and even having a romantic history with each other, the two unfortunate video game creators never truly understand or communicate with each other. One is consumed by work and the other her unknown and horrifying past. Throughout Kairo, characters routinely complain of being unable to connect with anyone else until the climactic ending where that becomes almost literal fact. Whether subtly expressed in the awkward relationships of the main characters or through over-the-top isolation on an apocalyptic scale, agonizing loneliness is often the primary impetus for much of the ﬁlm. The characters are often motivated by a desperate need to belong or be acknowledged, anything to escape being ignored or left alone. Similarly, the motivation of the central horror can often be traced back to some extreme isolation or abandonment – assuming there is any explanation provided at all.

Nihilism And when it all comes down to it in the end, it usually doesn’t matter at all. Not only may there not be a happy ending or a triumphant return for our heroes, but there may not have been any meaning behind everything they suffered. The back story is often the focus of the new wave horror movie, but this serves as a vehicle for that unsettling perversion rather than exposition. Being shown what happened in the past to bring about this horriﬁc culmination is vastly different from understanding the ultimate why of the whole thing. This disregard for explanation ﬁnds itself manifest in a number of different ways, from an inescapable inevitability to a shocking callousness - or even simple incomprehensibility.

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Why is the small village of Uzumaki at the mercy of “harmless” spirals that infect and distort literally everything in the town? We’re given a brief glimpse at what might have been the history of this corruption, but certainly no explanation. It happens because it can. Why does the devilishly charismatic an-

tagonist of Angel Dust bend everyone around him to his will? Because he can. Why does the titular character of Tomie return relentlessly to twist all the men she meets around her finger and torture the women? Because that is simply what she is: a monstrous force of nature and personification of raw desire. It may seem unsatisfying to not have all the loose ends tied up, but removing that comfort is precisely the point. Stripping away a reason for everything takes the film farther from a “movie universe” and closer to ours. Despite wildly supernatural elements often woven in from the very beginning, the lack of an over-arching “plan” to have everything “make sense” strikes close to home for most people. Doubt is an experience inherent to humanity, and it’s the currency in which the new wave horror movie pays for its thrills and chills.

Through a Mirror Darkly Ultimately, all of this is a caricature of the real world. New wave horror is a reaction to and a product of a world where people feel increasingly isolated from each other in a world that just doesn’t seem to make any sense, with the comforting warped and corrupted into something unsettling or unclean. What this may say about Japanese society is best left for another article and a more educated author, but the popularity of the movement speaks to the universality of the sentiment. Similar themes show up in a wide range of American entertainment, for example. Nihilism and isolation provide the groundwork for a world in which capitalism has virtually replaced religion, the government and sometimes even the family in the dystopic world of the cyberpunk genre. This is a remarkably apt comparison, as it shows another, fainter common element to much of new wave horror. As society changes more and more, rushing to keep up with technology and globalization, all the familiar institutions of the past bend and warp under the stress, often leaving people with little or no connection to each other or direction in life. Whether channeled directly through technology (The Ring, Kairo) or shown in old society warped into a modern form (Angel Dust, Audition), the comfortable past is bent and twisted into something almost alien. The devil you know is reborn as the devil you can’t even understand.

Uzumaki

Angel Dust While it is unlikely to be included in any official catalogue of new wave films, the powerful and subtle Angel Dust is quite at home among the rest of these movies, sharing virtually all the same elements. Like Audition, it lacks any overtly supernatural elements, instead focusing on the very human (if not quite normal) cast. Almost as much of a murder-mystery or thriller as a horror movie, Angel Dust has managed to escape most people’s notice, despite its evocative presentation. Closely tied to Japan’s recent history, the movie follows a series of inexplicable murders that plague early morning commuters. As a criminal psychologist, Setsuko tries to uncover some kind of connection between the victims that can be used to track down the killer. Following the only evidence she has to a seemingly blissful cult, her own free will comes into question when she tries to confront her past. Behind this detective story are the three familiar elements in new wave horror, isolation being the most prominent. Specifically, it is the power of isolation, or at least the weakness of the human mind in the face of it. From general society to cult to re-education clinic, the desperate need for acceptance and acknowledgement is shown as perhaps mankind’s most deeply powerful motivation. It is the small things that are warped in Angel Dust, as characters begin to start doubting themselves on even a subconscious level. And as the movie closes and this betrayal of the self under the inevitable weight of loneliness reaches its conclusion, we find no comprehensible explanation behind the tragedy.

Audition

Getting lonely in his older years, Aoyama is persuaded by a friend to hold a mock audition for a fictional movie, providing him with a wide selection of possible paramours. Immediately fixating on one perfect beauty in particular, he finds himself intoxicated with happiness as he begins to court her and she

While this may sound something like a remake of Basic Instinct, this is not a thriller by any means. A very deliberate movie, Aoyama’s isolation from virtually everyone around him is made abundantly clear. Aside from his relationship with his son (who seems to understand far more about his father than Aoyama does himself) and his friend (who provided him with the morally questionable plan in the ﬁrst place), he is painfully oblivious to the lives of those around him. He is so lonely, in fact, that he actually goes through with the audition plan and soon ﬁnds himself in love, unaware of how his world has begun to warp dangerously around him as he learns more and more about the object of his affections. And in the end there is no pleasant wrap-up or solution, though you may be of the opinion that Aoyama brought his doom upon himself.

Kakashi (Scarecrow) Another movie based on one of Junji Ito’s popular horror manga (as Uzumaki and Tomie were), Kakashi is perhaps the weakest of the three, suffering from a limited budget, poor acting and a crudely implemented premise. At the same time, the creator’s trademark style shows through more than once. Patient and forgiving viewers, as well as any fan of Ito’s work, may want to check this out if they get the chance. Trying to chase down her missing brother, Kaoru arrives in a small town with an unhealthy obsession with scarecrows. The inhospitable townsfolk outright refuse to help her until she stumbles into the father of a childhood friend – the self-same friend that had sent a letter to her brother just before his disappearance, which is her only clue to his whereabouts. Despite repeated warnings to leave, she cannot abandon her brother and ﬁnds herself trapped in a tiny village cut off from the rest of the world as the wall between life and death begins to erode to nothing. Despite its ﬂawed implementation, Kakashi is a relatively good example of the style. Traveling through one of those long, narrow, dark tunnels that Ito is so fond of using, the outside world is quickly left behind, replaced with an insular village populated by what seem to be paranoid scarecrow worshippers. A far cry from the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, these creations are clearly malevolent, thoroughly tainted by whatever evil force has corrupted this village on the edge of life and death. There is no real explanation as to how this all came to pass, either. Perhaps it was the translation I had, but the only reason even hinted drew upon the Japanese myth of a scarecrow attracting the attention (good and bad) of the gods, and the bitter resentment of the girl who had sent the letter to Kaoru’s brother.

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Superﬁcially a break from form for the over-thetop shock director Takashi Miike, Audition may actually be his most disturbing movie. Calm, collected, methodical and clearly insane, the ﬁlm slowly simmers between unsettling and pleasant before almost very literally breaking apart into a shattered landscape of madness, pain and horror. It is, of course, highly recommended, though it is also not for everyone.

returns his affections. Of course, all that seems perfect in the beginning becomes something altogether more sinister before long.

A WEEK OF TERROR THE BEST NEW WAVE HORROR

For a week-long whirlwind tour of new wave horror, I’d recommend starting with the best (and strangest) titles:

Monday The Ring (Ringu) It’s the ﬂagship of the entire style, and well worth all the accolades and acclaim. It’s the perfect place to begin.

Tuesday Audition Slick and polished, it’s a much more “mundane” horror story in a prettier package.

Wednesday

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Angel Dust Take a mid-week break to ﬁnd out what happens when you add a dash of mystery and suspense to the equation.

The Ring Franchise It all began with The Ring (Ringu), at least on an international scale. Almost single-handedly, the widely acclaimed masterpiece created a cult following for new wave horror across the world. The fans appeared overnight and the sequels and knock-offs weren’t far behind. Soon there was a sequel that attempted to provide some history, context and explanation for the murderous villain of its predecessor, a prequel that desperately tried to humanize her, a Japanese television series and dozens of clones produced all around Asia (particularly Korea). Perhaps more noteworthy is the American remake produced by Dreamworks. Both the original Japanese and the American remake are highly recommended. The sequels and various assorted spin-offs and knock-offs are really of interest only for the die-hard fans, and even then it’s a very mixed bag. Revolving around a mysterious video tape that inevitably brings about the death of whoever watches it one week after, it is a story of unrelenting anger and hatred. A skeptical reporter is exposed to the frightening images on the bootleg tape and very quickly becomes a believer. With less than a week left, she tries to uncover its secret before it claims the lives of all those she holds dear. In the form of the cursed video tape, The Ring almost casts “perversion of the familiar” as a character in and of itself, but largely limits itself to that one iconic element. While the nihilism of new wave horror is evident in the lack of meaning behind the whole sequence of events and one of the big twists near the end, isolation is quietly woven throughout the ﬁlm. Despite her impassioned desperation to save her son, Reiko barely interacts with him, and the boy himself is almost deathly lifeless and passive at times. Similarly, her relationship with her ex-husband is strained at best. We see glimmers of hope, but not for long. Finally, the closest we ever get to an explanation for everything is a conclusion the viewer has to draw: isolation, abandonment and betrayal all lay at the root of the evil.

Kairo (Pulse)

Inugami

I was told that Kairo (Pulse) was superior to The Ring in every way, but I must admit being rather disappointed when I ﬁnally had a chance to see it. It has more of that familiar cheesiness of Asian cinema, and the quality of the acting failed to overcome that. It has an intriguing high concept, however, and is perhaps the most clearly distilled new wave horror movie I have yet seen.

Perhaps the most visually impressive of the movies presented here, Inugami may also be the most tragic in the classical sense. With a strong air of a Greek tale of tragedy and woe, it has a very distinct feel from its compatriots. A deeply sensual movie, it has been accused of being a visually stunning but vapid romp through the violation of nearly every taboo sacred to civilization. A clear clash between the past and the present, Inugami also has one of those plot twists that make all the puzzling little moments in the beginning of the ﬁlm just click right into place.

Beginning almost innocently, a missing friend is revealed as having apparently committed suicide and a mysterious web site has begun circulating online, asking “Do you want to meet a ghost?” It escalates quickly and soon everyone begins to feel the same isolation and almost crippling loneliness. Then rooms sealed with red tape start appearing everywhere and people begin disappearing – or perhaps just fading away. And this all seems to be happening because the world of ghosts has simply ﬁlled up.

Like Angel Dust, Inugami is included among the other new wave horror movies for the way that it feels, for its unmistakable style. Much grander than the rest, it still manages to share much of the same subdued and unnerving atmosphere. Isolation plays a relatively minor role, primarily in the form of the family’s distance from the rest of the village and Miki’s attempt to avoid her own past and nature. The ﬁlm clearly operates in a cold, meaningless universe, however, providing no explanation for the curse the family’s women labor under. It is that very family, however, that shows the clearest signs of the new wave movement. An artifact of the past, it is slowly crumbling under the forces of the modern world, having been twisted into a sick parody of what it once may have been by its past and the curse.

St. John’s Wort While Inugami may be the most visually impressive of the new wave movies, St. John’s Wort may be the most surreal and experimental. A number of different cameras are used to various effect, from stable shots to a shaky handheld to creepy voyeuristic surveillance cameras. Color is never a constant either, shifting like a dream from one extreme to another and then back to normal. Deep maroons and reds often dominate the screen, giving the entire movie a dream-like quality. The premise of a video game designer researching his next project is played up as many “real” scenes unfold using text-boxes or cinematography typical of

St. John’s Wort Begin the trip into madness with a touch of the surreal.

