Ura Horror (2008)

I have been pretty vocal about my love for the works of the contemporary king of POV horror Koji Shiraishi, as well as my general love for the horror anthologies of purportedly real footage that got churned out for the local Japanese home video market for a time. So much so, finding a new fansubbed movie of the sort provides me with a genuine moment of happiness.

Ura Horror, an anthology of shorts that tend to be around the five minutes mark, brings these good things together, with Shiraishi co-directing together with Yohei Fukuda (who also spent some time in the realm of cursed footage and tapes banned from broadcast on his own). Quality and depth of the pieces wavers between what amounts to short jokes and their set-ups, to tales that suggest a larger world of the supernatural lurking right at the upper right corner of a fuzzy video.

For the Shiraishi maniac, some moments here feel like suggestions and sketches of what is to come later: yes, digital worms are indeed in here, and AV actress turned general purpose idol and Noroi stalwart Maria Takagi is featured (and getting cursed) as well in a segment that also features the great Takashi Shimizu playing himself. Shiraishi’s love for the low-rent parts and aspects of Japanese popular culture is already in full effect.

This is, of course, all pretty lightweight in the sense that none of the tales here is an actual story with a traditional beginning, middle, and end, or features an explanation for the weirdness we have just witnessed, and no deep characterisation is going to be forthcoming. One could, of course, argue this to be exactly the point: these are films about the lack of explanation, about weirdness only briefly encountered, caught on camera, and then locked away by the survivors.

Three Films Make A Post: A new breed of mystery.

Videoheaven (2025): We all have our nostalgias; some of us feel the need to make three hour long essay films that attempt to defend them by amateurish attempts at intellectualizing, layered over endless clips of movie scenes taking place in video rental stores.

This is the video store version of Los Angeles Plays Itself, but where that classic of the overlong essay movie has complex ideas – some of whom I very much disagree with – it uses its clips to argue for, this is a strenuous clip show overlaid with an overwritten, pretentious monologue read by Maya Hawke that needs ages to explain the few, superficial ideas director/writer Alex Ross Perry actually has. The whole tone of the project mostly makes me happy video stores are practically dead, because if they made people this insufferable, they weren’t a good thing.

The Sheep Detective (2026): I wouldn’t have been surprised to also hate Kyle Balda’s high budget Amazon original about a bunch of sheep (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston and Patrick Stewart, among others) solving a murder in the most clichéd British murder village (possibly situated in the neighbourhood of Midsomer). However, this turns out to be utterly charming, working with and against golden age mystery tropes, making actually funny jokes and even nailing its emotional beats so well, I found myself tearing up at a movie about animated sheep.

The book this is based on is apparently considerably darker, but I found the film as it stands balancing quite wonderfully on the line between kitsch and goth.

Hi-Five (2025): Dear Internet, I’m still not suffering from that “super hero fatigue” I read so much about – how could I when superhero movies make up perhaps one percent of the movies I watch in a year? – and I’m not sorry about it, either.

So Kang Hyoung-chul’s South Korean superhero comedy about five very ordinary people and a Christian cult leader getting super powers, does have it kind of easy with me. But then, what’s not to like about a well-paced, genuinely fun film filled with just as fun characters, the proper not-Zach-Snyder-approved ideology for a superhero film, and a sense of playfulness and style?

The Summit of Mount Fuji (1970)

Original title: Fuji sanchô

After some years of failed attempts at convincing the government, the Japan Meteorological Agency manages to secure a mandate to install a weather radar device on the summit of Mount Fuji. This is predominantly going to be used to forecast dangerous typhoons much earlier than possible up to this point.

It’s not an easy project though: the weather affords only about forty working days per year, with a very slim two year window to finish it at all provided by the budget. There’s also the little problem of hard physical labour having to take place in very thin air, as well as the logistical and practical nightmare of masses of production materials having to be hauled by horse and higher up on foot.

And that’s before the kinds of troubles arise a project of this kind can’t avoid: backroom squabbling, worse weather than expected, and so on.

When you see the “Nikkatsu” logo on a film, you generally expect something more pop or more nude than a somewhat dry two hour movie about an ambitious construction project, but, with the assistance of the JMA and Mitsubishi Motors (the company who built the actual weather radar on Mount Fuji), this is indeed what we get here.

