In short: Slit Mouth Woman in LA (2014)

Apparently, that horrid orange guy with the alien on his head on Twitter is right and the US of A do have an illegal immigration problem. Los Angeles, at least, is invaded by a group of low budget filmmakers from Japan going Bulgaria on the place. No wait, that’s the production history of the film, not the plot. In the plot, there’s a curious, unexplained (and never to be explained by the film) accumulation of killings related to Japanese urban legends suddenly happening in Los Angeles. In various, anthology-style episodes, the Slit Mouth(ed) Woman does her thing (and is indeed beautiful), a kokkuri-san (imagine a Japanese version of ouija) session causes murder and undeath, and so on, and so forth. Why, things become so bad, one Furen, Evil Hunter – that’s what it says on screen - (Eiji Inoue) travels to the city for some Japanese style monster bashing.

After this, I honestly hope Japanese budget filmmakers hopping over to Los Angeles to shoot something fast and cheap will become a thing exactly like US action films shot in Bulgaria, for while this certainly is neither a deep, nor a creepy, nor a clever movie, it certainly is a fun one. The directors/writers – Akira Hirose, Hiro Kay, Kazuya Ogawa and Takeshi Sone – seem to have a lot of fun imagining Japanese urban legends happening in the US, and who could blame them?

A large part of the film’s charm is based on the feeling of cultural whiplash watching it may cause. It’s not just that Los Angeles’s population of Japanese citizens seems to float around fifty percent (this is not a complaint), it’s that all the white people in the film don’t conform to the clichés of US horror movie characters but to those of Japanese horror movie characters, leading to an LA based film that’s full of guys and gals of the types you’ll more often meet in anime or in (movie) Tokyo; the slightly alienating – or at least very weird – effect is further enhanced by the quality of the actors playing these characters, for their acting is off in various typical indie horror ways anyway, resulting in moments when writing and acting come together or apart in the most bizarre ways.

If this sounds as if I were looking down on the film, nothing could be further from the truth. We all have, after all, seen many a film made by US filmmakers who just don’t get the foreign setting they are using at all. This turnabout isn’t just fair play, but it’s also a great example of cultural bastardisation, of artists playing around with the elements of a foreign (or should I say “strange” in this context) culture, understanding about half of it, and building something new and weird nobody actually coming from the place would ever be able to dream up.


Add to this the film’s sprightly pace, decent to good special effects and its goofy lovability, and you could do worse than stream this on a rainy evening. I actually found it among the dregs of cheap horror films on Amazon Prime, and certainly became a little happier watching it.