Keri O'Shea

DVD Review: Howl (2015)

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Although he’s clearly been working hard in his other capacity as a prosthetics specialist, I had been wondering what had happened to Paul Hyett: director since he brought us that mesmerisingly grim movie The Seasoning House back in 2012, which screened at that year’s Frightfest. Well, he’s back in a directorial capacity with Howl (2015), and you wouldn’t need to be a genius to work out that – given the title, the poster blurb and the full moon shot – it contains a specific, rather different kind of brutality to the wartime vision of his first feature film (though while we’re on the subject, whoever opted for that bloody cliched handprint-on-window poster art for this wants bloody shooting). So it’s clearly a creature feature of a specific kind; the question is, how does it compare to other films within this reasonably sparse, but often problematic genre?

Train guard Joe (Ed Speleers) is an ambitious guy within the remit of his profession, but when we meet him, he’s in a frustrating place. Having just been turned down for a promotion, the first treat in store for him in the role he had hoped to ditch is an extra shift on a last train out of Waterloo to some back-of-beyond location in that dangerous, unchartered area known as Not London. On board is the usual ragtag bunch you get at that charmless hour of the evening: workaholics, gobshite teenagers, slightly uncomfortable pensioners and the obligatory Train Lech. Still, these things are to be expected, and the journey seems to be going as well as these things ever do, right up until it isn’t; without warning, the train grinds to a halt, ditching power in the process. The driver (Sean Pertwee) gets out to investigate – and that’s the end of him.

Now, just two members of staff – Joe, and assistant Ellen (Holly Weston) – remain alongside an increasingly irate group of passengers, a few of whom demand to be let off to walk the last few miles to the next station. Joe starts off fretting about the future of his job as the reason people shouldn’t do so, but they’re happy to ignore the disappeared driver, the full moon and the pitch black woods in order to get home (which, if you think sounds unreasonable, you haven’t spent very many hours using the borked British rail system). Thing is, Joe and Ellen soon find the driver when they try to leave alongside their passengers, and seeing what’s left of him gives them one of the more compelling reasons to hole up in the train instead. Something is out there – something dangerous – and if those on board want to survive, then their only hope is to work together against whatever preternatural predator now hunts them.

Hyett has chosen to work with a couple of the same cast he used to good effect in The Seasoning House here, namely Rosie Day and Sean Pertwee, though he clearly doesn’t want to over-rely on them and as such they have bit parts only. This seems a bit of a waste, really, as Pertwee in particular has the chops for genre cinema; perhaps Hyett felt he really wanted a very young actor to play the thwarted shift manager Joe, and Speleers is decent enough, if a little monotone in places. Still, familiar cast or unfamiliar cast, creatures or no creatures, one of Howl’s key strengths is in something Hyett also does in The Seasoning House – which is to create a sense of claustrophobia and helplessness, a potent combination. Howl gives us a competent glimpse of a horror staple, namely just how vulnerable people are when even a few miles ‘off the grid’, and it’s at its best in a few key scenes: when the camera pans down from some of the passengers wondering what the hell is causing the delay, through the train’s chassis and to the carnage going on underneath the train, this shows flair and even a little of the glib humour which crops up elsewhere in the film.

This brings me back to the creatures themselves, though, and I have to say that, despite some phenomenally creative SFX where the critters are concerned (hallelujah for werewolves which look original and even fearsome), the werewolf motif overall falls rather flat for me. As much as I want to see more creature features grace our screens, I want to be able to differentiate between the creatures which make it there, and frankly when we have a group of disparate people being forced to overcome their differences and barricade themselves into a confined space to defend against a relentless foe (ahem) then it could be a zombie, a vampire, an omnipotent redneck, any horror staple you like. There’s really not that much in Howl to distinguish these baddies as werewolves save for the phase of the moon outside, and certainly nothing substantial about mythology, cause, anything of the sort which may have raised the plot up beyond the most obvious level. Add in the contagion element present in this plot, with a bitten passenger slowly ‘turning’, and it feels more and more like a zombie movie by any other name…

The could-be-anything enemy is there then, and in addition to that, Howl pitches in rather too many tropes for the average horror fan’s liking. For instance, humanising an awful human being is code for the fact that they’re about to get offed, when it would have been more interesting to have us ask ourselves whether we wouldn’t still be able to empathise with a twat, rather than someone who momentarily turned out to be lovely after all. On the converse of this, layering awfulness on awfulness until a character can barely stand the weight of it is further proof positive that bad things will befall them: more nuance, more ambiguity would have helped the characterisation, again, raising the plot up.

I always want to champion werewolf horror as I’d generally like to see more of it around, but sadly Howl doesn’t quite fit in with this wish overall. Competently made on a technical level, it nonetheless treads a safe path through genre conventions without really making much of the source of the horror it spends ninety minutes on. Finally, elements of threat disparity collude to see the film out with a bit of a whimper. As far as directorial calling cards go, The Seasoning House is still by far and away the best bet.

Howl gets a theatrical release on 16th October and its home entertainment release on 26th October 2015.

Film Review: Goddess of Love (2015)

Posted on September 9, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Almost the moment the opening credits roll on Jon ‘Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer’ Knautz’s newest film, Goddess of Love, we can see that our female lead, Venus (Alexis Kendra) is something of a culture vulture. Learning to speak French? Check. Ballet? Check. Piano, yep; drug addiction which makes her look intermittently wasted but doesn’t altogether detract from her overall attractiveness – you betcha. Still, perhaps she’s a finishing school drop out, or for whatever reason, be it down to drugs or something else, she’s also stripping by night to make ends meet. This… doesn’t seem to be her forte, to be fair.