Friday Uzumaki As the work week ends, abandon all pretense of reality for the absurd.

Saturday Inugami Sometimes you need to remind yourself that Japanese movies can be just about a pretty as American ones.

Sunday The Ring (2002) Being the day of rest, why not take a moment to sit back and watch it all come full circle as the whole thing is cast through an American lens.

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Kairo is the purest expression of the basic elements of a new wave horror movie, despite any faults it may have. Isolation is unquestionably the central focus at all times, so much so that is actually becomes physically manifested with increasing frequency as the movie progresses. At ﬁrst, it appears only in warped mundane forms – empty rooms, red duct-taped doors, almost drone-like reactions from some characters, the ghost watch web site that functions like a window to the problems in the world – but it moves far beyond that. While we are given an explanation of why this apocalypse is happening, its inevitability is stressed again and again. There is nothing special about the circumstances that acted as a catalyst. Anything would have worked and the survivors can take no refuge in any reason for all their suffering.

Miki, an aging paper maker, finds herself remarkably revitalized as she begins a passionate romance with the new young teacher who has moved into town. But as their affair heats up, the townsfolk whisper that the vengeful inugami, the cursed dog-spirits reputedly bound to Miki’s family, have been set loose. Old tensions between the villagers and her traditional aristocratic family flare up again until the truth about the past is released in a flood of catastrophe worthy of Shakespeare.

Thusday

Japanese horror RPGs or even dating sims. Culminating in the shocking ending(s), it all makes for a very unique film. What can be separated from the game-story or the “real” story of the movie is difficult to pin down, but Nami asks her ex-boyfriend and video game designer to accompany her as she explores the old mansion she just inherited from a father she had never met. He decides to document the trip as research for the basis of his next game, but things quickly change as they uncover the secrets of Nami’s heritage - along with a number of mummified children. Someone tries to kill them more than once before they can learn the ultimate truth of what happened to the twin Nami never knew she had. Unbelievably creepy throughout the entire film, its most remarkable trait after its surreal presentation is that we barely ever see the antagonist in any capacity at all until very near to the end. Instead, the real horror of the movie lies in Nami’s past and her father as they uncover more and more about what had happened in this mansion. As a contrast to the extreme visual presentation, understatement and suggestion are the strengths of the story. Nami and the family she never knew she lost are tied together by familial bonds twisted by obsession and madness. Shut away from the outside world, the same madness calls in her blood as she tries to finds a place for herself within her long-lost family.

Tomie

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Originally a collection of short manga stories by Junji Ito, the movie adaptation takes the basic idea and creates yet another story around it. Easily one of the most overt of the new wave horror movies, Tomie is almost a slasher flick, with plenty of innuendo punctuated by brutal and bloody violence. Oftentimes a far cry from the repressed and reserved air typical of the style, not unlike the other Ito adaptations, it still holds the central elements at its core. Many viewers find it clichéd or derivative, and in many ways it is, but it is also the most concrete of the movie versions of Junji Ito’s manga. The one common element to all the manga storylines was Tomie herself: a perfect model of the ideal Japanese girl. Beautiful, polite and proper, she is also unstoppable and filled with an unquenchable hatred for virtually everyone. The relentless horror movie villain, her influence grows from the smallest seed, just as her body regenerates from any tiny portion of flesh. Men find it impossible to resist her and women find it impossible to stop her, or perhaps to stop becoming her. Though her presence is initially heralded by the unnatural behavior she causes, Tomie makes little attempt to really conceal that titular character’s nature. Instead it is more concerned with the lives of those around her and the revelation of her past. She is almost a force of nature in her inexorable impact on everyone she contacts. Callous inevitability stands above Tomie’s warping effect or the alienation and isolation she brings as the primary element of the movie, though much of its impact is found in her unnatural state.

Uzumaki (Spiral) Like Kairo, Uzumaki is another film that has all the elements of new wave horror almost just about boiled down and laid out for display, but it places a thick layer of surrealism over everything. Many find the movie almost silly or campy, but its over-the-top antics simply make the entire thing so absurd that the strange behavior of much of the cast seems normal in comparison to the malignant infection of spirals and swirls through the tiny village. Not even attempting the deadly serious air that most of the other new wave movies carry, Uzumaki is as fun as it is creepy. It’s worth noting that the movie does differ significantly from the manga in many ways, though it starts out from the same seed and incorporates many of the same scenes. In a small town by the sea (again, cut off from the rest of the world by a narrow tunnel), any semblance of a normal life is swept away as spirals infect every aspect of the town, from its physical appearance to the actions of its residents. As the spirals’ influence grows, it doesn’t take long for Shuichi, a young boy with the charisma of a Lovecraftian hero, to veritably barricade himself in his house, refusing to expose himself to the madness. The story is told from the point of view of his girlfriend Kirie, however, who has an inexplicable love for him. We follow her story as she is drawn further and further into the spiral. Like The Ring, the perversion and warping of every day life takes center stage in Uzumaki. To a greater degree than any of the other films, the transformation of a simple spiral into an ultimate and unknowable evil that unstoppably corrupts everything is really the central character or focus of the movie. It serves more than just to twist the mundane, however, as the spiral isolates everyone, insulating them in their own madness. The town spirals away from the rest of the world as the townsfolk twist away from each other. And all of these events are the result of some alien motivation or purpose that is simply beyond human understanding, if there even is any meaning behind it all. There is a brief attempt at an exploration of the history of the spiral infestation in the town, but even that is quite literally cut short. The plague of murderous geometry isn’t meant to be understood or averted, it’s meant to be simply witnessed with horrified wonder. Words by Derek Guder Pictures by Jeremiah Colonna-Romano

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りんぐ (Ringu) America Style...

Cultural Relevance elevates the original above a brilliant remake

Ringu is a seminal work in Japan. The film is far from perfect, but it is forthright, bare and poetic. Its simplicity derives from its makers’ reverence for the source novel, and what must have been innate resonance with its gestalt, if not the rational certainty of Ringu’s causality and physics. Additional money spent on effects might have detracted from its charm. Creators of The Ring had the advantages of more source material, money and ambition, and almost succeed in translating Ringu into terrifying Americana. The failure of The Ring is not any lack of beauty and brilliance, but a lack of unshakable dread. Ringu’s mix of ancient and modern phobias was not translated into terrors which resonate with American audiences (and critics). Both films garner similar popular support on Amazon or The Internet Movie Database, but strikingly different reactions from film critics (see site Rotten Tomatoes). Ringu is practically revered by horror fans and film critics, The Ring is not. Celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote of the film, “Rarely has a more serious effort produced less serious result.” He was not the only critic haunted by its wasted potential. While The Ring has been a considerable success (with a sequel in the works), imagine if it had really connected with its audience. If The Ring were as successful here as Ringu had been in Japan, it would rival the success of such preeminent works as The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project. Yet it is mysterious how an intellect like Roger Ebert, a critic quite familiar with Asian cinema and anime, could miss the obvious hook of The Ring. Most fans of Japanese culture walked into The Ring having read of the novels (as background on Ringu), and it must otherwise be extremely easy to dismiss such a complex story with so many distracting details. Imagine watching 8 1/2 and just not getting it. Ebert’s reaction is important because it is true and symbolic. He recognizes the essential craft of The Ring, but neglects the reason it fails to connect. The story is to blame, not because it doesn’t make sense, but because its cultural significance did not translate. If The Ring had been culturally relevant, it might have inspired more thought, or at least more tribute and fright.

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What Is The Conundrum? If you have not seen either film, or read the book, the story is an invented ‘urban legend’ about a videotape. Viewers of the cursed video are doomed to die exactly seven days after watching the tape. The narrative common to all versions of Ringu is that a reporter investigates this urban legend. Upon realizing a niece and her three friends were all victims, the reporter actually searches out the videotape. Of course, our skeptical reporter watches the video. The experience of this viewing, and other clues convince the protagonist that the clock is indeed ticking. Now what is interesting is that the book makes it clear that there is a trapdoor, there is only one way to survive... The films do not reveal this as a crucial plot device, and instead introduce a traditional ghost story resolution as false cadence. In the films, the cursed video is a mystery, and even if that mystery is solved, such does not guarantee a charm for breaking the curse. Each version of the story is focused on tracking down the source of the video, and how to foil its curse. The Ring is based more on the Ringu film than the book, but its symbolism acknowledges an essential element of the source novel. The problem is that if you know the mechanics of the curse, you recognize how Ringu side-stepped it, but The Ring embraces it with inspired surrealism. Both films add brilliant improvisations to the base story, while avoiding some glaring brilliance of the novel, but the generous explication and self-awareness of the remake led many viewers to question its puzzling details. Unfortunately, The Ring lacks commitment, it plays with the secret of the curse, but wants to retain the cloak of ambiguity assumed by the original

film. The story is about a female psychic who was traumatized by her community, and eventually murdered. Through the video, she curses viewers. It would seem victims all succumb to a supernatural force, and yet... So the conundrum, if you know the victims of the video are killed by a virus, the films largely make sense. In no way do I mean to discount obvious inconsistencies in the films, but truthfully, they make sense. Some viewers will reject this as preposterous, and prefer to just accept Sadako/Samara as malevolent force, either ghostly or animistic (think kami, or native Japanese deity). The Ringu-based novels delve into this in great detail, and while synopsis of these works might read like farce, they can be likened to the serious fare of Michael Crichton (e.g. Jurassic Park). So the books apparently propose virtual psychic bioterrorism seriously (though I suspect the author enjoyed mixing such crazy salad), the original film emphasizes psychic intuition and malevolent haunting while allowing a virus interpretation, and the remake uses those aspects of the original film. But The Ring cannot use psychic powers and haunting in exactly the same way as Ringu because these ideas rely on Japanese superstitions, so what comes across, if your interpretation is tainted by knowledge of the virus mechanism, is that infection by the virus makes its victims psychic. The Ring Virus was engineered to torment its victims with the horrors experienced by its creator, to burden humanity with her misery. Back to our conundrum, if you understand this about the films, you possess a rare insight (if you happen to be in America). In fact, cognitive dissonance will ensure you encounter hostile reaction to this interpretation. Knowledge of the virus before you see the films makes it obvious, but would any of us realize this possible explanation without peeking at the source novels?

The Passion Of One Father Koji Suzuki wrote four books dealing with the characters and themes of Ringu. Aside from the surface horror and science-fiction pleasures of these works, there is also serious commentary on the dystopia of Japan (and by extension, all industrialized media-driven cultures). The films offer wonderful explorations of nihilism and the intense pressures of modern life on children and parents, but the shared themes of toxic mass consumerism, intolerance, and the terrors and obligations of parenthood are all present in the Ringu novel. Analyzing how the books and films are related is difficult because of a dearth of material in English. Aside from one principle resource, The Ringworld website maintained by J. Lopez, there is little discussion of Suzuki’s novels. Two novels, Ring (Ringu) and Spiral (Rasen), are available in translations from Vertical, Inc. Reading various interviews, a few interesting details of Suzuki’s life are important to his works. First, he was inspired by compelling ideas, such as

Rarely has a more serious effort produced a less serious result than in The Ring....Enormous craft has been put into the movie, which looks just great, but the story goes beyond contrivance into the dizzy realms of the absurd. —Roger Ebert that of four people dying at the same time. Which is not to say Suzuki never developed his stories, but he wrote Ringu without having worked out the cure until the very end. Such stream-of-consciousness creativity has resulted in a work of deep personal and cultural relevance. Second, Suzuki was a stay-at-home father, an unusual role for a Japanese man. Suzuki’s experience of parenting, and his stated dread of losing his family, are present in

バースデイ (Birthday): Three short stories set within the Ring universe. The theme of birth is common to each story... Sora ni Ukabu Histugi (Floating Cofﬁn): Mai Takano tells of her ordeal after watching the cursed video. Lemonheart: Suzuki humanizes Sadako in this story of her romance with Toyama while working with the Hisho Acting Troupe. Happy Birthday: Kaoru lords over the Loop while anticipating the voyeurism of Reiko, his real world lover. The books offer several interesting conceits. One example is that of the doppelganger: reality-versus-Loop, how the evil and good aspects of Sadako were isolated from each other to limit her power, and even how Suzuki claims Takayama and Asakawa are both modelled upon conﬂicting aspects of himself.

