Kairo Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Don't Fear the Subs: 'Retribution' From Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Filed under: Foreign Language », Horror », Lionsgate Films », New on DVD », Home Entertainment », Cinematical Indie »
Certain movies get under my skin and refuse to leave. Case in point: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Pulse (AKA Kairo). There are several startling scenes in those movies that left me on edge for days. Both are horror flicks, but differ in their approaches. Cure is a police procedural with an unsettling string of deaths, while Pulse imagines what happens when there is no more room in the spirit realm for dead people. Kurosawa has a gift for creating indelible imagery married to sometimes head-scratching stories. Even when things don't really add up, as in Bright Future, his films leave a distinct aftertaste.Kurosawa's Retribution, from 2006, hit Region 1 DVD earlier this week, and it's an odd little beast. In the opening scene, a woman in a red dress is brutally drowned by a mysterious man in a shallow pool of salt water on a reclaimed piece of land near the ocean. Kôji Yakusho (Babel, Shall We Dance?) plays Yoshioka, a weary police detective (similar to the one he played in Cure) investigating the case. Before he can get too far, we witness a respected doctor kill his son, for little apparent reason, by the same method. Is the doctor a serial killer? Why are Yoshioka's fingerprints on the first victim's body? Why does Yoshioka start having nightmares about a woman in a red dress?
Deliberately paced, Retribution veers between an effective freak-out and a disappointing, frustrating mystery, but Kurosawa fans may want to check out its low-key artistic despair.
Pulse on DVD
Filed under: Horror », Sci-Fi & Fantasy », New on DVD », The Weinstein Co. », Home Entertainment », Remakes and Sequels »
It's weird to think of almost $20 million as chump change, but that's how the movie game is played. Pulse hasn't set any box office records, having pulled in a mere $19,703,256 as of this past weekend, which is unfortunate for this solid horror film. Kristin Bell (star of TV's Veronica Mars) proves she can carry her own weight in features, and the movie has some great creep-out moments with apocalyptic overtones. Kairo, the Japanese film on which Pulse was based, is a collection of interesting scenes, separated by moments of tedium and all strung together by a narrative that refuses to coalesce. Some may cry "blasphemy" when they read this, but Jim Sonzero's remake clarifies many of Kairo's infuriatingly vague elements, creating a truly rare cinematic phenomenon: a remake that improves upon the original.The film deserved to do better, but I am confident Pulse will find its audience on DVD. The disk streets on December 5 with a 90-minute unrated cut, 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer, and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Extras will include a commentary track with the filmmakers, deleted scenes, as well as the featurettes Creating The Fear: Making Pulse, The Visual Effects Of Pulse, and Pulse And The Paranormal. There will also be an 87-minute PG-13 version available in fullscreen only.
[via Bloody Disgusting]
Fango Announces Chainsaw Nominees!
Filed under: Foreign Language », Horror », Independent », Sci-Fi & Fantasy », Thrillers », Awards », Mystery & Suspense », Remakes and Sequels », Cinematical Indie »
A few days ago, Slither-maker James Gunn mentioned on his MySpace page that his adorably splattery sci-fi horror rom-com was the receipient of four Fangoria Chainsaw Award nominations. My response was "Hey, cool. Where are the rest of the nominations?!?!?" And now, a few days later, here they are. Neat-o.Although Fangoria has been doing their annual Chainsaw awards for over a decade now, 2006 marks the very first time the event will be televised, much to the delight of zombie freaks and slasher geeks all over North America. The event will be held in L.A. on October 15th, although the Fuse Network won't be airing it until the 22nd. (Which means if you want to watch the event "un-spoiled," I wish you luck.) Want to throw your own votes into the tally? Fine. You can vote right here, but only between September 1st and 13th (which is a Friday, mwaahaaa!)
After the jump you'll find a complete list of all the 2006 Chainsaw nominees, plus my own predictions on which flicks would win if the event were called Amazing Geek Weinberg's Horror Awards instead of The Chainsaws.
Review: Pulse
Filed under: Horror », Sci-Fi & Fantasy », Thrillers », Theatrical Reviews », Remakes and Sequels »
The day I saw Pulse -- which, it must be noted, did not screen for critics -- I spent the morning dealing with Gmail having shut down my e-mail account as an 'automated security procedure' after I'd tried downloading my mail to Outlook. Then, at the gym, I stumbled on the new TreadClimber and nearly split my head open; after that, while text messaging to get show times on my phone, I failed to notice a change in the curb and almost went face-down in the street. So a horror film about modern technology trying to kill us felt like a nice fit for the day; certainly, it had been trying to annoy me to death for the past several hours.
Based on the 2001 Japanese horror film Kairo by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Pulse begins on a college campus: The kids there have all the gizmos and gadgets of modern life, they lived by frantically e-mailing and IM-ing each other. At one point, out for a night on the town, our heroine Mattie (Kristen Bell) gets a text message from her friend Tim (Samm Levine) -- who's sitting two chairs away. It's not funny to Mattie; she's worried about her boyfriend, Josh (Jonathan Tucker). "Our relationship has been reduced to text messaging ...", she notes to her friend Isabell (Christina Milian). "How tragic is that?"
Well, it's about to get a lot more so, as Josh has discovered a computer program -- on some server somewhere he was hacking around on -- that not only really seems to mess up his operating systems and desktop but also functions as a gateway for angry and unyielding undead forces to stalk the world in search of victims to slay; Josh is a victim of those unquiet and hungry spirits early, but he's not the last.
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