She’s given a few handy pro tips on how to empty wallets by fellow dancer Chanel (the wonderful Monda Scott, and someone, somewhere please give her a starring movie role) but for all of the sage advice, it doesn’t go well. The first customer she gets after the pep talk tells her she looks like his dead wife, and somehow they still end up at dinner together. They seem to hit it off, too – professional distance be damned – and start seeing each other. Venus can cook but one meal and that’s pasta, but what the hell. It might just be love. Young lovers need the carbs.

Months pass, however, and with them goes the honeymoon period; one day, Venus sees another woman’s name pop up on Brian’s phone, some old friend called Christine (who also models for his photography). She copes with this as admirably as any nervy, drug-addicted and insecure female ever has, i.e. not at fucking all, and so when Brian begins going incommunicado altogether for days at a time, it’s clearly getting under Venus’s skin: she becomes obsessive, paranoid, her mental state ever more fragile. Is Brian cheating on her? In getting to the bottom of the question, Goddess of Love offers us abundant nudity, red wine from the bottle, and puking.

I sound like I’m really down on this film, but to tell the truth – I’m not. Okay, on one level it was a surprise, considering the last thing I saw by this director was very much in the ‘horror comedy’ category, and this is neither a horror nor a comedy. In fact, I’m struggling to place it in a genre at all, which means little in terms of reviewing it per se, but may affect its likelihood of finding an appreciative audience. Market it as a Neighbor style horror and risk criticism of its largely bloodless nature, sell it as a psychological thriller and get it in the neck because it’s just too crass and horrific in places (for a woman who seems to only turn up to work a handful of times during the film, incidentally, Kendra spends a lot of the time in various states of partial or full undress which can look a bit, well, odd; if that has now encouraged you to check out the film for boobs alone then I posit that no one looks good sitting naked on a toilet).

Despite some misgivings about the genre aspect, though, there are many things to enjoy here. In terms of how the film looks, it’s really very good. The production values here are rock solid; it’s well-miked, well-lit and well-shot, with an evident eye for effective angles and reveals. The lead actors aren’t massively at ease in some places, but give Kendra some proper flip-outs to work with and she shows she can do a great deal with it – ditto Elizabeth Sandy (playing Christine) who goes from lady-who-lunches to bat-wielding harpy in a heartbeat. And then, in some ways it’s refreshing that the film deviates from one of its possible courses; I’d assumed this delicate and naive stripper would be victim to some sadist who just happens to frequent strip clubs; thankfully, this isn’t the case. But my god does this film play on the worst stereotypes of female behaviour, too (and yes, I know stereotypes have one foot in truth, even if we might not like to admit it). Venus is positively painful to watch, with the constant sending of unread texts, the clinginess, the determination to throw everything into a short-term relationship with, well, with a bit of a dick. I understand that what follows for her and for the plot is rooted in this behaviour, but still – it’s frustrating stuff, and the ol’ ‘unhinged female whose attempt at a relationship acts as a touchpaper for her descent into madness’ has been done elsewhere.

In fact, if I was going to compare this film to anything, it’d probably be Lucky McGee’s May (2002): the earlier film’s tagline ‘Be careful – she might just take your heart’ seems to be echoed in Goddess of Love’s own ‘Be careful who you get close to’. But although you sometimes find yourself rooting for Venus – flaws and all – in the same way you find yourself rooting for Bettis’s May, Goddess of Love as a film ultimately lacks the shock and sympathy I felt at the end of May. Whether this is because the depth to Venus’s character is signposted so lightly and early, because there’s more of an attempt to maintain overt sexuality in Venus, or even because the conclusion takes one more step into a tried and tested exploration of psychosis is something to be debated.

Hannibal Season 3 – The Rundown

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Caution – this article contains spoilers

When the credits rolled on the last episode of Hannibal Season 2, I felt physically exhausted; whilst the first season was itself superb, the second series was really where things really began to drop into place for me, and the ever-complicating relationship between Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) reached such a crescendo of violence in the ultimate episode that it was almost painful to watch. As if that wasn’t enough, creator Bryan Fuller then threw us a massive curveball; perhaps psychiatrist Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) wasn’t as fearful as she had seemed. How else could she come to be placidly sipping champagne with an at-large psychopath?

We had to wait, and wait, to find out. We also got hit with the news that there would in all likelihood be no Season 4 of Hannibal, meaning that any story arcs would have to be done and dusted in the newest episodes. Or, so we may have thought…

Season 3 was, certainly in its first five episodes, a challenging lull in the pace and energy of the series which had preceded it. Hannibal, still at large and still accompanied by Bedelia, had rocked up in Italy, where he first set about masquerading as an academic (deceased) – with Bedelia playing the part of the dutiful academic’s wife. Whilst a beautiful backdrop for filming, these early episodes felt rather aimless; whilst we did find out how and when Bedelia happened upon Hannibal after the bloodbath of the S2 finale, it rang rather hollow to me in terms of her own reasoning, and Bedelia’s conversation – her constant slew of dreamily-delivered platitudes – was a definite turn-off. Still, seeing Mads in leathers on a motorbike provided some levity, and almost made up for the sad lack of haute cuisine on offer in S3. Part of the series’ great appeals for me has always been the way it makes cannibalism almost appetising. And we do love to see a man cook.