Ringu: Waking Up Dread Ringu is the top grossing domestic horror movie of all time in Japan, and led directly to a boom in similar films (see Japanese New Wave Horror for an introduction). Several such films were derivative, and the fad seems to have receded. The Ring has done well in Japan, however, so these remakes could help revive the genre. A series of revelations guide Asakawa and Takayama to Sadako’s resting place. The story is rich, and there are many details uncovered as our victims become ensnared by the cursed video, but reaching an ostensible confrontation with Sadako requires roughly ten clues, with the last being a desperate realization that the phone only rang in Izu! The film is beautiful, with the title shot of dark, roiling ocean water. Its opening scene is of two high school girls (Tomoko and Misami) discussing an urban myth. A young boy watched a strange video in Izu and died one week later. Tomoko’s progression from concern to sly theatrics and palpable fear is well done. The girls’ relief when discovering it’s only Tomoko’s mother on the phone is effective foreshadowing. Unfortunately, Tomoko has a preordained visit... Reiko Asakawa investigates this same urban myth. She is first seen in a cafe interviewing high school girls about the cursed video. Back in the newsroom, Asakawa decides to investigate further in Izu. Attending the funeral of her niece, Asakawa learns she and her three friends all died at the same time. Another friend had to be institutionalized (Misami). Using a clue obtained in Tomoko’s room, Asakawa tracks down the cursed video in Izu. She is so shaken by the experience, Asakawa enlists the aid of Ryuji Takayama, an estranged lover and the father of her child. Ryuji’s intellect and character will drive their sleuthing. This strong narrative arc sets the story in motion. The cursed video of the novel features Mount Mihara, and pouring lava. The key clue of the cursed video in both films is hidden. The Ringu cursed video features subtle audio with a cryptic rhyme in dialect local to Izu, rather like America has various distinctive local dialects (e.g. Creole and Cajun). Key images from Ringu’s version also include a document with the kanji for “eruption” (which leads directly to news articles on Shizuko Yamamura), and the shrouded man pointing at the ocean. Shrouded man appears as a chilling apparition to guide Asakawa in crucial moments. A cool trick pulled in the cursed video is showing the eye of Sadako with a reflection of the kanji sada, or chaste. Seems like just another clue, but it is also a pun in the homonym-heavy Japanese language, as the word for eye is me, and sadame means destiny. Ringu contains a number of such small flourishes. One great element of Ringu missing from the remake is scene of Shizuko Yamamura demonstrating her telepathic abilities. She is denounced as a charlatan, and Sadako responds by killing the heckler via psychic attack. The scene plays out as a flashback of Shizuko’s cousin aided by Ryuji’s own abilities, but Sadako manifests inside their shared vision and grabs Asakawa leaving a real bruise on her arm. Such events are ambiguous, leaving open the explanation of Sadako’s curse as either supernatural or scientific (though with a taint of the paranormal). Aside from the frightful interaction of Sadako, this all has the feel of historical footage. Director Hideo Nakata took inspiration from some famous fright films for some of the more ingenious departures from the novel. Sadako emerg-

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surprising explorations of gender and moral perversion. りんぐ (Ringu): Asakawa Kazuyuki is the journalist. He enlists the aid of Ryuji Takayama, a university lecturer in psychology. Ryuji embodies selfprofessed misogynistic history, such as one might associate with an aggressive chikan. Ringu is like a Japanese Your Friends & Neighbors as it explores stereotypes, e.g. assured Takayama versus indecisive Asakawa. Pondering how such a video could be created, Suzuki considered nensha (spirit photography). Extensive research led to historical figures who were adapted into psychic Shizuko Yamamura and Professor Heihachiro Ikuma. It is their ‘daughter’ Sadako who develops the ability to project images through television, and directly into minds. Two other historical figures are important, the last man (fictionalized as Dr. Joutarou Nagao) to be treated for smallpox in Japan rapes Sadako in fit delirium and lust. After Nagao discovers Sadako has testicular feminization (psuedo-hermahprodite prone to “complex psychosocial complications”), she lashes out in shame and rage, and Nagao throws her down a well in self-defense. En no Ozunu was an ancient ascetic who founded Shugendo in the 7th century. Late in life En no Ozunu is said to have visited Izu, the region where the Yamamura’s live. A statue of the monk was found on the ocean floor by Shizuko, and it endowed her with strange powers. The virus Sadako creates to delivery her misery unto humanity is based largely on smallpox, a disease which winnowed roughly four hundred million souls in the 20th century. (Note how the film perverts Suzuki’s original intention of encouraging men to be more engaged in family life, by portraying the love of a typical man for his wife and daughter. Making the journalist female, and Ryuji her estranged spouse, is a brilliant manipulation to add romantic tension while reducing cast, but it subverts the novel by placing the obligation of moral sacrifice upon Asakawa, the mother.) ラせん (Rasen): The film centers around Ryuji Takayama’s autopsy by pathologist Mitsuo Andou (a former classmate) and the revelations of Asakawa’s report on the cursed video. Unfortunately, Mai Takano (Ryuji’s assistant) discovers Ryuji’s copy of the video. After she unwittingly watches the video, something surprising happens, Takano is an ideal host for the virus, and Sadako is able to be reborn from Takano’s husk. Stem cells run amok! (Suzuki has stated that the books end with refrains of optimism. Such is fitting because experience tells us that it is almost impossible an infectious agent could doom humanity. And even if your name is Leroy Brown, there is always someone badder, you just ain’t crossed them yet. Unless Sadako became God, she could not be the end of humanity. Such criticisms are silly because they are simple, like mocking the God of the Gaps. Realizing Sadako cannot torment all humanity is small comfort when you’re choking on your own doom... and the novels evoke that dread.) Reborn Sadako has Asakawa’s report published as a book, Ringu. So then, the virus is tweaked to be triggered by prose? Okay, stop laughing, because we’re not done. A movie of the book is made, starring Sadako... The interesting twist of Rasen is how Sadako enlists the aid of Andou who has realized who she really is—by offering to make their child a clone of his deceased son. Let us pray DeNiro declines the role. ループ (Loop): Loop is actually cool. If your a fan of junk movies, imagine a concoction of Ringu, The Thirteenth Floor and Alien: Resurrection, and you have the essence of Loop. Before dying from the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus (MHCV) epidemic, Kaoru Futami’s father advises his son to seek “Loop” and former associate Amano. Of course, Loop is a reality simulation running on a network of supercomputers. The Ring Virus and Sadako exist in this virtual world. So it’s off to see America, land of secret desert research facilities. Via virtual reality goggles, Kaoru is able to hack into Loop and investigate the Ring Virus (similar to Sight Jacking in the game Siren). He discovers that Ryuji Takayama contacted the real world, and researches had decided to clone him (and you could resist cloning Lara Croft?). Attempting to find a legendary forest which heals like the laying-of-hands, Kaoru is salvaged by dudes in a black helicopter. Yes, Kaoru is indeed the clone of Takayama, and with a handy atomic particle gizmo, an eccentric geezer will learn the secret of Kaoru’s MHCV immunity! The world-saving procedure kills Kaoru, but in consolation, he is recreated in the Loop, and gets to pay Neo to Sadako’s Smith. Fun for everybody.

ing from the television was inspired by Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Curse victims appearing distorted in photographs and video as if marked was derived from The Amityville Horror Part 3, Ghost Story, and the shinrei shashin (spirit photography) stories common to Japanese television. Author Suzuki rejected haunting as the source of the curse, but Sadako being trapped in the well recalls Japanese folk tales and animistic traditions (where a mountain can be a spiritual force unto itself, or represent the greatness of a historical figure). Aside from superstitions surrounding the spiritual realm, the Japanese are more open to such terrors as bioterrorism and nanotechnology due to the long tradition of borrowed technologies dramatically transforming Japanese life (e.g. the works of Katsuhiro Otomo). Americans by contrast do not seem concerned by the grey goo scenario (Bill Joy has work to do). From another angle, the argument is I, Robot works as an action movie in either culture, but if recast as a horror movie, it would be taken more seriously in Japan. Ringu should be experienced by anyone with any interest in Japan or an appreciation of horror films (a tolerance for subtitles is required). The film is devoid of gore-shock, does not feel campy, and its mood is well crafted. Perhaps the best scene in the film is like something done by Ozu or grafted from a Noh play, Asakawa pleads with Takayama to provide comfort when she dies and he responds with dismissive nihilism. The confrontation is faceted because Ryuji resents not being normal, like Sadako. But Ringu is not without flaws, it’s just that its flaws seem of less consequence than those which plague the American version. Accepting Sadako had developed nensha to such a high degree that should could kill and ultimately reorganize matter is too difficult. But how did she create the cursed video if she’s dead? The books imply Sadako may have survived for many years in a kind of meditative, or beatified, state. Ringu plainly plays this as ghost story, but can ghosts be psychic? Ringu also plants an image which The Ring turns into the visual equivalent of kudzu. Tomoko is attacked in her kitchen, but her body is later found upstairs contorted in the closet. Very odd that Sadako would allow this, she seemed a bit gimpy for stairs.

Because this Ring does away with many of the supernatural aspects of the original, some of the characters are reduced to little more than shades of their former selves. — Javier Lopez of The Ringworld

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The Ring: Brilliance Inscribed

In many ways, The Ring is worthy of the original. Even Koji Suzuki approves. Consider how many scenes are recreated in The Ring. Whether the Japanese film inspired it or not, making the Sadako character a child (Samara) is a dazzling move. As a child, Samara recalls the latch-key predicament of Yoichi and Aiden (for being banished to the barn). Anna Morgan’s infertility calls to mind the plight of Sadako. You can almost imagine a chart with cool idea’s taken from Ringu being moved around to fit in The Ring. The pitfall must be obvious, making each connection is a giddy experience, but anyone examining your schematic wonders at the mess. Director Gore Verbinsky said, “There’s a viral aspect, I think, to an urban myth.” The interview with that quote can still be found on The Ring website. And so the film starts as does Ringu, with two high school students watching television and talking. But the director and screenwriter do something incredible, the discussion does not start with the cursed video myth, but with a rumination on the dangers of “electo-rays”. Watching The Ring’s creators insert seemingly trivial material, that invigorates scenes from the original movie, while highlighting the forebodings of Suzuki, is almost breathtaking. Such radiation anxiety is directly related to the author’s concerns about the dangers of consumerism and mass media, and ultimately protecting children.

