A new DVD label called CasaNegra is releasing excellent remasterings of classic Mexican horror films starting with two notable titles from the early 1960s, this film and El Espejo de la Bruja (The Witch's Mirror). Unless one happens to catch an infrequent showing on Spanish language television, original-language versions of these pictures are almost impossible to find, especially in quality presentations. Part of that is due to the heritage of K. Gordon Murray, an enterprising American who imported the films and dubbed them horribly into English.

For many viewers The Curse of the Crying Woman (La maldición de la Llorona) will be an odd return to genre basics. The literal and linear story ignores the standard legend of La Llorona and instead substitutes every crea...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Don't let the tagline on the DVD box worry you. "There is more to this world than is safe to know," it says. This might be a warning one should heed if not for the fact that The Uninvited goes out of its way to not explain anything. Whatever those dangerous things are, you'll still have no idea by the closing credits.

The Uninvited opens on a Korean subway. Jung-won (Shin-yang Park) is dozing off on his way home from work. When the train reaches the end of the line, the announcement over the loudspeaker wakes him up, and he narrowly makes it through the closing doors onto the platform. As the train pulls away, however, he notices two small children are still inside, sitting opposite one another, not moving. The metaphor is a heavy one: life...Read the entire review

If you ever wondered what a Korean American Pie/Farelly Bros. movie (or, for my generation, Porky's/Fast Times at Ridgemont High) might be like, look no further than Sex is Zero (Saekjeuk shigong, 2002), a broad and raunchy film cut from nearly identical cloth. Intellectual it ain't; the comedy is so crude as to make the Three Stooges' writers seem like Albert Camus. Those looking for an outrageous - and truly mindless - evening's entertainment might find the film silly fun, though the sameness of its non-stop parade of gross-out gags becomes tiresome after a while.

The plot is so simple as to be almost classically schematic. Eunsik (Chang Jung Lim) is a nerdy, wide-eyed freshman law school student hopelessly prone to accidents and embarrassment in the best Jerry Lewis tradition. (The actor playing him is obviously too old for the part, his age explained in a line that mi...Read the entire review

Tokyo Psycho (2004) is a tale of love. Well, the kind of love where you stalk a girl and send her weird fragmented notes tied together with piano wire, with the words "You Will Marry Me." scrawled on them, and have pictures of the girl smeared with blood and punctured by staples. Okay, maybe that's not love.... It's that other thing.... What do you call it?.... Totally batshit crazy.

Young, pretty Yumiko (Sachiko Kokubu- Onmyoji, Menotto), who runs a design agency with her best friend Moe (Mizuho Nakamura), is having problems. She's been receiving strange letters which she initially cannot figure out until she goes to a school reunion. At the reunion, her fellow classmates help her recall a one semester student who was pulled out of school and rumored to have gone crazy. The student, Mikuriya (Masashi Tamaguchi), had a crush on her, and a little internet digging reveals that he did i...Read the entire review

The Pinky Violence Collection gathers four films from Japanese cinema's golden age of the profane and funky. In the late 60's, just like in most of the major movie markets, Japanese relaxed censorship laws and allowed more extreme content in films. Thus, titillation, savagery, and general debauchery and exploitation began to pop up and proved to be a lucrative way to lure in an increasingly tv-entertained audience. "Pinky violence" was basically bad girl films, often filmed in a psychedelic haze, set in the grimiest urban locales, and filled to the brim with blatant nudity, too cool swagger, vicious violence, as well as some outlandishly gaudy outfits and dated hairstyles.

Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom (1973)- The School of Hope is a reform school with the motto that they will turn female juvenille delinquents into "role model mothers and wives." The corrupt p...Read the entire review

Following Sex and Fury, our pickpocket, gambler, underworld heroine Inoshika Ocho (Reko Ike) is back for more in Female Yakuza: Inquisition and Torture(1974).

Ocho arrives in Kobe, but no sooner does she get off the boat, the poor girl is shanghaied and strung up and stripped by a trio of lecherous thugs. They "examine" her, then drug her, and she wakes up with a knife in her hand next to a female corpse. Determined to track down her assailants, Ocho uncovers a gangland conspiracy involving serial murder, abducted women, drug running, and the attempted overthrowing of a yakuza gang that once helped her out.

The Ogi clan has a new leader since the old boss died and his daughter mysteriously disappeared. Former gang member Jyoji and Ocho suspect ...Read the entire review

When Japanese film studios found their box office receipts dwindling in the late 60's, the main culprit was the growing tv market. So, most studios, including giants Toei, turned to producing films with more extreme content, be it blood or sex (often both), that audiences couldnt get at home. The stately samurai film even got more extreme with the likes of Lone Wolf and Cub and Lady Snowblood. Gangsters got even meaner and more depraved. A whole spate of sub-genres emerged, from the torture film, to biker flicks, and bad girl cinema. Sex and Fury (1973) belongs to the pinky violence category, female driven films that offered a combination of frequent soft core titillation with some added ultra-violent action.

The year is 1905. Pickpocket Inoshika Ocho (Reiko Ike- Streetfighter's Last Revenge, Terrifying Girls High School) was orphaned as a child after the murder of her de...Read the entire review

I have fond memories of being a kid, curled up next to the tv (or "mother" as I used to call it), watching the horror films that ran on the local UHF station. That was the first time I was exposed to the anthology horror film, and I instantly liked the genre. Some of the ones that instantly come to mind from those days are Vault of Horror, Trilogy of Terror, and The House That Dripped Blood.

The appeal of an anthology horror film is pretty easy. If you don't really take to one story, well, another one will start in thirty minutes or so. Bangkok Haunted (2001) adheres to that rule. I was bored to tears with the first story, but the second was a little bit better, and the third was quite good.

Three young women sit and share scary stories. Antique dealer Jeib tells the tale of Pada and Gnod. Taken in at a young age by a master drum maker, Pada grows into an attractive girl....Read the entire review

Omen (2003, aka. Sung Horn) is a supernatural, Thai horror film co-written and edited by the Pang Bros, of The Eye 1&2 fame. The film is basically a vehicle for the boy band trio D2B to capitalize a little from the Asian horror explosion.

Beam, Big, and Dan (D2B going by their actual boy bad monikers) are a group of guys that work as graphic designers for a magazine. After working late one night, the trio each have encounters that shape their upcoming days in increasingly strange and dire ways. Dan has a head-on collision with a tree and wakes up in an old woman's house. As he leaves, she makes a vague statement, telling him, "You better use the stairs. Don't go in the small room. You won't like it." Beam meets a girl, Orm, and is instantly smitten. Big has a run in with a slight of hand savvy street kid.

The creepy octogenarian's cryptic phrase turns out to have been p...Read the entire review