What we saw plenty of in S3 was people somehow surviving incredible injuries; oh, I know there’s limited realism in many respects in Hannibal (S1 and S2 contained murders which were more like improbable, but oddly beautiful sculptures) but bless Will Graham. Whatever the hell that man’s made of, market that stuff. Ditto Dr Chilton! Recovering in hospital after he and his colleagues were almost-but-not-quite killed by Hannibal, Will begins piecing together the events of that night, and ruminating on his peculiar, almost intimate relationship with his former doctor. Travelling to Italy upon his recovery, alongside Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) Will is compelled to tell Hannibal that he ‘forgives’ him, having worked out where to find him by decoding clues left to him. It’s not that straightforward, however, and the series spends some time almost itself pondering – should Will try to capture Hannibal, or not? Whilst some have applauded the art-house sensibilities at play in the Italian episodes, episodes which abound with altered states and non-sequiturs, I can’t help but think it would have been better condensed into one or maybe two episodes, allowing the (to my mind) far more engaging Red Dragon arc to flourish.

S3 really does feel like it splits into two different seasons, so different in tone is the Great Red Dragon storyline. Having moved on in time by three years, via a dismal death for the maniacal Mason Verger, who had attempted to avenge himself on Lecter, we now see Hannibal – who after everything handed himself in so that Will would always know where he was – in a situation which has already been seen on film, though it’s a credit to Mikkelsen that I now feel the role of Lecter is his utterly, however iconic Anthony Hopkins. Will Graham, married and a father in the intervening years, is enticed back to his old job by the presence of a new serial killer, identified by the moniker ‘The Tooth Fairy’ (before some careful re-branding goes on). Will has tried to excise that part of his brain which allows him to place himself on a par with killers, but the way in which the Dragon targets families gets to him, and so before long he’s back, asking Lecter to help him. Lecter takes this opportunity to toy with his old friend, putting him in grave danger, perhaps simply – as he explained in S1 – to see what would happen. However, all of this is part of a learning curve for Will. Perhaps his fate is entwined with Lecter. The finale spells out just how much this is true.

Happily, I felt that the end episode of S3 was redemptive of the series as a whole, on many levels. I’d almost been dreading it, in case it didn’t give us any closure and didn’t give us any shocks; too much more of the platitudes and the lulls would have broken the spell of the series completely, but the presence of the deeply creepy, but also oddly vulnerable Dragon added impetus and drama where it was needed, and again, by the final episode, I was as gripped as I’d been with S2. The end episode contains some neat twists, although they’re signposted to an extent, and what Lecter refers to as the ‘mic drop’ – Will’s fatal flaw, a moment of humanity in a world of artifice – adds substantial depth here. As Will and Lecter disappeared from the screen, I couldn’t help feeling sad; it’s a credit to Fuller that he’s humanised a psychopath to such an extent that you actively want Lecter to prevail. Furthermore, S3 taught me that you have to be in it for the long game with Hannibal, and digest the story as a whole, not necessarily as neat component parts. Despite my misgivings regarding the early episodes of this series, overall it did far more well than it did them badly. Telling stories in this adventurous, ambitious manner is always going to be a risk where TV and ratings are concerned, and Fuller deserves credit for doing it his way. Hannibal rewards your patience.

So is that really it, for Hannibal? Certainly the conclusion which S3 came to points that way, and makes for a poignant swansong too. But should these characters get resurrected in future – on TV or in film – there’d be a receptive and grateful audience, self very much included. Oh, and one more thing: knowing that this series plays fast and loose with time structure, I probably shouldn’t pin too much on the closing scene, but seeing Bedelia fulfilling her destiny in such a macabre, eroticised way in the end fills me with an odd sort of optimism that I probably wouldn’t get any place else, and certainly not from that subject matter! Bravo, Hannibal – you’ve made cannibalism into a virtuoso art-form, and far more besides.

Asami August: Erotibot (2011)

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Tristan Bishop

Due to Asami August here at Brutal As Hell I’ve had a good excuse to revisit some of my favourite Asami performances, as well as discover some new ones (the insane charms of Sukeban Boy are now counted amongst my favourites) and make mental notes of a few more must-sees thanks to the sterling reportage of my fellow BAH writers. One of my original ideas for a piece this month was covering one of her AV features (that’s a porn film, for those of you not familiar with the lingo) – an idea which, although appealing at the time (in the sense of bringing a new perspective to things, of course) soon turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. How, for instance, does one review pornography in an interesting manner, beyond appraising the physical attributes and noise-making skills of the players involved? (and, frankly, I would find it a little embarrassing to write). Added to that, it turned out to be damn near impossible to actually track any down – The AV films haven’t been released in the West, I can’t Google in Japanese, and, it turns out, using ‘Asami’ as a search term when poking around in the less salubrious areas of the internet doesn’t help much, as there appear to be a large number of Asian porn stars with that name. That was a frustrating evening’s research, I can assure you. Instead it was suggested that I take a look at one of her ‘pink’ (softcore) films, and so I browsed her filmography marking titles like ‘Prison Girls’ for possible investigation. In the end I decided on Erotibot – after all, who can resist a title like that?

Erotibot is the story of Tamayo, who is the daughter of a rich inventor and a servant girl – and apparently heir to a massive fortune when her father passes away. Tamayo has been raised in a mansion by two robots – a suave butler droid named Number One and a hulking metal beast called Number Two. On her 18th birthday she receives another robot which she names Sukekiyo. Sukekiyo is not as advanced a model as number one, with his big silver head and frequent malfunctions, but he is by far the most human, and it doesn’t take long for Tamayo and Sukekiyo to fall in love with each other. However the path of girl & robot love never runs smooth, and it transpires that Number One has been programmed to attend to Tamayo’s ‘adult education’, causing Sukekiyo not a little heartbreak. On top of this the inventor’s legitimate daughter Tsukiyo (played by another very popular AV star, Maria Ozawa) and her female ninja sidekick Azami (who else but Asami) have heard that Tamayo is in line for the inheritance and are out for blood.