Surprisingly enough, I found myself often riveted by Tetsutaro Murano’s film. There’s something to be said about a film concerning a bunch of serious, professional people – all of them men, because that’s the times unfortunately – doing serious, professional work under difficult circumstances to build something of actual use to their society. Especially when watched in a time when the thing to admire in the real world are incompetent fools trying to destroy as much of our societies in many of the countries of the West in as short a time as possible to get rich on the backs of everybody else.

Murano tells the story calmly, often emphatically without drama. Thus, he can focus on the small triumphs when yet another difficult hurdle is surmounted by hard work and professionalism, and doesn’t exactly need too become too heavy-handed.

This isn’t much of a character movie. There are a lot of fine Japanese actors here – like eternal favourite Shintaro Katsu as the leader of the horse porter cooperation which will turn into the bulldozer porter cooperation – who provide screen presence to not let the film drift off into the inhuman. Yet this isn’t a film about personal problems but one about the solving of impersonal problems through competence, stubbornness and a bit of luck.

Visually, there are some exciting shots of Mount Fuji – particularly the daring helicopter transport of the radome is impressive –, of heavy machinery crawling up a mountain while a group of pilgrims goes down the mountain, and rather a lot of bad weather, made with enough heft to convince anyone they are indeed witnessing the building of a radar station on a mountain summit.

Which, it turns out, was exactly the kind of thing I needed to see today.

The Stately Ghosts of England (1965)

Ah, the Sixties, when NBC News somehow deigned to hire – apparently already paranormally inclined – Frank “future The Entity guy” De Felitta to adapt a non-fiction – of a kind - book by Diana Norman about some haunted manors in England.

Because as guy from the Bronx doesn’t exactly scream “stately manor house”, the ensuing documentary is actually carried by Margaret “Miss Marple” Rutherford, her apparently mute husband Stringer Davis, and “clairvoyant” (not space cadet!) Tom Corbett.

So Rutherford and her hangers-on in turn visit three stately manors, all of which clearly can only be filmed in Dutch angles, let some posh twat tell the local ghost story in the tone of often told, well-rehearsed stories, and then begin wandering about the place while an impressive orchestral score swoons. Corbett inevitably sees ghosts (and corrects the number of ghosts from the stories upwards), Rutherford overacts every of the very many reaction shots asked of her while quoting Shakespeare or Byron. All the while Stringer Davis looks on, confused why he’s even there.

In other words, it’s pretty fantastic entertainment for the lover of ghost stories or of the less YouTube sort of posh English ghost hunting – Dame Rutherford certainly won’t measure any magnetic fields or shout at any given spirit person – and the paranormal as cosy entertainment.

For me, as someone who grew up on our German Edgar Wallace adaptations as a focal point of what England is supposed to look and feel like – that is, not at all like the real place – the film provides the additional kick of doing something comparable through the eyes of American De Felitta, with the added frisson of De Felitta actually having some proper British upper class people to act out his fantasies about their country for him.

Three Films Make A Post: MIGHTY MAX!

The Solar Thread (1963): The mere existence of this short film is something of a Fortean encounter. Commissioned to make a PR film for a large producer of artificial textiles, Kazuo Kuroki turned out this portrayal of capitalism as an abstract nightmare of empty factories filled with machines voided of human input, bathed in an atonal score by Toshi Ichiyanagi. Possibly one of the great dystopian yet beautiful movies I’ve seen. Somehow, a large company’s PR arm signed off on this, and a gentleperson on the internet fansubbed it and put it on the Internet Archive.

Speed Demon (2026): I seem to be one of the few people alive who actually enjoyed this “nun exorcist Katie Cassidy on a train” movie, but Jon Keeyes’s film is so joyfully cheesy without winking at its audience, and carries itself with such a sense of fun, I’m not going to complain about the bizarre characterisations, the improbable dialogue, and the, ahem, variable acting. All these so-called flaws really only add to my enjoyment, as does a final sequel set-up in which an undercover Pope first tells our heroine that he doesn’t like her methods but approves of her results and then leads in to promise us the exorcism of the President of the United States (who really could need one) in the sequel. How could I resist?

Bored Hatamoto: The Daimonji Conspiracy (1959): Unlike the other films in the long-running jidaigeki mystery series I’ve seen, this entry, directed by Yasushi Sasaki, does involve a somewhat more down to earth plot about a corrupt official’s attempt to rope an honourable but ill-used clan into a rebellion against the Shogun. There’s an emphasis on palace intrigue, plots and counterplots, and comparatively few of the pulpier elements of other Bored Hatamoto films. Though Utaemon Ichikawa does get an opportunity to make one of this patented grand surprise entrances in the finale, and still gets to stare down and kill a lot of mooks.