The brain-warping rays myth foreshadows the peril of the cursed video, but also the scene during which Rachel Keller stands on her balcony and observes televisions glowing in four apartments in an adjacent building. Apparently, there is no escape from television. Imagine what Rachel must be thinking, what if the images themselves are poison... What if someone broadcast the cursed video? If you don’t think mass media can be truly harmful, I think three men (Ritter, Blix, and Kay) might protest. A significant number of Americans still believe in Iraqi WMD even though experts have testified that searching for the Loch Ness Monster would be a better waste of money. At least you might find something interesting by dragging the lake. Indeed, the media has been so neutered and shamed that it is testing a new paradigm: He Said, She Said, We Said (see Jay Rosen’s Pressthink). Why? Traditional objective reporting (He Said, She Said) does not work anymore—too many officials blatantly lie. Partisan organizations now own their media, effectively becoming 24/7 versions of those shoutout-the-vote trucks which rouse Japan during elections. Think none of this is related to The Ring? Sorry, the film was originally to be set in Boston, but flying staff and talent across the country was considered so treacherous that the script had to be rewritten. Bright symbolism and gravitas radiates from The Ring as though it were a beacon calling through the dense fog of so much lethargic genre fare. But oh how critics and cineasts are easily scorned... The beacon turns out to be a bonfire, plenty of bong and beer to go around, lots of potential in the crowd, but everyone enjoying themselves has their hair down, not a single reveller has thought about Bresson all day. The Ring poses moral questions beyond its primary challenge of what a person should do to save their own life, or that of a child. There is the common science-fiction theme of telepathy as a terrible burden, and Samara’s influence on her community and family are devastating. Seeking aid, the family commits Samara to the Eola County Psychiatric Hospital (ECPH). What we see only hints at her trauma of being observed, but promotional materials for the film implied that Samara was subjected to a “failed psychosurgery”. Doctors simply filing away her unprecedented projected thermography upon the insistence of Richard Morgan is suspect, and the detail shows us Morgan may have colluded in his child’s murder. Faster than a rolling O: you got that infection reference? Ebola. The film seems brave in denying its villain morality. Sadako was reacting the denunciation of her mother (rebelling against intolerance), she becomes so aggrieved and dangerous that her father Heihachiro murders her. Samara’s mother is also a tragic figure, but Anna covets motherhood. The despair of infertility is a potent meme in modern America, but the danger is understood to be sextuplets, not Rosemary’s Baby. How Samara has inherited her gift is completely opaque, and that’s a difficult sleight-of-hand to ignore in a narrative so full of linearity. Samara mulls her situation and decides that she wants to harm. When Samara is down the well, it can be argued that she goes insane, but before that she lacks childish mannerisms. She loves Mommy, but why isn’t Samara at all concerned by Anna’s distress. Abused children often seek the love of the disapproving parent, what is going on here? Aside from those scenes already praised, and the obvious centerpieces featuring Samara, three scenes stand out. As a counterpart to the rending Asakawa and Takayama exchange at the ryokan, The Ring offers us a tentative reconciliation between Noah and his son. When Aiden reveals that he knows Noah discretely photographs him at school, Noah admits that he feels inadequate to the task of fatherhood, but fears losing Aiden. The boy observes that his father’s conflict qualifies as a “conundrum”. On the ferry ride to Moesko Island (and the Morgan Horse Farm), Rachel attempts to pet a horse confined in a trailer. The ensuing pandemonium as the spooked horse breaks free to pursue her is a high-point of the film. The horse’s reaction could be seen as evidence that Rachel is infected by Ring Virus. Finally, Richard Morgan’s condemnation of Rachel illuminates their doom. He says, “What is it with reporters, you take one person’s tragedy and force the world to experience it, spread it like sickness.” Okay, deep breath, it’s time to see if the bloody glove fits... Putting aside amusing websites that list riddles posed by The Ring, serious lapses in vision and editorial judgement litter the film. Why did Rachel not answer the

Ring World Timeline (not strictly chronological)

1957 1990 1991 1995

Critical Mass: In Darkness Bound

Koji wins Fantasy Novel Award for Rakuen

The Ring is utterly brilliant in its exploration of “infection” theme, and adds some wonderful American flavor, but rather like the skin suit in The Silence of the Lambs, the getup does not hang together and lacks allure. Ebert complains of the false cadence and exposition of the film’s conclusion. Its not the tail of this movie that could use a dose of wormwood, though, its the head. Several scenes come dangerously close to off-key Scream homages. The film swoops over imagined landscapes and prostates at its fake tree so often that it abandons vernal impulse. Like Shroeter’s Malina, The Ring uses sign-language and off-kilter vignettes to create anxiety in the viewer (Rachel shocked motionless by disturbing photographs while a train speeds past above the street). The primary exposition of The Ring is the killer video and surreal manifestations experienced by its victims. Perhaps sensing the psychic infection mechanism would be missed by many viewers, Verbinsky also tries make it work on a venial angry ghost level. Consider another Verbinsky film, Pirates of the Caribbean, which is a good example of an entertaining movie. With The Ring, however, Verbinsky chose to employ the “cinematic” language of art films to evoke some of their emotional impact, and thus elevate his work, but he would not risk the project’s commercial viability. Instead of going for a knockdown, Verbinsky played it safe and punched out a winner on points. Lots of cheering fans, but throughout the stadium those whose hearts were quickened by an elusive glimmer of glory grimace. Ringu is an important Japanese film. The Ring is a great remake, but it could have achieved more than good profits, it coulda been a contender. “Critical Mass” was to contain conclusions about The Ring, and an exploration of critical reactions in the USA. But I have finally recognized the nature of this beast... By now, readers should be weary of these themes: perhaps The Ring fails to tap our cultural fears in an effective manner (unlike Ringu), maybe Verbinsky lacked the conviction required to legitimize the film’s visual imagery, or even that the creators may have been so enthralled by the details of their vision, they could not sense its lack of cohesion. Since sitting down to view The Ring at the Walter Reade Theater at midnight opening day, I have known it is deeply flawed without being able to articulate the reason. But now it’s obvious, Verbinsky willfully thrashed our trust. The Ring and Ringu are largely naturalistic, but this is a sham, for The Ring is actually manufactured. Eschewing hot camera, Verbinsky adopted something distinctly American, let’s call it porn camera. Movies often contain gaffs because film production is complex work, but sometimes circumstances result in serious failures of editing and/or vision (e.g. Training Day). Porn is different altogether, scenes are looped, reorganized, and if some prop teleports around the set, it’s a hoot. An auteur might pull outrageous stunts which make a statement, such as Funny Games or Seul contre tous, but such artists share a bond with the audience. After spending years hiding out in theaters, I am at a loss to compare what Verbinsky has done in The Ring with anything else in cinema. The Ring is an utter betrayal of esthetic sensibility. Consider how an anchor is caught enacting sorrow in Broadcast News, likewise our brigand filmmakers are not the least bit concerned with truth and beauty. Dream logic was Verbinski’s rationalization and ruse. Watch the film on DVD as Rachel discovers Cabin 12 (00:23:40~00:24:00), draw an overhead map of the scene (including radiant tree). Note the large window on the left side of the cabin. Later in the movie, Rachel will stand by that window and ruminate upon the spectacularly framed tree (01:24:30). But that’s impossible. Everyone on set knew what they were doing was utterly false. The outside orientation can be confirmed again as Noah and Rachel approach the cabin (01:24:05). Filmmakers do stupid things to impress audiences. Mistakes happen. How should we respond when a director deliberately deceives us? Verbinski purposefully placed Rachel between the tree and cabin, and later, reoriented these fixed landmarks to obtain an artifice. The manipulations throw everything into question—reconsider Noah’s anguished lament outside the cabin (01:30:25), is it not wrecked like Belladonna’s ass? Seduced by its ornate grandeur, I hoped to defend The Ring and discredit critical dismissal of it. Mea culpa. Ebert has been proven wise, and I have been foolish to waste time on such exploitative trash.

Ringu published, ~3M sold Rasen published

Rasen novel wins Yoshikawa Eiji Award Ringu released, Dir. Hakata Hideo (Cost 1.2M$, Box Ofﬁce 15M$ [est.]) Raisen released, Dir. Iida Jouji (released with Ringu) Ruupu (Loop) published

1999

Ring 2 released, Dir. Hakata Hideo Baasudei (Birthday) published, collection of short stories ends Ringu cycle Ring: The Final Chapter (TV) airs, twelve episodes Rasen (TV) airs, thirteen episodes Ring Virus released in Korea, Dir. Kim Dong-bin

2000 2002

Ring 0 released, Dir. Tsuruta Norio

2005

The Ring 2 USA release (anticipated)

The Ring released in USA, Dir. Gore Verbinski (Cost 60M$, Box Ofﬁce 135M$ USA and 14M$ Japan)

phone after Noah or Aiden watched the video? She acts distressed, but it’s cheap. The Ring seems more consistent than Ringu (e.g. the Ring Virus), but can we be sure? Anna’s Chinese treatment history in Samara’s medical file? Wow, that’s sure going to be useful to her shrink! You ever hear that satanic Aerosmith song, the one which features a shopping list recited in Gaelic? Verbinsky should have added it to the score. Victims of the curse in The Ring actually look sick. Big step forward. But wait, why is Samara moving the bodies? Where is The Profiler in our time of need, Sam could cock her head to the side, smirk and tell us what the hell Verbinsky was thinking. Consider the cutting room floor: Noah finds the keeper of Shelter Mountain Inn dead in a moored canoe. Lying face down. With playing cards strewn upon his back. When did this become a comedy? DVD extras are supposed to be fun, not demoralizing. The Ring clearly benefits from the craft dedicated to it. If you ever watch the direction closely, though, you might find yourself annoyed. Close-up on a coffee mug stain in the moments before Noah’s demise? The moment producers heard Verbinsky and crew discussing thematic symbolism, every single one of filmmakers should have been inoculated against zentropa fervor. How the film ultimately fails to achieve its full promise is maddeningly hard to discern, it’s like the sensation of a thought that eludes words... Rather like an inversion of Verbinski’s poetic “dream logic”, it lacks explanation, but you know it doesn’t click. Are the brilliant aspects of The Ring so easy to dismiss because the film lacks conviction? The arc of the story is tedious because it feels like M. Night Shyamalan dynamics pander to the audience. In one of the rare heights of cinema, Isabella Adjani dances herself to collapse in a metro tunnel in The Possession, such commitment is absent in The Ring. Compare those scenes at the well: Noah battles a fire hose (behold the ghostly antics of Laurel & Hardy), whereas Askakawa and Takayama nearly kill themselves straining against fate. Yet there is the larger question, even if some of the more superficial sleights were corrected, could The Ring be made whole art? The creative team did not do enough to uproot the Japanese essence of Ringu, and replace it with something more connected with Seattle. Outside of optimistic musing, it is difficult to envision how The Ring

Words by Sean Broderick

23 | Eastern Standard Magazine #4

Suzuki Koji born in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture

Ring: Kanzenban (TV Movie) airs

1996 1998

could be made viscerally relevant. What trope, phobia or dread could the ﬁlm assimilate that is missing? Ringu is so steeped in Japanese culture, it is a form of self-delusion to think it could be done.