This review can stand as a lesson in doing your research however – firstly Asami is hardly in the film, and given very little to do next to the other two actresses (although, as always, she looks great). Secondly, well, the film somehow manages to be incredibly boring, even at 72 minutes (Apparently there is a version out there somewhere which runs an additional 15 minutes, but in this instance I’m glad I didn’t put myself through any extra suffering). A few Philip K Dick references at the start of the film got me thinking that maybe this would be an interesting take on what it means to be human, but it isn’t – it’s mostly a slushy romantic comedy with a few sex scenes, and a bit of gore in the final ten minutes. Added to this is the fact that the film is obviously ~extremely~ cheap. Now we’re used to our Japanese exploitation being on the budget side – that’s all part of the charm – but when you have silver-painted wellingtons standing in for robot feet and a number of shots where you realise the rooms have no roof, the lack of action (and under-use of Asami) gets even less excusable. As for laughs, well, there are none. Director Naoyuki Tomomatsu wrote and co-directed (along with Yoshihiro Nishimura) the brilliant Dracula Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl, and the drop in quality here is actually astounding – he is also the man behind Lust of the Dead (as covered in Asami August by Ben) which, although I’ve not yet seen it, sounds at least a more interesting proposition than what is on offer here. Was it a complete waste of time? Well, the cast are uniformly attractive, but anyone looking for pure titillation will get more bang for their buck elsewhere.

RIP Wes Craven

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

I think I speak for all of us on that thing where you’re casually scrolling through social media, and then all of a sudden, something hits you hard. There have been many examples, but today’s is definitely finding out that one of the all-time most important horror directors has shuffled off the mortal coil. Wes Craven, having fought against brain cancer, has passed away.

I don’t want to make this eulogy about me – but I have experience of losing someone to that illness, and I can only testify to its ruthless vigour and appetite. I did not actually even know that Craven was ill, so it’s more of a shock to find out that the director of Last House on the Left – which as Nia has posited was one of the most important exploitation films ever made– has died.

For those of us who grew up with the VHS revolution of the 80s however, then we’ll all remember the utter terror of Freddy Krueger (a new-wave folk devil who has stayed with us as much as any fairy story ever could). Few directors could have achieved that level of influence, audience engagement and saturation. I always found it a great pity that the massively successful Scream franchise at first seemed to be disparaging of the horror tropes which Craven helped to establish – never good to shit where you eat – but subsequent films like Red Eye seemed to be more amenable to the horror ethos which made his name. All in all, Craven definitely helped to birth the modern nightmare; those things that scare us, even if we come to expect them, are often down to Craven’s directorship, and even snippets of his work was enough for many of us to feel scared, even in adulthood. For a horror director, I can give no better praise.

Wes Craven will be missed. No doubt about that. And for many of us, key cinematic scenes which have scared, upset or otherwise imprinted upon us will always be his doing. For a good director to die of such an illness is never something that can just be brushed over, but the work which he did so well will always stay with horror fans all over the world, as long as they are as invested in this genre as he was.

RIP Wes Craven.

Book Review: Home by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Much is made today of the phenomenon of ‘privilege’ – who has it, who does what with it, and just what should be done about it. People are advised to acknowledge their privilege, or check their privilege…people quibble about how much privilege they really have and what it all really means, and as such there’s rarely a day which goes by when there’s not a new debate on the relative levels of good fortune which we enjoy, don’t enjoy, and so on ad infinitum, with new debates billowing out like smoke on the internet on a dizzyingly regular basis. However, perhaps it’s the hidden truth behind all of this discussion which really has the capacity to act as a leveller, and it’s something we confront only rarely.

We in the West belong to ageing populations; we might all have the leisure time and technological advancements to allow us to pontificate online about other topics to our heart’s content, we might enjoy better health and longer life generally, but the last chapter of this life will be old age, and it’s something we have great trouble acknowledging. There is, of course, good reason for this. Old age is frightening and devastating. Wealth, status, background…these things we argue about throughout our twenties, thirties and forties can offer us only limited comfort or protection against the inevitable. At the end of it all we face growing old – we face the loss of our autonomy, our influence, our health, our vitality and even something as fundamental as our personal identities, our memories of loved ones and friends and deeds, all those things which make us human. These are all things we take for granted, as long as we have hold of them. But we can’t face the threat of their loss, and thus being unable to face ageing, we immure it. The elderly often live segregated from the rest of society, their presence on its fringes a whispered reality, something almost shameful. Author Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone forces us to confront this unpalatable truth both about what we’ll face and how our culture deals with it in her novel, Home. The result is a difficult read, because it is so compassionate as well as visceral in its horror.

Steve, an older guy and something of an everyman figure, is devoted to his wife Fran; they’re one of those couples who have been together so long that they really are two halves, the one complementing the other. Fran, however, has terminal cancer, and knowing her husband so well she finds she can’t just leave him to brood and cope with the fact of her imminent demise at home, so when a caretaker’s job comes up at a local care home, she urges him to take it. Her reasons are straightforward – give him something to do, get him out of the house. Steve’s retired, but he also sees the logic in coming out of retirement for the time being, so he applies and gets the job. The home is in dire need of repair and maintenance, and he has plenty to keep him busy, although he can’t help but think that the home is an odd place – very few staff, and very few clients either. As he develops a closer relationship with Milos, one of the nurses, he begins to become more aware of goings-on at the home which just don’t seem right – until a chance discovery places Steve on the cusp of discovering something repugnant and dangerous about this place.

