Yoshihiro Nishimura Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Dread (UK/US): I'm going to act like I don't know how Clive Barker's original short story played out, as I didn't know when going into the film, but that still leaves this adaptation a bit too long-winded for its own good. Stephen (Jackson Rathbone) and Quaid (Shaun Evans) team up for a college project on what people fear most, and sure enough, this little social experiment of theirs goes too far. It's an interesting premise, eventually carried out to a foreseeable but intense climax, shot moodily throughout by first-time director Anthony DiBlasi, but the redundant dorm-worthy moralizing delivered by our fairly obvious villain and a tacked-on ain't-that-wicked twist only make it more apparent that Dread was a story perhaps better deserving of, say, a "Masters of Horror" episode rather than a feature-length treatment.

Read the rest at Horror Squad.

You can't accuse this movie of false advertising. Tokyo Gore Police, which screened this weekend as part of the seventh annual Asian Film Festival of Dallas (AFFD), bursts at the seams with severed limbs, oceans of bodily fluids, and enough intestines to choke a horse. More sensitive souls will run screaming from the room during the first scene, in which a man's head explodes in a cloudburst of blood, but that sets the tone of the movie as a live-action adult cartoon. Just keep repeating to yourself: "It's only latex and corn syrup, it's only latex and corn syrup ..."

Structured very much like a sick and twisted variety show, Tokyo Gore Police is all about the set pieces, which are mighty impressive indeed for fans of "hardcore mega-splatter," as our own Scott Weinberg described a clip he saw a few months ago. In the future, the Tokyo police force has become privatized for the protection of its citizens. That gives them license to execute all criminals with, let us say, extreme prejudice. One strain of bad guys remain a problem, however. Whenever so-called "engineers" lose a body part, the missing limb mutates into a bizarre weapon.

I thought Noburu Iguchi's The Machine Girl was insanely over-the-top, but Tokyo Gore Police ups the ante by mixing in generous nods to Paul Verhoeven, especially RoboCop and Starship Troopers.