Living People Also Good If you are reading this magazine, I assume you like Japanese stuff. Anime has become an absurdly massive phenomenon in America. New manga are being released almost by the hour and there’s even been a promising trend towards live-action feature ﬁlms. Media Blasters has gone beyond their trawling of the movies so crappy they make Troma look like Bergman and has begun releasing quality stuff like Pistol Opera and Vistor Q. Zatoichi is on DVD, Lone Wolf and Cub is coming soon, and people seem equally interested in good movies in a modern setting. Yet one major area of

24 | Eastern Standard Magazine #4

Japanese pop culture is being sadly overlooked: the live-action TV series. Probably the best chance for release in English is GTO. The anime has been released and the manga has passed the half-way point, providing the live-action version with a strong marketing tie in. The drama also has the advantage of being a good deal better than the turgid anime. For one thing, Soremachi Takashi (star of Love Complex) is really funny as Onizuka. And the cast includes then rising star Kubozuka Yousuke, now one of the most high profile young actors in Japan. (In the last two years, he has played a drag queen, a retarded boy, a Korean citizen raised in Japan, a ping pong superstar, a nationalist street fighter, and a samurai reborn from hell. He’s trying for variety.) With a lot of luck it will get licensed, prove popular and usher in the age of Japanese TV drama. But for all its charms, GTO is simply a surprisingly good example of mainstream television: a popular idol singer in a starring role and no signs of budget or directorial flair. The rather small section of the internet fansub network that covers drama tends to focus on these simple soap-opera stories with people from SMAP or the latest hot band in. Nothing wrong with mainstream pleasure, but most of these drama series don’t even get released on DVD here and are forgotten within a year or two. We’re going to take a look at a few of my favorite shows; for the most part, cult hits that came on around midnight, got poor ratings and then sold like gangbusters on DVD and video. Keizoku is a police drama set in the Unsolved Crimes division of the Tokyo police department. An elite officer who graduated from the pres-

tigious Tokyo University joins the force, specifically requesting to work in Unsolved Crimes for her own, secret reasons. She’s played by Nakatani Miki, who quickly establishes the character as irreparably insane. Though quite pretty, and undeniably brilliant, she’s completely immune to little things like tact and hygiene. Her habit of lying down in the position of the victim’s body while investigating a crime scene doesn’t help her reputation any, but when she starts solving hopeless cases one after the other, her fellow cops quickly start backing her up - especially the irascible male lead, who keeps smacking her in the head whenever she starts acting crazy. Sadly, the final episodes go spiraling off into a mind control fueled psycho drama that doesn’t really seem to fit into the show’s world, but the first ten episodes are brilliant stuff. Hiroyuki Tsutsumi, the director, has developed a rather unique rhythm, easily swinging between comedy and tension, using the same set of off kilter angles (he loves to put faces in the edges and corners, leaving the bulk of the frame empty) and unexpected editing for both. Normally, I would assume cutting three times a second during an exposition speech - from close up to extreme long shot and back and forth between multiple angles on each character - would be confusing. Somehow it actually adds to the tension, making it easier to follow the sequence of events and bringing you to the edge of your seat waiting to hear the conclusion. Tsutsumi followed Keizoku with Trick, which focuses on the same kind of comedic relationship between Keizoku’s main characters, placing it in the foreground. Nakama Yukie plays a charisma-free but very talented

magician who tries to make a buck by pretending to have psychic powers at a university study run by Abe Hiroshi’s gullible, intense and conceited buffoon of a professor. Her ego gets the better of her and she can’t help but tell him how he was fooled, cackling like a madwomen. As revenge, he forces her to accompany him on a trip to the backwoods of Southern Japan to disprove a cult leaders abilities, all at the request of Yabe, a policeman wearing the most obvious wig in the history of mankind. He and his partner have a habit of answering the phone in the strangest of places, such as a roller coaster. Fortunately, Abe is so single minded he utterly fails to be put off by the other passengers’ screams of terror every time they hit a down-slope. Nakama Yukie’s expertise with a magician’s tricks eventually reveal all the cult leader’s own tricks and Abe’s absurd kung fu abilities get them out of several tight spots. Catchphrases such as “I see through every single thing you do” and “If the going gets tough, I’ll run away and leave you to fend for yourself,” helped make Trick popular enough that it spawned a second TV series and then a movie, which was a huge hit last Christmas. His other major TV series was so inﬂuential the planned sequel was scrapped after inner city gangs began imitating the ﬁctional gangs in the show. Ikebukuro West Gate Park is a street level mystery series that clearly hit a nerve with its mostly teenage audience. While the stories are essentially mysteries, it dispenses with all the conventions of the genre. The central character, Makoto (played by the lead singer of Tokio), is nineteen years old, has no plans on going on to higher educa-

tion, works part time at his mother’s fruit store and spends the rest of his time in the park, just sitting around with his friends and waiting for something to happen. All of the storylines unfold in an natural and organic manner: chance meetings or simple favors gradually unfold into much more dramatic conﬂicts. Kobozuka Yousuke (again) plays the addled but extremely powerful gang leader Takeshi. When Makoto’s girlfriend is murdered, he organizes his gang into a search party, and they comb the streets looking for the killer. The same writer, Kudo Kankuro (Go, Ping Pong) also worked on Kisarazu Cat’s Eye, famous for using twice the number of cuts the average TV show uses. A group of jobless high school graduates play a lot of baseball, drink themselves shitfaced and have gleefully wild adventures that eventually get so convoluted and Rube Goldbergian that they’re forced to rewind halfway through the episode and follow a dangling subplot till they ﬁgure out just what the hell really happened.

Words by Andrew Cunningham

25 | Eastern Standard Magazine #4

Louis Vitton fakes done with white out, cars buried beneath the pitch, Aikawa Show’s yakuza baseball and the sheer unholy terror of over the hill hookers all seem to blend into something that feels a hell of a lot more in line with modern Japanese culture than anything getting exposure in the west. And ﬁnally, Private Detective Hama Mike, which spun off from the (boring) movie The Worst Time In My Life into a really cool punk mystery series. Nagase Hitoshi plays Mike, a private detective in a red leather coat and dozens of rings, who lives above a movie theater. Clients have to buy a ticket before they can get up to see him. He invariably solves insane cases like “Find me” or “Find the reason I can’t sing.” The show’s unique gimmick was to have each episode directed by a well known, talented director; Sogo Ishii (Electric Dragon 80000 Volts, Angel Dust), the director of Go, the director of the Sapporo Black Label Love Beer commercials, and - of all people - Repo Man’s Alex Cox, who mysteriously casts Tetsuo the Iron Man as a spaghetti western gunslinger. The stories range from very serious to wacky comedy. The DVD versions, which sadly admit the rollick opening credits sequence with ‘Ego Wrappin’, are feature length versions of the episodes, which fact doesn’t quite make up for the 7000 yen price tag - which is why I want American el cheapo versions. I’m not made of money folks. As it stands, however, an English language release of any of these shows remains a pipe dream. If these descriptions have piqued your curiosity, then write your favorite company and request a DVD box set. A number of companies have taken risks in the anime, manga or growing live-action movie market, and it’s time someone took the step into Japanese television dramas as well.

hack//Franchise -We are .hack. -You Will Be Assimilated. -Resistance is Futile. -...

26 | Eastern Standard Magazine #4

The .hack franchise involves a MMORPG called “The World.” It’s the most popular game in the world and has users on every single continent. It’s accessed by putting on special VR-style goggles while the player manipulates a controller that looks suspiciously like a PS2 Dualshock. Of course, things must go wrong. Due to the game’s primary programmer being obsessed with his ex-girlfriend (who wrote the world’s most popular fanfiction before meeting a tragic early death) the servers hold an artificial intelligence that becomes malevolent. The actions of the AI affect the real world, and are described in .hack//SIGN (an anime series), the .hack PS2 games, .hack//Liminality (4 OVAs that come with the PS2 games) and .hack//Legend of the Twilight (a manga series). There’s also a .hack novel and another anime series, .hack//Legend of the Twilight based on the manga of the same name. The basic structure of a .hack story is that you have a group of socially maladroit misfits who band together to fight The Man. The Man may be the AI, a hostile clan in “The World” or even CC Corp, the company that runs the game. All the events of the .hack universe revolve around the PS2 games, however, so you may lose something if you don’t play the games.

.hack//SIGN .hack//SIGN takes place first, chronologically. It immediately precedes the PS2 games and .hack//Liminality. The AI traps the mind of a player, Tsukasa, in the game; he is simply unable to logout. He meets various different players who decide they want to help him for one reason or another. In all honesty, these players are sufficiently so-

cially stunted that you can believe that their only social interaction comes through an online game. There’s a lot of humor in the dialogue, as the players will talk about the history of computer games, how they hate lettuce, where they want to go shopping and how free pizza is better than watching videos for free. .hack//SIGN is a very slow show. There’s not a lot of action, which puts it at odds with its typical fantasy appearance. However, if you’re considering it to be a RPG where the cast not only finishes the main plot but do side quests in under 13 hours, then it’s amazingly fast-paced. People who want to see butt-kicking should probably avoid the series, but there is a lot to enjoy here. There’s even an ending of sorts for the characters, but the series really leads up to...

.hack PS2 games The .hack PS2 games are a collection of 4 action RPGs that share the same system. You can import your save from previous games to the next one, which is a nice touch. There’s even a pseudo-Windows OS interface for the game before you ‘log in’ to The World. You play Kite, a twin blade wielding fighter whose best friend is put in a coma while playing the game. Kite is gifted with a bracelet from Aura that allows him to hack into the game to alter a monster’s data or access secured areas of the server. The evil AI from .hack//SIGN is really pissed off and taking steps to preserve itself, which seems to involve inducing comas in players simply because it’s eeeeeevil. You meet other players who are just as odd as those in .hack//SIGN but this time you get e-mail asking you for love advice, what foods you enjoy, crackpot time-travel theories and attempts

to get you interested in Digimon Battle Cards. The character designs are also variants of those from .hack//SIGN, so you’ll see characters that look very familiar. As mentioned above, the system remains static for the 4 games, and they are short; each one can be finished in around 20-25 hours. Altogether, they have a very good story, but don’t expect a satisfactory ending until the last game. The order the series goes: .hack// Infection, .hack//Mutation, .hack//Outbreak, .hack//Quarantine. Included with each game is a DVD that contains an episode of...

.hack//Liminality While the .hack PS2 games take place entirely in “The World,” .hack//Liminality takes place exclusively in the real world. A small band of people who are looking into the coma victims run into CC Corp (a joke reference to CyberConnect, the studio that developed the PS2 games). CC Corp would rather not have people poke around its servers and connect people going into comas with its games.

Four years pass and all is well with “The World” being played by 20 million players. Of course, it would be boring if nothing happened, so we go into...

In this manga series, Shugo and Rena are a brother and sister who recently won the skins of the legendary players, Kite and Blackrose. Shugo ends up getting a bracelet from Aura with abilities similar to Kite’s. Naturally, CC Corp is none too pleased about this and sends its goon squad, the Cobalt Knights, to take care of things (i.e. correct any system glitches). .hack//Legend of the Twilight (manga) has a much lighter feel than the PS2 games or .hack//SIGN. Some characters from the games and anime return, whether as the original versions or a slight variant. We have the disturbing instance of Balmung (now a sysadmin for CC Corp) hitting on Rena, but we’re desensitized to it because of Shugo earlier being simultaneously horrified and titillated at Rena’s barely-there armor. The series is enjoyable, though it is being released somewhat erratically by Tokyopop (only two volumes are out as of this writing). This is not to be mistaken with...