The structure which Home employs is to use three narrators – Steve and Milo being two of them, and an unnamed client of the home making the third. This means there is no sense of omniscience, and like all of the characters not part of the innermost cabal of the care home, readers are locked out of what’s going on until our protagonist Steve can piece things together. This is the best approach – it’s meant to be alienating, and it really comes into its own in the latter chapters. The fact that Steve is such a likeable, credible man – who has been through hell, and only wants to do the right thing in life – makes you deeply invested in the events which surround him, and the people who evidently know more than he does. In particular, the rest of the care home staff are unknown quantities, perhaps sinister or perhaps innocent (as unappealing as they are personally) so the book retains a sense of the reader being smaller than the place, on a par with Steve as an outsider. Milos, as one of the staff, seems at first to be an unfeeling, inhuman character – but as his narrative provides him with a past and an inner life, it grows more complex than that. Finally, the ‘woman’ who is given a voice at intervals here makes for a heart-rending, disturbing sequence of narratives. I found her sections of the text hardest to read, because Lattin-Rawstrone uses plaintive, yet straightforward language to create an impression of someone utterly unsupported and dehumanised, unable to remember herself or her life, imprisoned within a medical setting and lacking in even a first name. The author does not need to use frilly simile or hyperbole to make this situation hideous, writing descriptively but quite sparsely to allow the woman’s plight to unfold via a series of deeply introspective moments as well as very physical shocks.

Finally, I should say that I did not know what to expect from the plot of this book, other than an awareness that something was of course very wrong with the care home at the crux of it, but the way things go is an unpalatable surprise, one which perhaps pushes believability in places (and doesn’t particularly need its mentions of consumerism as this comes through as a contextual factor of its own accord) but nonetheless, its developments have the power to shock – forming an existential horror blended with elements of body horror.

Home is ambitious, but it delivers, and it delivers on subject matter which most people would shudder to be faced with. Most disturbingly of all, having effectively ratcheted up the tension in its latter chapters, it refuses to allow us a nice, neat return to order. Despite being a page-turner, you turn the pages here with a sense of dread. The overwhelming feeling I had after finishing this book was one of profound sadness, but given the subject matter of the novel, this sadness is integral to the unmistakable horror at play.

You can find out how to order Home here.

Asami August: Sukeban Boy (2006)

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Sometimes it’s completely unnecessary for a film to have a slow, believable build-up, let alone a believable set of circumstances, and for so many of Noboru Iguchi’s lunatic technicolour battle epics, it would frankly slow things down until they weren’t as entertaining. We know this, we love this, and it’s why we’re talking about these films so much this month with regards Asami’s career. Picking up on one of these in particular (which Nia has already mentioned in the first part of her excellent study of the splatter movies which helped Asami cross from AV to main-ish-stream) Sukeban Boy (2006) is a slightly less well-known example of Noboru’s output over the past ten years, but in terms of what he manages to cram in to one hour, it’s a more than worthwhile mention – and properly pure Noboru Iguchi, free from any outsider constraints whatsoever. Seeing as how it starts from the point of ‘insane’ and sort of goes from there really, it definitely fits in with his other work, but if anything it manages to be even more lewd and eyebrow-raising than his other films – which is quite some achievement, I’m sure you’ll agree.

In the first few minutes of Sukeban Boy, the film’s determination to use gender and sex as part of its arsenal of jokes and improbable plot devices is made clear, as we start out with what appears to be a pretty teenage school girl kicking seven bells out of a group of grown male assailants (who both want to beat her up, but are also mortified that a young woman would be acting so inappropriately). No problem: the schoolgirl raises her skirts to show that’s she’s actually male, and the kicking can continue. To clarify – we then find out that Sukeban (Asami) is a boy who has been cursed with the face of a girl, but all other male body parts are intact. She’s (I’m just going with ‘she’ to make it simple) tried to look more male but no matter how much she beats herself up (yes, literally) she still looks pretty, and her life in school has been made hell for it. Helpfully, her ‘freak biker’ dad suggests she start disguising herself as a girl, moving to a new school to help maintain the disguise. She agrees, though she struggles with the facade, and it doesn’t go so well at first: the other girls are suspicious of her for the amount of bad language she uses and as she’s introducing herself to her new class in that way we so often see in Japanese cinema, someone throws a knife at her. Hmm.

She eventually makes friends though, particularly with the sweet and innocent Mochiko (Emiru Momose) and although she warns her new friend of a ‘gang boss’ being present at the school, Sukeban’s embroilment with this leads her to become friends with the gang leader Kanko (Saori Matsunaka) after giving her a thorough whooping during a lunatic interlude where schoolgirls are being forced by the girl gang to practice fainting of embarrassment whilst stripping at the school ‘Humility Club’, and Sukeban takes issue with Mochiko being compelled to basically moon the group. So far, so Noboro Iguchi – very much doing his own thing with the staid old topics of high school rivalries and gang culture. This heady combination grows far more unlikely as we go on, though, with the mysterious arrival of a leg-chopping Full Frontal Woman (poor Kanko – though she gets an unexpected boom, sorry boon), the vengeful Braless Women, the deadly Monk Women (naked, obviously) and for balance, a bunch of Sukeban supporter males…in schoolgirl garb.

Spoiler: there’s lots of boobs and fighting in this.

