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Friday, January 23, 2009

Asian Horror

Since Christian decided to write about Italian Horror, I will write about my love of the far east and their gloriously strange style of horror films.

So it seems that Asia is known for the following styles of film Kung Fu films (hong kong), Muay Thai films (thailand) epic martial arts films...like ninjas and magic...(china), or plain weird shit (japan). Now those are all great genres, but I only feel about writing about horror now, so let's cover some good ones.

I couldn't start this any other way but to name Takashi Miike, seeing as how he directs about 500 films a year and many of them fall into the horror genre. IMO his stuff is either really great or really mediocre. here are some great ones:

- Ichi The Killer
- Audition
- Imprint (short film for Masters of Horror)

he has done a ton of films that aren't horror but are worth checking out like

- Zebraman (parody of superhero films)
- Sukiyaki Western Djano (weird samurai western)
- Full Metal Yakuza (yakuza dude gets rebuilt as a robot)
- Gozu (Miike goes for a David Lynch type thing...quite weird indeed)

etc

ok so i don't feel like writing a real article so here are some other awesome asian horror/whatever:

- Another Heaven
- Alive
- Battle Royale (only the first)
- The Eye 1 & 2
- Art of the Devil 2 (haven't seen 1, but 2 is awesome)
- Marebito
- Casshern (more steampunkish, but good)
- Suicide Club
- Re-Cycle
- Meatball Machine
- The Vengeance Trilogy (oldboy, sympathy for mr vengeance, sympathy for lady vengeance)
- Machine Girl
- Death Note (live action...was actually really good, i haven't seen the anime)
- Spider Forest

a million more that I can't think of right now, and of course all those movies that USA re-did and butchered horribly like The Ring, The Grudge, One Missed Called, etc etc etc etc

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Sweet!

I'd also add the "Dead or Alive" series by Tashaki mike... they're more a sort of crime/underworld theme than "horror" per se, but they are great. The final five minutes of Dead or Alive pt 1 might just be the most incredible climax of any film ever.

I actually walked out of Audition after the first half hour because I thought it was boring as heck... no body told me it would all make sense by the end.

Anonymous said...

Dude, Izo. One of my favorite Miike movies. It's ridiculously violent, yet surreal and beautiful at points.