I have to admit, the film’s general quality notwithstanding,m I found myself missing the magical curses and, ninjas and vampire bats of other entries into the series a little.

Highwaymen (2004)

Already car-hating Molly Poole (Rhona Mitra) barely escapes with her life from the attack of a serial killer we’ll later learn to be called Fargo (Colm Feore) – one of her friends is less happy. Fargo uses his souped-up car as murder weapon of choice, and really as a replacement body, for he is wheelchair-bound, which makes the while serial killing thing rather difficult. Given the car angle, nobody actually believes Molly’s story, and the police treat the situation as a bad case of a hit and run.

Well, nearly nobody believes her – a traffic investigator (Frankie Faison) has his doubts about the normalcy of the situation, and a mysterious man (Jim Caviezel before he lost his mind to QAnon) in his own souped-up car shadows her. Rennie, as we’ll mostly come to know him, lost his wife to the killer who attacked Molly and has been hunting him for years now, sharing the ways of the road and an occasional CB taunt/come-on with him.

Rennie is convinced Fargo is going to attack Molly again, and he’s not above using her as bait to finally get his man.

What a difference a decade and a half make. When I first (and last) saw Robert Harmon’s Highwaymen, I treated it as a less than successful attempt by Harmon to return to the glory days of his masterful The Hitcher, with the film at hand a slickly made yet basically empty attempt at catching lightning in a bottle a second time.

As is so often the case, I’m looking more than a little askance at my past self’s willingness to wave away a film that’s nearly as good as The Hitcher itself, a film which does indeed use elements of that past achievement as well as some taken from the mass of serial killer films that had accrued between the two movies. Where the old one is about a boy becoming a man/monster (interrogating the borderline between these two in a violent male-dominated society), this one takes place at a point where the protagonist’s innocence is already lost, and there’s only a difference in degree between him and his prey anymore.

So, this is a movie about men who have turned feral, roaming empty highways in cars that have become parts of their bodies – in the killer’s case even actual replacements for much of their bodies – performing a ritualised hunt Rennie uses to keep himself from ever having to actually process the death of his wife like a normal person would have to. In this context, it is no surprise he is only able to finish the hunt once he’s pressed into relating to Molly – and to a degree to investigator Macklin – as a person instead of a tool or an obstacle that doesn’t truly belong into Car World.

All of this is baked into a masterfully made thriller/action movie, a film of dark streets reflecting neon, the empty spaces between the places people actually inhabit, and seemingly endless nights. In fact, one of the best little tricks Harmon uses is the elegant shift from night to day for the film’s final stretch.

Basically, past me was an idiot. But that’s not news around here anymore.

The Convenience Store (2026)

A couple of cops are trying to piece together the strange occurrences that took place one night at a rural convenience store. There’s rather a lot of strangeness, as well as a dead, eyeless manager in the basement to consider.

The case’s main witness is student Tazuru (Kotona Minami). She had been working the night shift of the store that night, as she does six nights a week to earn money for college and to take care of her mother. During the interviews, she, and eventually other characters, reveals some of the peculiar and horrific things that happened at the store during the last few nights.

Because what the girl has to tell is very strange indeed, seeing as it concerns ghosts, apparitions and a doom-saying homeless man, it is lucky she can offer some memory cards with videos to prove at least some of her supernatural experiences. Surely, watching those videos can’t connect anyone watching them to a curse, right?

Director Jiro Nagae has been doing cheap Japanese horror for the home viewing market for quite a few years, and he does by now clearly have a good grip on how to make a very basic horror film. Thus, I mostly found this videogame adaptation a pleasant enough time, featuring as it does some somewhat effective scares and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The film carries its affection for the superior classics of the J-horror boom on its sleeves: the investigative structure is mostly an excuse to tell the story out of order like a Ju-on story, there’s a little boy ghost also more than a little reminiscent of those classics, and the eventual cursed object is so Ringu, I’m a bit surprised nobody got sued.

Of course, being quite so derivative, there are few surprises here – if you have seen any Japanese horror made post 1995 at all, you’ll know what the big final reveal is going to be very early on, and if you’re bored by J-horror style ghosts, this isn’t going to be the movie to show you how wrong you are (even though you are).

As an unapologetic part of its tradition, The Convenience Store is a pleasant enough experience.

Three Films Make A Post: This is not an expedition. It's an execution.