When I say ‘lots of boobs’, I actually mean noteworthy amounts of boobs, and that’s even coming from a Jess Franco fan here. Yeah, that’s what I said. The nudity is absolutely gratuitous (though due to her role, not so much – so much – from Asami herself) and had this film ever been presented to the BBFC, I’m sure the combination of flesh and youth would have sent them into utter apoplexy – but the thing is, the context is so cartoonish that it really doesn’t seem titillating. It’s silly rather than sexy. And if you start even trying to zone out the action to focus on the flesh, then tough luck, there’ll be a fart joke along presently to ‘bring you back to yourself’. This is essentially most like the Beano for adults, with breasts and biotech to go with the school life observations and physical comedy – though of course the manga tradition would probably provide far better comparisons, and but of course this film is based on a manga series, ‘Oira Sukeban’.

The whole cast routinely send themselves up, pull faces and perform pratfalls worthy of vaudeville, whilst Asami’s comic turn here is hilarious, if you like your comedy lowbrow – and that’s an absolute must. Remembering that we have a young woman playing a young man playing a young woman, she does a great job; her ‘male’ walk with her briefcase slung over her shoulder as opposed to being carried in a demure, ladylike way, together with that voice…very funny, and perhaps even funnier to a Japanese audience who would know that typically, polite women will raise the pitch of their voice slightly when talking to strangers, particularly men. Asami’s voice at the best of times is a force of nature; get her impersonating a male and it’s like a foghorn. I laughed.

As for the gore, it takes a little while to get going here but once it does, you can feast your eyes on spurting blood, flying limbs, boob guns, women spitting bullets with enough force to kill (and getting the actors to pretend like they’re being shot even when they’ve run out of the FX to do it properly) oh, and hormone injections being used as warfare. All present and correct, I think you’ll find.

Sukeban Boy is silly, grisly, and doesn’t take itself seriously for a second; you may be able to wring a message of ‘acceptance whatever you look like’ out of the film, but I think you’d agree this isn’t the main point of the exercise. As a lesser-known movie by a now beloved cult director, it’s well worth a look if you like this genre, and because I can’t finish this review in any better way, I’ll end by saying that yes, worry not, Asami does her robot dance in this…

Asami August: Gothic & Lolita Psycho (2010)

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

“Why is there a knife blade in the tip of your umbrella?”

It’s fair to say that when the Japanese get hold of a youth subculture they like, they more than make it their own – and the ‘Gothic Lolita’ phenomenon is a good case in point. A pretty mash-up of I suppose what you’d call ‘trad Goth’ and far more cutesy, frilly add-ons, it was perhaps inevitable that the visually-arresting style would make its way into cinema eventually – particularly the sort of cartoonish, frenetic vengeance flicks that we so enjoy, because nothing catches the eye quite so much as a well-turned-out angel of death (see also: Geisha Assassin, by the same director Gô Ohara). The reasoning doesn’t really go any further than that here, to be perfectly honest, and there’s no especial reason why lead character Yuki has adopted the clothes she has, but what the hell. This film is a lot of fun.

The year is 20XX (?) and the location is Tokyo: Yuki (played by the apparent winner of the 2007 award for Best Buttocks, Rina Akiyama) – under the watchful eye of her father, who seems to be an out-of-work vicar, is about to raise hell as a method of avenging her mother’s death. Mother was dispatched in a particularly nasty way on her daughter’s birthday by a group of cowled assassins; Yuki has had a costume change since that fateful day (well to be fair, white was not the colour to be wearing) but she knows who was responsible, and she’s coming for them – armed with an array of killer parasols. Starting out by paying a visit to a nightclub which boasts synchronised Geisha dancing, a fighting pit and a gambling den (though they only serve Budweiser, so you can’t have everything), Yuki is quick to put her blade to good use. We only see the back of her head for the first ten minutes, but rest assured, the choreography and OTT special effects are glorious: arterial spray, severed heads and flailing bodies abound.

Of course, all of this is plot-lite. The reason that Yuki’s mother met the fate she did is not really explored until the very last handful of scenes, but then it’s not really important; we know enough to know that Yuki is justified to lop off a lot of limbs and that’s enough, no further philosophy needed. More of a computer game with end-of-level bosses than a film with a subtle story arc, the film is a sequence of overblown, worthy opponents, each one marked off by Yuki on a corresponding Gothic tarot card. Everyone playing here has superhuman abilities and ridiculous weapons; gambling den owner and Gothic geisha Sakie rolls her dice in a skull and decapitates people who get in her way, for instance, and perhaps the most jaw-dropping adversary, Lady Elle (Misaki Momose) has a sparkly pink mobile phone built in to the handle of her pistol so she can talk to her bae whilst she’s stamping on someone’s ribcage. As you do.

As you may expect, the film is choc-ful of action sequences, and these consist of some fairly challenging martial-arts style fights as well as masses of firepower and improbable stunts. Rina Akiyama looks like she’s properly out of breath in some of the scenes and I’ll bet she was – but, she holds up admirably, and certainly isn’t let off the hook just because she’s wearing good boots. The film doesn’t take itself too seriously either (the Kamikaze Gang are a comic highlight) and manages to find the time to add in a few fart jokes, gratuitous ass shots and a teacher who’d almost certainly end up on some kind of a list. Really speaking, it does a hell of a lot in less than ninety minutes.