.hack//Legend of the Twilight (anime) In this 13 episode anime series, the setup is identical to that of the manga. There are minor differences (such as the introduction of Sanjuro from the games) but it’s a very faithful adaptation of the manga. The databugs have returned and cause the series to have a more serious undercurrent. Bal-

Words by Sam Flanigan

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A lot of background is given here, like how the aforementioned creator was desperately in love with the world’s most famous fanfic author. It supplements the games and doesn’t really stand on its own. It ends at the same time as the game. There’s also extra information on these DVDs that tell you more about the characters from .hack//SIGN and further background of the enemy bosses from the PS2 games.

.hack//Legend of the Twilight (manga)

mung no longer hits on Rena; she has a schoolgirl crush on him instead. The show was recently released by Bandaii, and the box comes with another soundtrack. The music of the series isn’t as distinct, but it suits the lighter look and tone. The series does seem to want to make the point that people involved had played the games; references to game mechanics are plentiful.

.HACK

GAME MECHANICS While the PS2 games are action RPGs, they don’t require the reflexes of a hyperactive eight year old. When compared to the spastic action of Kingdom Hearts, the .hack games are practically on valium. As a twin blade, Kite has both fighting and magical abilities. Twin blades aren’t the best in either, but are fairly equally balanced while other classes have strengths in either of the two areas. You access your magical abilities through your equipment; weapon A can provide you with a fire attack, but weapon B will give you a lightning one. Elemental strengths and weaknesses are an important part of the game and can make it much easier, though somewhat time consuming as you go through your equipment list trying to find the proper elemental balance. Magic tends to vary little, with different animations accompanying different elemental effects. Higher level skills mean they have a greater effect, whether healing or damage. Your other party members are controlled by the game’s AI. You can prompt them to take certain actions. In fact, you should. I found the AI to be just a shade more intelligent than a rock, so I continually prompted it in every battle. It is possible to act solely as support while your party members carry out your plans, but I found it generally easier and faster to take part in the physical combat.

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Despite being an action RPG, the game will pause while you open a menu. That means you can use an item or cast a spell without having to worry about getting slaughtered by monsters hitting you. There’s a lot of dungeon delving in the game. In fact, other than towns, you’re limited to either fields that contain monsters and dungeon entrances or dungeons. Virtually all of the storyline is progressed through dungeon delving. Gameplay becomes somewhat monotonous, but there are shortcuts you can use to make it go quicker (like having a Fairy Orb map out the floor of the dungeon you’re on). You’re able to import your saved game data from one game to another, allowing you to keep all of your experience, money, and items. It also allows you to keep your background settings, something that’s nice because the default settings are rather boring. Words by Sam Flanigan

REVIEWS

From New Wave Horror done Hong Kong-style, to garish and bizarre musical gunfights, to kung-fu puppets, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve got the lowdown on some of the scariest and most bizarre films committed to celluloid! With three major players in the video-game world of Japanese-style horror up for inspection as well, we complete our ring of terror. Pass these words on or suffer the consequences!

Ju-On p.30 The Eye p.31 Legend of the Sacred Stone p.32 Versus p. 33 Pistol Opera p.34 Battle Royale II p.35 Silent Hill 3 p.36 Fatal Frame 2 p.37 Siren p.38

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A while back I came across this random trailer that was passed down the digital daisy chain before ﬁnally reaching me, so I had no idea what it was actually called, but I immediately fell in love with it. The trailer was scary – really frightening. The poor heroine sees corpse-white and blackeyed children everywhere: in shadows; in the shower; even in her bed sheets with her. Unfortunately my love was unrequited; most of the best scenes are given away in that trailer and the movie as a whole is so resolutely pedestrian, despite several intriguing ideas that could have made it something great. Ju-on has some very innovative and effective scenes but it’s so clearly a mish-mash of other successful horror movies that it rapidly became something of a chore to watch. Take a core built from Kairo and mix in some Dark Water with Ringu and Uzumaki thrown in too. There’s a haunted house that taints the people who pass through it, driving them to commit unspeakable acts or arranging for some gruesome death. This all stems from the vengeful ghosts of the original victims, who have increased their ranks by claiming the spirit of each new victim. No one marked by the house escapes their clutches. The movie follows a number of different characters through their lives until they are unfortunate enough to come in contact with the ghosts. A number of differ-

ent characters start out quite well-drawn and easy to empathize with until falling to their eventual doom, but not before tangentially encountering another character whose story will unfold later. This results in a number of different chapters, which are not all shown in order or end in clear tragedy. Sometimes we have to wait for another chapter’s character to stumble across a victim to get full closure, and no one escapes. The best scene of the movie stems from this fluid sense of time. One of the first victims, a former cop who had investigated the original murders in the house, gets a vision of the future when his own daughter gets caught in its web too. It’s quite a remarkable and powerful scene, but it also sadly marks the end of any really interesting temporal manipulation. From then one it’s mainly a slow downhill slope to the ending, as most of the best ideas were used early on. Ju-on is pretty much a paint-by-numbers horror movie. We’ve got all the traditional elements and styling, but in many ways it feels like the creators didn’t really know what else to do with it. Unique and genuinely creepy ghost appearances give way to standard and trite hauntings telegraphed by a ham-fisted musical score. An unpredictable sequence of time goes from engaging to repetitive before long. With all the different stories it felt like they couldn’t settle on one that was strong enough to carry a film all by itself. Indeed, the longest stories are definitely the weakest and they all become a bit predictable. People encounter house; they get scared out of their minds; creepy ghost kid and women leer at the camera; character dies horribly, but not before leading to someone else getting caught in the house’s trap. The phrase “conspicuously mediocre” sums Juon up pretty well, unfortunately. It shows enough promise that it should have been great, but the writer didn’t know what to actually do with it. The movie slides back into formulaic clichés and those buried gems only serve to put the mundane execution of everything else into sharper focus. It may be worth it for die-hard fans of horror to check out for those good spots, but otherwise it’s unremarkable.

Ju-On: The Grudge DVD • IVL • 92 minutes • MSRP $21.95

Words by Derek Guder

doctor to believing friend. His performance is understated and believable. Lee is also completely convincing as Mun. She projects a palpable sense of fear and confusion. You can feel her heart beat faster as cloudy, unknown terrors - that only she can see - close in around her; it’s a very visceral experience. Creepy moments pepper the movie. They are spread all throughout the film, seasoning the melancholy story instead of being lumped all together. If you have a careful eye (no pun intended), you can pick out ghostly images in reflections and a host of other subtle touches thanks to the impressive folks at Centro Digital. Responsible for the visuals in the breakout hit The Stormriders, Centro’s deft usage of computer graphics allows The Eye’s deceased denizens to come alive (again, no pun intended). Some of these restless spirits simply fade in and out of the background, but others are far more malevolent, chilling the audience to the bone with their rage. All of this is done without succumbing to the Lucas-esque garishness that populates CGI in so many other films. A compelling and haunting soundtrack further heightens the atmosphere and completes the package. The Eye is an evocative drama, wrapped in the guise of a traditional horror movie. Although there are no huge revelations or innovations here, this Pang Brothers film will pull at your heart and frighten you to your wits end. Anyone wishing for a subtle, well-crafted and emotional film that carries a bit of dread would do well take a good, long look at The Eye. Words by Eric Chon

The Eye DVD • Panorama Distribution • 98 minutes • MSRP $11.95

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For a while, Asia - and Japan in particular - was the hotspot for a burgeoning “new wave horror” revival. Although they were never rare in the East, it was Japan’s Ringu that garnered international attention and caused a stir over which subsequent film might be its spiritual (if not actual) sequel. Many copy-cat films followed, most notably Korea’s Ring Virus – a ‘retelling’ of the Japanese original. Ringu was a film that excelled at creating an atmospheric terror. It didn’t rely on cheap “jumpy” scares to get your heart-rate going. How strange, then, that the next big contender for mindshare among moviegoers would be an effort from Hong Kong, not known for its use of subtle storytelling. Over-the-top melodrama and cornball theatrics lie at the heart of most HK films. I can’t count the number of fantastic stories ruined by one or two instances of overacting. Writers/directors Oxide and Danny Pang (I’m not kidding here) craft a mysterious and haunting story filled with tragedy, despair and hope without falling into your typical HK clichés (for one, there’s no character named “Fatty”). Eschewing these omnipresent conventions, they allow the film to breathe and move more naturally. The forced pace and artificially emotional moments are eliminated, allowing one to better identify with the characters. Mun (Angelica Lee) lost her sight at the age of two. Twenty years later, she undergoes a high-risk operation, receiving corneal transplants. As her sight slowly returns, she starts seeing a whole new world – one beyond just the physical one she’d been denied for so long. For someone who isn’t even accustomed to the mundane, these supernatural visions are a terrifying waking nightmare. Many might shout, “It’s just a Sixth Sense clone,” but they’d be wrong. Although the basic premise is alike (the protagonist is cursed to see the dead), the execution and the direction are completely divergent. The root of the movie lies in uncovering the mystery of her new-found abilities and helping repair the tragedy that started it all in the first place. Assisting her adjust to life with sight is Dr. Wah (Lawrence Chou), Mun’s therapist. He is the nephew of the doctor that performed the operation and is about the same age as Mun. Here is where the only major flaw pops up. Predictably, the good doctor Wah falls for his lovely patient and gets entangled in her frightening tale. It’s sappy and a bit (a tiny bit) melodramatic. But the performances by both Chou and Lee redeem the whole affair, preventing it from becoming maudlin and hackneyed. Chou does a great job in transitioning from skeptical

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Right from the start, Legend of the Sacred Stone evokes the best super-powered blowouts of Hong Kong movies past like Storm Riders and Swordsman 2, with a show-stopping whirlwind battle between a villain with kung fu skills that shake the heavens and a coalition of high-flying martial arts masters and prodigies who unleash more laser beams and smoke effects than a Pink Floyd reunion. This shouldn’t be too foreign to anyone who’s seen a couple wuxia films, but the thing that sets Sacred Stone apart is that every one of the combatants is a puppet. Even Wong Jing at his nuttiest never made a movie without any human beings onscreen. LSS is the brainchild of Chris and Vincent Huang, fourth-generation puppeteers from Taiwan who decided to jazz up the family business a little bit to compete with Hong Kong and Hollywood. The juxtaposition of techno soundtrack and the occasional futuristic set with puppets in ancient Chinese garb is less jarring than you’d think, but that’s probably because after seeing puppets hover in mid-air and hack each other into bleeding chunks, nothing is surprising any more. Except perhaps the plot: the opening battle is actually just a prologue to the amazingly convoluted main story, which rivals Jet Li’s legendarily incoherent Kung Fu Cult Master in sheer density of narrative. In brief, the kung fu overlords band together and mostly die in sealing off Mo Kuei, the most evil man under heaven, but cloaked comic relief demons (referred to as “the Unfriendliness” in the HK-quality sub I saw) steal his body and dissect it in their mad science lair to discover the whereabouts of the source of his power, the titular Stone, which proves to be the catalyst for a saga of love, treachery, disfigurement and long-simmering revenge. This is about as comprehensible as you’d expect given the fact that this is a theatrical spin-off of a long-running TV series. You need a thorough grounding in the clichés of the wire-fu genre to have any real chance at following LSS and, even then, the sheer number of wicked impostors, devious plots, secret hideouts and unrequited loves make comprehending it all an epic quest in itself. Fortunately, Sacred Stone is enjoyable purely on a visual level—the oddity of seeing puppets soaring through the air, unleashing blasts of chi, bleeding and dying is worth seeing all by itself - but it’s the skill of the puppeteers that continues to impress after the shock value starts to wear off. By the end of the movie you’ll just kind of accept that the actors are made of wood—they still emote a lot better than Keanu Reeves did in Matrix Reloaded. There are two primary ways to experience this film: either in the Japanese dub, which features anime voice talent (notably the prolific Takehito Koyasu as Su Huan-Jen, the arguable protagonist) or the original Chinese track, in which every single character, be they man, woman or demon, is voiced by one person, in keeping with Taiwanese puppet theater tradition. Overall, it’s hard to call Legend of the Sacred Stone a classic, but if you’re reading this magazine, chances are it’s the kind of thing you should see at least once. As a competitor to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon it doesn’t quite measure up, but it’s a more than worthy companion piece to Meet the Feebles. Words by Joe Iglesias