Iron Lung (2026): While the YouTube to movie director pipeline has already introduced some excellent new blood to the cadre of horror genre filmmakers, it also has enabled the return of the vanity project, this time with an in-built audience your past vanity filmmaker could only have dreamed of.

On one hand, I applaud YouTuber Mark Fischbach falling in love with a horror videogame and deciding to use his influencer clout to finance and create his own movie adaptation of it instead of becoming a serial killer or MAGA techbro. My problems start when he then takes on the role of director, writer, executive producer and co-editor of the project, while not being very good at any of these roles. He then proceeds to turn out a film that moves slow like molasses – this is about an hour longer than the material warrants – lacks the visual flair needed for something that mostly consists of shots of Fischbach or some sexy, sexy dials and screens, and which focusses on one single actor who simply isn’t good enough to carry a two hour movie on his shoulders. Much of which could have been avoided in a project where someone would have been in a position to say “no” to the auteur’s bad ideas, or could have convinced him to hire an actual actor for the lead role, a screenwriter for the script, and so on, and so forth.

Personally, I’d also have loved some professional sound editing, but then I’m too old for this shit anyway.

Paura il diavolo and Blue Fear (1993): On the other hand, these first SOV short-ish features by British DIY filmmaker Darren Ward, mostly made with friends and family, show much more of a coherent vision than Fischbach’s endless meandering shots of his own face, even though these, too, are amateur productions completely in thrall to their influences.

In Paura’s case, these influences are mostly from the gory side of Italian horror – Lamberto Bava’s Demons and Fulci are clearly involved – and Evil Dead, so this is predominantly a showcase for some fantastic homemade effects, but also already shows a filmmaker with an eye for the creation of mood through colour and shadow, a flair for concise and expressive editing (hi, Mr Fischbach), all clearly visible even with the limitations of the Shot on Video style and the damn fuzzy VHS source the Blu-Ray was sourced from.

In a sense, Blue Fear is a bit a of a regression for Ward, mostly because here, he’s in full-on giallo mode. Which is more than fine in the highly effective and ridiculously stylish (this is SOV!) slash and stalking and dream sequences that actually suggest a young director sharpening his visual tools. However, a giallo also needs a plot and therefore needs acting, and here, Ward doesn’t seem as secure in his abilities to get the desire results yet, leading to some awkwardly edited and slow dialogue sequences, certainly not helped by the lack of actual actors on the project. Family and friends can only take you so far in this regard, unless you’re called Bridges or Carradine.

The Adventures of Kosuke Kindaichi (1979)

Original title: Kindaichi Kosuke no boken

In the world of the film, famous detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Ikko Furuya) is also a famous mystery novel character, and a famous film character. For his newest case, he teams up with Inspector Todoroki (Kunie Tanaka). Todoroki is mostly interested in a series of art thefts committed by a gang of roller-skating young people who like mime and/or David Bowie make-up, whereas Kindaichi is waiting for a murder to happen, for there are always murders in his cases, as well as tainted blood, generational guilt, and complicated murder methods, because that sort of thing is at the core of the Japanese experience as he sees it.

Which is about as sensible as I can make the great Nobuhiko Obayashi’s mystery comedy’s plot sound. There is a properly Kindaichi-like murder mystery happening here, mind you, but it is nearly drowned out by Obayashi at his most exhaustingly unleashed: there’s not a single shot here without any sight gags going on in the background, hardly a line said that doesn’t hint at broader pop culture, Japanese golden age style mysteries, movies, books, music, or ads that have nothing to do with the supposed plot. Some of it is completely inexplicable from my distance of time, geography and language to its point of creation, some I could parse thanks to the amount of Japanese movies, books and manga I’ve consumed during the course of my life, some should be clear to everyone. In any case, it can all become a bit overwhelming, particularly combined with the breakneck speed with which Obayashi goes from scene to scene here.

Of course, this being an Obayashi movie, it also looks absolutely beautiful, and shifts from visual style to visual style with an off-handed surety that must have intimidate any lesser director; also of course, this does not make The Adventures any less overwhelming.

All of this reads like a commentary on the kind of art a Kosuke Kindaichi film must be to me, something referential to a torrent of other media in its own series, as well as the torrent of popular media surrounding it, as well as the torrent of different popular media that surrounded the other versions of the same character, a hall of mirrors that goes on and on until it becomes difficult to find the substance of whatever the adventures of Kosuke Kindaichi actually mean. Or once meant, or will mean, and so on and so forth, until one is overwhelmed enough by the whole thing one has to make Kindaichi himself the killer to return to any kind of sense at all.