Uzumaki is the story of highschooler Kirie, who opens the film with a brief voiceover introduction. We learn that Kirie lives in a small rural Japanese town with her father (her mother has passed away), and that young Kirie has a crush on her childhood buddy Shuichi, whose father is starting to act very...

Let me preface my review by saying that I saw the sequel to “Ring”, “Ring 2″, before I saw the original. Of course this means a lot of things were lost to me (while watching the sequel), one of which was the unanswered question of why people considered this series “scary”...

A movie like Hiroyuki Okiura’s Jin-Roh is why the Japanese are considered the pioneers of animation. Over the last decade or so the shortcomings of American “cartoons” and animation have become painfully obvious when one looks at what’s coming out of Japan now — and even...

When he set out to make what would later become a horror film classic, George Romero, through sheer will and the acquaintance of some foresighted investors, managed to frighten up (forgive the pun) somewhere around $114,000 in order to make Night of the Living Dead. I suspect director Tetsuro Takeuchi,...

Pointless. That’s how I feel after finally finishing a First Person Shooter (FPS) game. It doesn’t matter if the FPS was a good game, a bad game, or if it was too hard, too easy, or somewhere in-between. At the end, when the credits roll, and I shut down the game, I feel as if I’ve...

A movie like Gonin astounds and fascinates me. Writer/director Takashi Ishii is obviously a very talented man. There are visuals and camera framing in Gonin that just takes my breath away. The man has a great eye for detail and knows how to set up his cameras to convey the point that he wants conveyed....

Detective Nishi (Takeshi Kitano) is having a very bad week. It starts with the death of his 4-year old daughter, which leads to his wife’s hospitalization and discovery that she has terminal cancer, and while visiting his wife, Nishi’s partner, and best friend Horibe (Ren Osugi), who Nishi...

Azuma (Takeshi Kitano) is a 20th century cop living in a country still mired in the traditions of the past. Rookie cops kowtow to the veterans at every turn and even the homicidal drug dealers respect their crime boss. But Azuma isn’t your average cop — he’s prone to violence and perhaps,...

Blood: The Last Vampire is my second Japanimation in as many days. Blood is a cinematic feature that runs just over 45 minutes long. In Japan, this would be akin to a movie-of-the-week, since animation is considered a movie art form there, not just another weekend morning cartoon show as it is here in...

Thirty minutes into Ring 2 and my only thoughts were, “The director really shouldn’t have hired a woman with a bum leg to play the female lead.” This thought surfaced because of the female lead’s complete lack of personality and inability to invoke enthusiasm. The actress playing...

Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress’ full name is actually The 3 Villains of the Hidden Fortress, and in interviews of the past, George Lucas of Star Wars fame has admitted that there were elements of his space opus that were based on this Kurosawa film. Fortress once again teams Kurosawa...

As the saying goes, Children do and say the strangest things. I couldn’t tell you if I ever saw a big furry creature that resembles a real-life teddy bear when I was 4 or 7 years old. Then again, I have never lived in the country (or anywhere with a lot of trees, for that matter) and I’ve...

After reviewing Akira Kurosawa’s masterful “Seven Samurai” I thought I’d go back and review his other masterpieces. “Yojimbo” is similar to “Samurai” in many respects, but is also vastly different, in that there is only one main character here, the Yojimbo...

Despite not being very original, “Battle Royale” proves to be something even better — a killer of a movie. Not only are there more than 40+ students sent to an island to be killed off (at the hands of each other, no less), but also the adults are around to urge them on. You see, there’s...