Legend of The Sacred Stone DVD • Pili Multimedia Inc. • 122 minutes • MSRP $24.95

Words by Eric Chon

Versus Special Edition DVD • Media Blasters • 119 minutes • MSRP $34.95

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Start with a healthy dose of Tsui Hark. Mix with equal parts Tarantino and Raimi, then sprinkle liberally with a little Miike. Stir-fry on high until you get an equal mixture of immortal samurai, super-powered yakuza, and gun wielding undead. Add gore and sit back and enjoy. This hyper-violent and super-stylish zombie/samurai/sci-fi/fantasy/mobster flick is the brainchild of now top-gun director Ryuhei Kitamura. It eschews the need for real plot or story and instead gives us unchecked chaos and mayhem, all with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Imagine Evil Dead with kung-fu or A Better Tomorrow with zombies. Hell yeah. Although the idea of two hours of non-stop annihilation might sound tiresome, Kitamura is able to keep the pace frantic and alive, interspersing the intense combats with off-the-wall humor. The story, such as it is, revolves around our main bad guy (Hideo Sakaki). His desire to become the strongest ever (perhaps even toppling the Hulk) requires the blood sacrifice of a certain girl (Chieko Misaka) and the involvement of our laconic anti-hero known only as Prisoner KSC2-303 (Tak Sakaguchi). All this takes place just after he and a companion (who joins the ranks of the undead early in the film) break out of prison and head to meet up with Sakaki’s yakuza henchmen at the Forest of Resurrection (#444 of the 666 portals to Hell on Earth). As we dive into everyone staring at each other over the barrel of their guns, all the dead bodies buried there by those very same yakuza start trying to settle some old scores... with guns. Yes, these zombies shoot (though not very well). Of course, this is all pretext to the massive orgy of destruction that comprises the majority of Versus. Sprinkled throughout are bits of over-the-top comedy that help ease the constant fighting. Of note is the small, feral-sounding, freakedout yakuza that keeps getting bitch-slapped, Rick James-style. He continually pulls out bigger and bigger guns, seemingly from his ass, each time he loses his previous one. Then there are the two cops who are hunting after the escapees (one is missing his right hand, which was dangling in the handcuff that our hero tossed aside shortly after his prison escape). References are everywhere and those who’re well versed in cult cinema will find it easy to pick out their favorite scenes (look for Raimi’s shaky-cam chasing a protagonist or a Matrix-styled dodge). The requisite black trenchcoats and cool gear are on display like it’s Friday night at your favorite Eurotrash bar - but even then Kitamura pokes fun. After dispatching a spiky-haired goon, Sakaguchi decides that the baddie’s shades are cool and takes ‘em, only to have our damsel in distress shake her head disapprovingly (he puts ‘em back down). I guess there is such a thing as being “too cool.” All of this is presented in swift-cut, quick-pan, shaky-cam glory. While that may be a mark against the film for some, it intensifies the action even more. The camera style adds to the overall ambiance of the movie - as many fast close-up shots and zooms as there are, you can find an equal amount of slow, wide pans; it all depends on the scene. Color filters are used to give certain scenes an almost ethereal or unearthly atmosphere. Choreography is tight and explosive. Here is where the quick cuts stop and we get those deliciously long Hong Kong-style shots. While it might not be Yuen Woo-Ping, it’s still damned good. From the kung-fu, to the swordplay, to the gun-fights, Versus delivers. All the gore is just icing on the cake - sweet, sweet bloody icing. This just might be the funnest movie to come out of Asia in a long, long while. It is every film-geek’s dream come true; Versus is the king of trash cinema and it wears its crown with aplomb.

In tight close-ups, a grim-faced man readies a riﬂe and shoots twice. Before he can ﬁre a third time, he is slain himself by an unseen gunman. He rolls down from the building he perched atop of and dies, a smile on his face. Then, after a short swing jazz/pop art interlude, we’re treated to a woman in a white cloak and purple scarf (worn across her face, ninja-style) asking another woman if she’s gay, before the two of them lean against an wrought-iron fence and pose suggestively for a couple minutes. Really, how the hell am I supposed to follow that? Nothing I can say will top that opening, and the madness has barely begun. Review’s over - Pistol Opera, by Seijun Suzuki, lush visuals, mad as a spoon. Three stars, for fans of surrealism only. Go home.

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Okay, I’ll try to do better than that. The problem with talking about Pistol Opera is that it is not a film so much as a fever dream captured in Technicolor. There is a lot of bizarre and frankly opaque imagery here… how much can one say about a movie that only makes sense if you assume one of the main characters is the hallucination of another? Lunacy is far from new territory for director Suzuki; in the late 1960s he got tired of making gangster pictures that made sense and was actually fired by his studio after turning in Branded to Kill. It tells the story of Japan’s number 3 hitman, who is drawn into an increasingly warped feud with Number One, climaxing with the two of them sharing an apartment, mutually agreeing to not shoot each other until “it’s time”, and never leaving the house or even going to the bathroom without holding hands. Thirty-odd years later, Suzuki revisits this basic idea of dueling assassins, aided by screenwriter Kazunori Ito (known mostly for his work on Ghost in the Shell, the Patlabor franchise and Avalon - though he’s also one of the movers behind .hack). Pistol Opera is perhaps technically a sequel to Branded to Kill, but seeing one movie won’t necessarily help you decrypt the other. Most of the characters’ motivations are implied at best; Stray Cat (all the killers in this movie have codenames like superheroes or pro wrestlers - Hundred Eyes, Dark Horse, Painless Surgeon and so on) is the third greatest assassin in Japan and doesn’t care about her rank in the underworld, but she does want something, and badly. She claims it’s a gun, but what she does with the gun when she gets it suggests something else. Her final act in the film raises yet another possibility. Pistol Opera claims to be a gangster film - and occasionally even acts like it - but it’s really more of a deconstruction of the form. I’m not sure it’s accurate to say there’s one central theme, but this is largely a movie about the fetishization of violence, with a little anti-Westernization sentiment thrown in towards the end. But then, I could be wrong - I have no idea what most of the sequences featuring the Champ (who recalls the lead from Branded to Kill) are supposed to mean. Pistol Opera is more concerned with being visually striking than coherent, as shown by peculiar scenes like Stray Cat’s handler spontaneously delivering a rambling soliloquy to a bunch of Caucasian extras about how much she hates the flags of Western countries, while lying on top of a car, draped in the Union Jack. If spending a couple hours in Salvador Dali territory is your kind of thing, Pistol Opera has a lot to offer, but unfortunately Media Blasters’ presentation leaves something to be desired - the opening song and most of the closing credits go untranslated (so I have no idea what actor played which role, Makiko Esumi’s Stray Cat aside). There are no extras of any kind besides trailers for this and other Tokyo Shock titles and there is no English dub. But frankly anyone turned off by that alone would probably not enjoy this riotous, almost defiantly impenetrable movie anyway. Words By Joe Eglesias

Pistol Opera • Media Blasters • 112 Minutes • MSRP $29.95

her, he’s left with no real reason for any of his actions. This leads to him - and indeed virtually every member of the cast - delivering their performances at a desperate shriek, rolling their eyes and wailing as if they’ve just been told their daughter has been torn apart by wolves. The script, clearly a work in progress rushed into production before the director passed away, gives us some good ideas and then fails to go anywhere with them. There’s a lot of random babbling about the nature of terrorism which falls far short of actually having a point. One of the girls, Shiori, is the daughter of Beat Takeshi’s character in the first film, but all this gets her is a few moments of laughable introspection. The main male student, Takama, is identifiable as such only because he has blonde hair and rates an enigmatic flashback scene. I’m sure Battle Royale II would have managed to scrape by as merely a disappointing sequel if it weren’t for a disastrously bad scene in which Takeuchi Riki suddenly wanders into the battlefield wearing a spotless rugby uniform, calls a time out and gives everyone a pep-rally speech before his head explodes. One of the worst scenes in the history of film, it leaves the audience in such a state of shock we almost manage to avoid being annoyed at the absurdity of the incoherent happy ending. Words by Andrew Cunningham

Battle Royale II • Theater • 134 minutes

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It’s the goodwill left over from our fond memories of the first film that carries us into this train wreck of a sequel. The opening of the film helps as well, a powerful opening shot of Tokyo skyscrapers crashing into the ground that fades into grainy video footage of Nanahana Shuya, one of the survivors of the original film’s game, declaring war against all adults with this terrorist act. Then begins the nail biting tension of this film’s randomly selected class waking up with collars on and being told they have to fight a war for the government. They’ve upped the ante a little, pairing the students off by number. If one dies, their partner’s collar explodes as well. They’re armed (though not given bullets – those will be airdropped into the battlefield itself), shoved in camouflage and sent out to kill Shuya. They’re clearly being treated like cannon fodder this time, and in less than twenty minutes the class is down to only a dozen students. Very quickly the pace begins to drag and you start to realize how little you care. The most interesting members of the cast have already died, the survivors have not been characterized at all and nearly everyone gets killed before you even manage to get them straight. The opening attack is lifted straight out of Saving Private Ryan and overuses a jittery handheld camera that leaves the images jumpy and hard to watch. Takeuchi Riki gives the worst performance of his career as the new teacher (puzzlingly named “Takeuchi Riki”), chewing scenery in an attempt to distance himself from Beat Takeshi’s understated performance in the previous film. He manages to be menacing once or twice, but mostly is just silly - a fitting match for a movie that is just as ridiculous. Fujiwara Tatsuya, playing Shuya again, is never given any kind of center; his fellow fugitive, Noriko, is mysteriously missing in action. Given that his entire motivation in the first film centered on saving

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You could question whether the Silent Hill series single-handedly reﬁned and cemented the “realistic/horror” genre of gaming… but you can’t argue with the fact that they’ve all been top notch games. Silent Hill 3 is no different from its predecessors, plunging the player into visual and psychological Hades without ever being cliché. Face it: you love the way it creeps you out.