Whilst Gothic & Lolita Psycho doesn’t cast Asami in a starring role (though her appearance, replete with a head tattoo, is pretty damn memorable anyway) I think it’s still an interesting role for her, because by this point she was clearly a go-to girl for horror-comedy and had established herself as a name in this kind of quasi-mainstream – whilst certainly not AV – movie world. A lot of the visual effects in Gothic & Lolita Psycho are put together by the team who also worked on, for instance, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl – so there’s a lot of commonality of aesthetics and approaches throughout a hell of a lot of these films. Remember also that by this stage, Machine Girl was A Thing and Asami had enjoyed some starring roles elsewhere; 2010 was also a hell of a busy year for the actress, with a staggering 13 projects reaching completion. She also played an eye-patch wearing assassin in Mutant Girls Squad that year, so maybe it would have been a push to see her do it twice had she taken the role of Lady Elle here, but still. A decent project to have under your belt whatever you happen to play in it, though, Gothic & Lolita Psycho is one film in a now relatively busy market for splattery, gratuitous body horror comedy. Like Gothic Lolita generally, Japan is good at adding aesthetically pleasing flounce to traditional forms, and having a blast along the way.

Film Review – Dead Rising: Watchtower (2015)

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Tristan Bishop

Dead Rising: Watchtower, for those of you not in the know, is a video game adaptation. The game series (3 main entries and numerous spin-offs) is basically a spin on Dawn Of The Dead, and has you attempting various missions in shopping malls which are infested with slow-moving but incredibly numerous zombies. The joy of the games is a pretty simple one – you are able to free roam (although within occasionally tight time limits), pick up almost any object imaginable and use it as a weapon. Who can resist plopping a traffic cone on the head of a flesh-eater (and maybe then hitting it with a baseball bat)? Not me, that’s for sure. Truth be told I’ve never come near to completing one of the games (those harsh time limits) but I’ve had hours of fun wandering and wiping out waves of the undead. Truth be told, I wasn’t so sure that a film adaptation of Dead Rising would be half as much fun, however – I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how disappointing the majority of game adaptations are, with the exception of Christophe Gans’ 2006 Silent Hill film (and I also have a soft spot for the Resident Evil series, but let’s not go into that).

Dead Rising: Watchtower is set between the events of the second and third game. The town of East Mission, Oregon, has been fully taken over by the living dead, although a few survivors remain scattered around the city. The Federal Emergency Zombie Authority (FEZA for short) has been distributing the drug Zombrex, which halts the effect of infection from zombie bites, but supplies are running low. Reporter Chase Carter (Jesse Metcalf), who is trying to get a hard-hitting story in the quarantine zone set up around East Mission, instead becomes trapped in the city itself, and, teaming up with kick-ass lady Crystal O’Rourke (Meghan Ory) and Virginia Madsen as Maggie, a distraught mother who has lost her daughter, tries to escape. Unfortunately reanimated corpses are not the only thing standing in their way, as psychotic Mad Max-esque bikers and a military who are determined to wipe out the zombie plague at any cost are also looking to cause them some problems.

My first impressions of Dead Rising : Watchtower were pretty positive – Metcalf looks every inch the classic Dead Rising hero, Ory is suitable appealing as the femme-fatale-with-a-dark-past, and the level of detail from the games which has been shoe-horned in is impressive. However this soon began to dissipate. To start with, let’s be honest, zombie films have had a good run since 28 Days Later (2002) gave the genre a shot in the arm and bought zombies back from the realm of shot-on-video (in the days when that meant something) amateur gore-fests and onto the big screen. In the last few years however, boredom has naturally set in, and the flood of zombie films has slowed to a trickle, with only The Walking Dead TV series really still making much of an impact (due to the slow-burn character development it does so well). We’ve basically seen it all, and Dead Rising really doesn’t offer us anything new – part of that problem being that the games themselves are so indebted to George Romero anyway. The other issue is the pacing. For a film based on a game which features some heart-pounding time limits to negotiate, it really does take time going places, and the action sequences (some of which are admittedly pretty good) are just too spread out to involve you. This might be acceptable if the rest of the time was spent building character and tension, but it isn’t. Annoyingly there’s enough plotting in here to make a decent 87 minute film, but at two full hours it just gets boring, and those who don’t have added value of recognising elements from the game will find themselves getting bored a whole lot sooner.

On the plus side, the production values are pretty good – and despite that cursed dodgy CGI blood used on too many occasions, this is way above the level of most TV movies (which is what I was expecting it to be). It’s certainly a damn sight better than the last film I saw from director Zach Lipovsky, which was the execrable Leprechaun: Origins. Unfortunately there’s not enough here to recommend to anyone but fans of the games.

Dead Rising: Watchtower is available to buy now from Platform Entertainment.

Comic Review: Wolf #1

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Svetlana Fedotov

Well, here we are, another comic about a supernatural detective who’s seen too much and is SO over it. Of course, there’s a wildly vast array of characters with weird faces whom the populace may or may not see and uh, vampires? Yeah vampires. So of course, you’re asking, ‘Svetlana, why are you reviewing this comic then? Why waste my precious internet time here, at the world famous Brutal as Hell, when I could be jerking it to clown porn?’ Woah there, Pogo. Aside from my well-known love of sexy men fighting sexy ghosts, Image Comics newest venture, Wolf, is pretty damn good. A genuine noir horror mystery that actually does take itself seriously, the comic reads like an old timey pulp novel updated for modern audiences and set dead center in the last vestiges of American debauchery, Los Angeles.

The comic opens on the glowing landscape of the City of Angels as a figure encased in flames makes his way down the starlit desert. Suddenly, the issue cuts to said figure sitting calmly in an interrogation room, exchanging mythology lectures. Meet Antoine Wolfe, part detective, part soldier, part mythological creature; you know, he’s complicated. He’s blessed (or cursed) with immortality and uses his death dodging abilities to help others with the abilities to exist between the spots in our vision, or at least stop the bad ones from running amok. Of course, no power of the gods comes without its share of problems and when he’s sucked into a prophecy of end-of-the-world proportions, he has no choice but to answer the call, even when it comes in the form of an orphaned teen girl.

