I finally watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film PULSE (Kairo). I don’t think I’ve seen any of this acclaimed director’s 30+ films, but this is the one people seem to mention most. And I get it now. There’s something very distinct about the potency of its forlorn, foreboding mood and the unusual way it combines a ghost story with an early internet thriller that then dissolves into a surreal apocalypse. The overcast skies, small, impersonal apartments and emphasis on staring at chunky turn-of-the-millennium computer monitors is already depressing before it starts to feel like depression may be its primary subject.
Michi Kudo (Kumiko Asō, CASSHERN) works with a couple other people at a small nursery in Tokyo. She’s waiting for her co-worker Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi, TOMIE, GODZILLA MINUS ZERO) to get her a computer disk he was supposed to prepare for her, and he hasn’t shown up for a few days, so she goes to check on him at his apartment. He’s there, but acting kind of weird, and then out of the blue he goes into the other room and hangs himself. (read the rest of this shit…)
BLOODY MUSCLE BODY BUILDER IN HELL (1995) is a movie I watched partly because it was described as “the Japanese EVIL DEAD” and partly because it was called BLOODY MUSCLE BODY BUILDER FROM HELL. It’s a short, very low budget movie that does indeed pay tribute to the early works of Sam Raimi. I like seeing his influence reach across oceans and cultures like that.
Okay, let me take a deep breath and explain this shit. You remember the movie THE RING, directed by Gore Verbinski, starring Naomi Watts. It was a remake of the japanese movie RINGU (or RING) directed by Hideo Nakata. (You may remember I reviewed THE RING on THE AIN’T IT COOL NEWS and also was the first motherfucker on the internet to reveal it was being made back when I reviewed RINGU and RINGU 2 for them.) The movie by Hideo Nakata came after a TV series and both were based on a novel. At the same time Nakata’s movie came out there was another movie called RING 2 or RASEN which means SPIRAL but is not to be confused with the Japanese horror movie UZUMAKI which is about spirals but is completely unrelated to rings. Well RING 2 is also not to be confused with RINGU 2 which is directed by Hideo Nakata. See, RINGU was a huge hit but RASEN (even though it was based on the sequel book) was not, so they pretended it never happened and made a new sequel. Soon after in Korea, they made a remake of the original RINGU, known here as THE RING VIRUS and I haven’t seen that one but I heard it has stuff that was ONLY in the movie version but also stuff only from the book. In the US Gore Verbinski made THE RING which is sort of the same story as the Japanese movie but now in seattle with horses and a girl named Samara instead of Sadako. That one now has a sequel coming out which is directed by, holy shit, Hideo Nakata himself, director of the original RING movie and the second attempt at the first RING movie sequel. So now he’s directing the sequel to the remake of his original, which is apparently a direct sequel to the remake, not a remake of either his original sequel or the sequel that was adapted from the book sequel that he did not direct and nobody liked. 
SPOILER ALERT !!