Unlike Silent Hill 2, this game follows the plot line laid down by the original game. Which means a demonic god, a resurrected child, an impending apocalypse, and writhing, skinless creatures are all involved. Too confusing for ya? Don’t sweat it; you’ll be too frightened out of your gourd to really take notes. As your surroundings drift back and forth between reality and some sort of netherworld hell (a trademark feature of the series), there will be plenty of dementia and frazzled nerves to distract you from the story. As always, the game’s use of silence and minimal sound effects play a huge part in the suspense building, often able to strangle your sanity without providing any action for extended periods. An empty room; dim, obscure lighting; some whispering voices; dancing shadows; echoes of your footsteps. Nope, it doesn’t need much else to scare the living shit outta you, cuz this is the kind of stuff real nightmares and fears are made of. As expected, Silent Hill 3 looks and plays smoother than the first two installments and new weapons, such as the katana and mallet, take bashing to all new levels of fun. The cut scenes are fully rendered with barely any polygons visible and no physical details are blurred, even in play mode - coming another step closer to making the insanity perfectly life-like. (shudder shudder) I have but just one complaint: the fixed camera angles. I understand that, like any good horror movie, the director dictates the tension/mood/ timing of the moment by sometimes choosing, very specifically, what the viewer gets to see. In a video game setting, however, that often means getting the controls and POV turned 180˚ during fights, making it very easy to lose track of where your character is facing, which way she should be headed, etc. It gets pretty damn annoying pretty quickly when three twoheaded zombie dogs are chompin’ at your ass and you keep getting turned around involuntarily. All in all, Silent Hill 3 retains the series’ right to be at the top of the genre. Though we might be less naïve than, let’s say, the first two times we entered the rust-stained netherworlds, we still cry like babies at this third-times-a-charm. PS: Silent Hill 4: The Room is already on its way Words by Tim Den

Silent Hill 3 • Konami • Play Station 2 • MSRP $39.99

montages. The imagery is tight and effective, far more so than most horror movies released these days and the fact that it’s a game draws you deep inside the events and makes the chills especially effective. Since most spirits are invisible the majority of the time, a flashbulb filament icon in the corner of the screen works like a paranormal Geiger counter - a useful tool when you run out of ideas for where to go next. Taking random pictures of areas where the filament glows reveals hidden things and opens doors. The game treads on both sides of the razor thin edge dividing maximum tension from boredom - the latter being mostly to blame on the girls sluggish trot and the incredible amount of back tracking. No emotion is more difficult to evoke in the audience than fear, and a good ghost story should make the viewer feel like they would go insane if they experienced such events. It’s a terribly difficult spell to weave but Fatal Frame manages to do just that. Slow paced, atmospheric, and effectively frightening, FF2 is a nice piece of gothic horror to be savored after sundown when it’s charms will be especially effective. Words by Eric Johnson

Fatal Frame 2 • Tecmo • PS2 • MSRP $49.99

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Ghosts rip holes in your perception of reality. A glimpse of one is a bowl full of existential crisis shoved right under your nose, a cold realization that the walls of reality may lie far beyond your previously secure perception of them. A good ghost story gives you a spoonful from that bowl and, if the storyteller has the proper discipline, pushes the right buttons and keeps the proper cards hidden, you can gorge yourself until you feel the primal unease of a lone deer studying every shadow for the wolf that will someday be there. Witnessed through the eyes of Mio and Mayu, twin girls lost in the woods who stumble across a phantom village of tormented souls, Fatal Frame 2 is a great cinematic ghost story and the fact that it’s a survival horror game actually augments it’s power. Like Silent Hill, FF2 downplays the action and pumps up the atmosphere. Instead of automatic weapons, ghosts are confronted with a camera. I know adolescent Japanese twins exorcising restless spirits with a supernatural Polaroid sounds hokey, but this game pulls it off. Lining up the viewfinder with a shambling apparition and phasing in and out of reality as it closes in for the attack is a frightening experience, one augmented by an effectively told story. Trapped in the village, the girls can only escape by learning more about the harrowing history of the place, a history that ended with a night of human sacrifice that turned the entire population into a pack of violent, twisted souls lashing out at the living unlucky enough to wander into their midst. The twins themselves tap into the energy of the place and experience some truly freaky flashback

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There is a bandwagon. And people always want to jump onto it, for good or for ill. But many times, the bandwagon is too small to accommodate all the hangers-on. And so it goes for atmospheric horror video games of the decidedly Japanese tinge. Already covered in this issue are two sequels to the best there are (Silent Hill and Fatal Frame for the lazy) and based on the quality of the aforementioned titles, more along the same vein should always be welcome. But both games took the idea of ‘survival horror,’ ﬁrst introduced in Capcom’s revolutionary Resident Evil, and slowed it down. They are more about creepiness rather than adrenaline, and creepiness is the key ingredient. They borrowed from popular Japanese cinema of the time and really hit the mark. What Siren seems like is an attempt to cash in, but 50% by people who really want to make a great game, and 50% by marketing staff who are infatuated with buzzwords. Atmospheric horror is the fad prominently on display in Siren, and there’s enough of it to choke a camel. The game reeks of it. A wonderfully shady story involving ancient Japanese rituals and a blood-red river round out the package, giving it a veneer of quality. There’s good stuff here and it’s readily apparent most of the time. However, it’s the terrors of the game itself that will make you scream in frustration (if not in horror at the bungling of such potential). Not surprisingly, Siren takes place in an old country-side village populated by zombies. Its story unfolds rather cryptically through the eyes of several cast members (in more ways than one), each given time to tell their own version. This is accomplished via “sight-jacking,” Siren’s gimmick. It’s a truly unique and cool ability that adds an eyeful of creep-out factor. Essentially it works like a “vision radio.” You activate your sight-jacking ability and slowly rotate the left thumb-stick to lock onto the vision of various entities and enemies in your immediate surroundings. Doing so allows you to see what your enemy sees, making the ‘sneak past-them’ bit easier. It’s equally terrifying to lock onto a marauding zombie (replete with moaning sounds and shufﬂing movement) and see yourself trying to scramble by! Graphically, the game is a mixed bag. Polygon count is low, making everyone look blocky and ruining some of the illusion. However, Sony cleverly mapped real faces onto the characters, providing for frighteningly realistic facial expressions which would enhance the dialogue if the voice-acting weren’t so goddamn cheesy! Bad enough they didn’t include the original Japanese track, but they gave everyone incredibly annoying British accents, jarring you once again from a seamless gaming experience. Even worse is that each vignette is called a “mission,” complete with a blank screen giving you your objectives. What is this, Metal Gear: Zombie? Just as you’re immersed in dread and foreboding, the next “mission” pops up, destroying the mood. In fact, comparing Siren to Metal Gear is fairly accurate - you’ll spend most of your time sneaking around avoiding the Guard of the Dead. I have no problem with being weaker than your aggressors - it certainly adds that extra danger to set your teeth on edge. However, when I have to sit and wait for a zombie’s walking pattern to repeat itself (and I was sitting there for awhile), I feel like I’ve stepped into an undead version of Manhunt. Waiting for enemy-patterns works for shooters like R-Type or Ikaruga, but with Siren’s plodding pace, it becomes an exercise in frustration and tedium. Siren has, at its heart, a brilliant survival-horror game. All the aspects are there and some serious love went into it. Too bad you have to dig at least six-feet into the ground to unearth any of this. It feels like some focus-group got their hands on an early version and gave the usual “decide by committee” death sentence to Siren. Such a shame. Words by Eric Chon

Siren • Sony • Play Station 2

MSRP $39.99

ARTIST RTIST INFO NFO series shows it. Ghost in the Shell: Innocence is something I’ve been waiting for quite a bit and I’m excited about its release. Some of my favorites are from the Animatrix project, namely Takeshi Koike and Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s contributions (Program, World Record). I’m fascinated by Koike’s direction considering that was somewhat his directorial debut. Usage of black as the strongest point of composition is great. He’s amazing. The only manga I really keep up with currently is Street Fighter, and NYX. Street Fighter at the moment has to be one the greatest collaborative projects in the American comics industry and its going very well. Josh Middleton (NYX) is an up and coming artist that has great staying power and talent and is constantly growing with each issue and if anyone hasn’t checked it out I recommend it. How did you start off? Did you read books? Take classes? Learn from other manga artists?

James Stanley So, who the hell are you? My name is James Stanley, I’m often known moreso by my penname, “nokato’. I’m an aspiring manga artist planning to attend Savannah College of Art and Design in the fall of 2004. My intent is to resurrect the old-school feel of anime and manga and to tell stories through comics evoking cinematic elements onto paper and drawing the reader in ^_^. And I like potatoes. A lot.

industry both Eastern and Western inﬂuence. A few that catch my eye are Frank Miller (Sin City), Falkun, Alvin Lee (Street Fighter), Arnold Tsang (Street Fighter), Paul Lee (Devil May Cry), Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (Shin Seiki Evangelion, Furi-Kuri, .H.A.C.K sign), Yoko Matsushita (Yami No Matsuei), Toshishiro Kawamoto (Cowboy Bebop, Wolf’s rain), Masumune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell: Man Machine Interface), and Josh Middleton (NYX)

And how long have you been drawing in the manga style?

What draws you to the manga style? Do you work in any others?

I’ve been drawing in the manga style, I’d probably say its going on 8 years now. I’ve been inﬂuenced by manga since a very early age not long after I get heavy into art and different styles and facets of illustration.

First and foremost, anyone who draws is an artist. Of course, people work under and through many different inspirations but all artists have one thing in common, and thats to create expression. In terms of style, I feel that whatever needs to be done to convey the truest expression of a story is what should be used for the project. I work according to the subject matter I’m given and I try to create an aesthetic that best ﬁts the story. Working in different styles not only helps an artist to improve but can be very fun and engaging. Bulgogi and tempura rolls together make a great meal in my opinion ^_^.

Who are your biggest influences? I’ll try and be as brief as I can with this question so here goes. I’m inspired a lot by ﬁlm directors, ironically. One of the strongest pulls of manga is engulﬁng the reader within the story - the feeling is very visceral, much like watching a movie. Mamoru Oshii (Avalon, Ghost in the Shell, Innocence, Jinroh), Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill Vol 1,2, Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction) Akira Kurosawa (Sanjuro, Yojimbo), Hideaki Anno (Love & Pop, Shin Seiki Evangelion, Death/ Rebirth, End of Evangelion), Shinichiro Watanabe (Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop: Knockin On Heaven’s Door). Since I’m an artist at heart, I’m inspired by quite a few manga artists and pencillers in the comics

Do you have any favorite manga/anime? I do enjoy Samurai Champloo quite a lot. It’s a breath of fresh air to classic Japanese genre and seems to be doing very well. Shinichiro Watanabe shows he has more promise than most thought and this

Learning for me was a bit odd. When I was younger, I didn’t think I really needed to learn how to draw other things so I solely focused on comics. I realized later on that drawing from life is the best teacher in how to draw anything. Drawing comics isn’t just ‘drawing comics’. In order to tell a great story you would need to be able to draw anything at any time. Life is the best teacher and it still is my teacher. Formal training in certain instances isn’t necessary but I have had some formal training in college and I plan to return for more. Art is an ongoing process where being comfortable could be a downfall. I’m inspired by many different artists but I always strive to draw the way I would draw. I don’t think anyone should lose sight of their own style - its what makes art unique. Everyone’s touch is different. Where do you see yourself in the next few years? 3 years from now? Meeting deadlines for my upcoming projects such as Reload, Ex Aust D’, and my contributions to a fellow creators project, Addiction, by Vaiox. Look for that soon. I plan to have an online comic site by that time. Please look forward to them and hopefully you will enjoy them as much as I know that fans of a good story would. Maybe I could get some work published in a magazine that name refers to a particular “time-zone” ... tune in next time, I guess ^_^. Why is the wall getting wavy like that? Last bit - anything you want to add? For anyone who is aspiring to make their claim in the comic industry, realize that it’s going to be tough and that it will cause a lot of self-examination and not to give up on the ﬁrst try. I’m just starting to get my own foot in the door and there’s a lot of ground to be covered. It can be discouraging at times but as long as you work hard until you reach your goal, you’ll be a great artist. No one ever stops learning - its an ongoing process. Thanks to EST for this wonderful opportunity. Thanks to fans of this magazine and their continual support and I’ll see you all next issue maybe.

Thanks for taking the time, James! And for an awesome piece of art! Email James at: nokatokun333@yahoo.com

NEXT ISSUE: NINJAS! NINJAS! NINJAS!