In short: Kidan Piece of Darkness (2015/16)

This is an anthology movie with ten short horror stories by six Japanese directors (and no, of course I have found nothing on the Net to help identify who did which segment), among them the three house favourites Koji Shiraishi, Yoshihiro Nakamura and Mari Asato, as well as Eisuke Naito, Hiroki Iwasawa and Hajime Ohata. Apparently, this is “based on Fuyumi Ono’s bestselling books”, but I can’t tell you if it’s the same Fuyumi Ono known for their manga and fantasy work, though I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m a source of great information today.

Given the number of segments in a 100 minute running time, it’ll probably surprise nobody that the stories are comparatively simple – though not necessarily straightforward – and based on or directly inspired by contemporary Japanese urban legends and/or early Japanese creepypasta (the borders between these realms have become rather vague once the Internet hit it big), so even if you’re like me and have no clue about Ono’s work, you’ll recognize the structures, beats and quite a few of the creatures haunting the tales. That’s not, however, much of a problem to me, for there’s always a place for the kind of short horror that understands itself as a form of folklore in my heart, particularly when it is as well realized as this one.

There are quite a few projects with a similar approach to this dribbling in from Japan, and most of them are rather enjoyable, but they do tend to have a rather cheap look and feel, whereas Kidan seems definitely more upmarket. Not the big cinema kind of upmarket, but the one where things don’t look actively cheap and impoverished. The experienced and highly capable group of directors helps there too, of course, milking every ounce of atmosphere they can out of the handful of scenes every story has to work with, building tension and a surprising amount of creepiness out of the well-known tropes involved.

There’s an eerie kind of weirdness surrounding most of these tales, the convictions of talented storytellers that help make some of the more preposterous ideas here disturbing and even somewhat horrifying, never giving a viewer the space and time to look at things and sneer. It’s lovely work, really.


The film turns out to be a bit more cleverly structured than typical of this sort of project, starting out with pretty traditional urban legends and becoming stranger with each episode, culminating in a final trio of stories that are so quietly strange as to delight my old hard heart quite immensely. Atypical of anthology movies, there’s no bad middle tale here, either, every director bringing full focus to their little story or stories, making a small project feel rather impressive.

Three Films Make A Post: Rabid, Drug-Infested Hippies on a Blood-Crazed KILLING RAMPAGE!

The Possession (2012): I was warned by other reviews that Ole Bornedal's movie loses much of its quality during its finale, but for my tastes, the whole thing jumped the shark at about the fifty minute mark when Jeffrey Dean Morgan does his short experiment in DIY exorcism (is there a column about that in Maker Magazine?). At least that's the point when all the film's increasingly loud and dumb attempts at scaring the audience only produced increasingly annoyed eye-rolling anymore. It's a bit of a shame, too, for the film's beginning promises a decent, subtextually loaded piece of nuclear family in dismay (oh noes!) horror, some of the horror sequences show promise, and the acting is rather good throughout. Alas, the longer The Possession goes, the dumber it becomes, turning loud when it should be silent and pompous when it should be subtle. Or maybe I'm just growing too old to appreciate a movie shouting at me throughout its running time as "horror"?

Taken 2 (2012): Speaking of disappointments, Olivier Megaton's sequel to what just may be the best among Europa Corps's endless assembly line churn-out of action movies does not hold up to the standards of the first film. Somebody must have talked Luc Besson into toning the violence down, and now we have an action movie that often seems afraid to show much of the action, even in the extended cut. There's some theoretically interesting subtext about the film's bad guy - whatever his name is - and Liam Neeson's character being mirror images of each other, but in good old Besson fashion, the script wastes that potential in its insistence on having the bad guy still being cliché-evil. This wouldn't be so bad if the rest of the movie would make a better effort distracting the audience from the film's failings, but there's really not enough going on for that at all.

On the positive side, this time around Famke Janssen and Maggie Grace are allowed a bit more screen-time and personality, though of course no actual agency. I'd also wish these films would stop casting nearly thirty year old Grace as a seventeen year old girl (one assumes) with the mental development of a twelve year old, but that might be just me.

Henge (2011): I was quite a bit more impressed by Hajime Ohata's short-ish (53 minutes) movie about a man (Kazunori Aizawa) who starts transforming into a monster, which does change the marital relations to his wife (Aki Morita) in various ways. Elements of Cronenbergian body horror, Hellraiser and finally kaiju cinema come together in a movie strong enough to transcend Aizawa's indifferent performance and the dubious quality of its special effects. There's some true conviction behind the filmmaking here that is a beautiful antidote to the half-assed-ness of the other films I looked at today.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,french movies,japanese movies,in short,horror,thriller,kaiju,ole bornedal,jeffrey dean morgan,olivier megaton,liam neeson,famke janssen,maggie grace,hajime ohata