As stated, what really separates Wolf from other supernatural detective mysteries is that it actually takes itself seriously. Antoine feels like a genuine character and despite his “too damn old for this shit” air, it doesn’t weigh down his character. That’s the problem that occurs with a lot of other work; the leads become caricatures of the down-trodden detective ideal and lack any sort of depth. They turn into common tropes, a different version of John Constantine. With Antoine, by making him a recently retired soldier and a black man who faces racism, it gives him something else to work with and creates a genuine personality. I also love that the comic has decided to focus on mythological backgrounds for the creatures in the comic instead of popular culture ideals. We’re talking some Old Gods stuff, especially the side character Freddy who actually has tentacles for a face and speaks in the grandiose language of Lovecraftian writing. Fans of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods will seriously dig this work.

The creative team of Ales Kot and Matt Taylor do a great job of bringing this hard mystery to the general audience. The power couple gets creative on a burnt out genre and sure, they throw in some standard fanfare such as a prophecy-telling crazy lady and jerky vampires, but it still works. In fact, it does what it’s intended to do, move the story along to its wild cliff hanger. I dig Taylor’s artwork too. It’s not overtly complex but, like the writing, flows organically. Some of the angles are a bit rough but he knows when and where to accessorise the backgrounds and when to wash them out, so it all evens out. I would love to see more from these two in the future, I really feel that they could become the next hot comic team, like Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips or Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. Either way, definitely go check out Wolf #1, it’s a double issue spectacular!

Asami August: Who The Heck’s Asami?

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Well, as my esteemed colleague Ben has already told you all, we plan on making August a huge celebration of the life of Asami Sugiura as she approaches her thirtieth birthday. But it also occurs to us that, out there, some of you may be completely uninitiated into the ways of one of our favourite horror and exploitation actresses. Firstly, we pity you if that’s the case, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Here’s a little introduction, from us, to you.

So just who is this Asami?

Tokyo-born Asami started out as an AV idol in her native Japan, getting her launch at the age of nineteen and staying in the industry until 2008, when she retired. Now, it’s worth saying that in Japan, the world of the AV – Adult Video – industry is rather different to how we’d probably recognise porn in the West. Japan generally has an oddball relationship with sex and its sex industry reflects that; it’s both overt and coy. You can access everything and anything that suits your tastes, but what you get is heavily pixellated; there’s a ferocious appetite for pornography, and you can buy it readily most anywhere, but no one really talks about it in polite society. In any case, your average AV/V Cinema (direct-to-video genre) starlet starts at a young age, and performs in any number of ‘niche’ cinema projects, usually also appearing in supporting photo spreads for magazines and the like for a couple of years at best. Thousands of girls get their big launch every year, and most of them disappear not too long after; it’s a crowded market, with heavy demand, and lots of girls eager to get their big break. Although the world of AV is different to the porn industry in the West, though, what’s common there as here is that it’s incredibly rare for an actress to make the switch from porn to mainstream roles. Can you name more than two or three Western porn stars who have made that transition? Nope, me neither. Asami is remarkable because even while she was still appearing in V Cinema, she was concurrently working on…well, I don’t know if we can call The Machine Girl ‘mainstream’ as such, because everything about it screams ‘I am not for everyone’, but the very fact that she was in it marks her out as different to so many of her peers. She took a risk – Noburu Iguchi took a risk – and it paid off. Speaking to Dazed magazine, Asami credits her former porno business colleague for giving her that opportunity: “He had directed adult movies and when he got the chance to do a low budget horror film he wanted to work with people he knew and trusted. I was very lucky because he realised I was interested in playing more legitimate roles.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

So how has she done so well?

Nia will be talking in more depth about Asami’s transition from AV to horror and her work with two directors in particular, but suffice to say that her career has now forged ahead into other territory, and it’s what we know and love her for. It’s not as simple as simply catching a lucky break, though. Luck plays its part, sure but there’s good reason that Asami has been able to achieve so much.

Japan may in many ways be a misogynistic culture, but it does have a tradition of heavy female representation on screen, and it acknowledges the fact that it must also cater to a large female audience; women have readily entered every cinematic genre there is in Japan, and Asami has now found her place in a long line of striking and talented B-movie actresses who know who their audiences don’t just comprise of men. To do well within the country, you have to get your head around this truism. As long ago as 1991 in his work Pink Samurai, critic Nicholas Bornoff was paying tribute to a “new breed of beauteous bloody mamas” gracing the screen in Japan; joining the ranks of Meiko Kaji and Eihi Shiina, Asami has proven that she has the charisma and work ethic needed to establish herself as an actress.

Of course, the reason that we can talk about her appeal at all is because her movies have made it across the hemisphere divide and got her known in the West, something which is tough to achieve, even in these days. A lot of her work still lacks legitimate release here sadly, but (to name but a few) titles like Mutant Girls Squad and RoboGeisha are always going to get you noticed. These films are gloriously loopy and a lot of fun, and you can expect a lot more chattering about how awesome they are over the coming month.

So, why her? Aside from the happy circumstance of her being given the chance to prove she could do the work in the first place, we can see in Asami an utter willingness to throw herself into her work (never has this girl phoned her performance in), a real hunger for her work to be accepted and valued, and of course a self-effacing streak when she talks about all of her successes to date. She’s in it for the long haul, she’s unconventional and as Ben noted, she’s one of a rare breed of actresses who really qualifies for the monicker ‘scream queen’. That’s reason enough, we feel, to pay a little thanks to Asami on her birthday. So if you didn’t know who she was before, you sure as hell will by the end of the month!