Executive Koala narrates the story of a koala bear who happens to be an executive in a pickle company. While trying to finalize a deal with a korean kimuchi company, Koala finds his girlfriend murdered.
He becomes the primary suspect and has to prove his innocence.
Executive Koala has been released on the 14th of January in Tokyo. It has been premiered at the hawai film festival where this lucky guy saw it.
It’s directed by Minoru Kawasaki whose previous efforts include Ika ressu (The Calamari Wresler) approprietly subtitled “Seafood Battle Royal”.
The official website is in Flash so no direct link to the trailer, you can find it by clicking on the frog guy on the far right of the navigation menu.
Thanks to twitch there’s also the Ika Ressu trailer here(wmv).

Kei Fujiwara made a little name for herself by writing, producing, editing, and designing the horror flick Organ, back in 1996.
Fujiwara has been an underground activist for some times, she notably worked with Tsukamoto and his theater troupe Kaiju theater back in the 80’s. She also played a part in Tetsuo the Iron man.
She is now almost ready to release her next picture, Id, which she started shooting back in 1999. Yes, life is hard for independant filmmaker in Japan.
Anyway, Organwas a pretty fucked up movie and did make some noise in various international film festival and amongst extreme cinema fans circles.
Id sounds equally psychotic so i guess she can hope to continue the buzz and hopeflly make
her next movie faster.
Here’s Id’s official website, in english (Fujiwara got most of her praise from outside japan so it makes sense). No trailer yet.
via twitch

Loft is the next Kyoshi Kurosawa’s picture. For those who don’t know him, no, he’s not realted at all with the other Kurosawa.
KK has been one of the most revered japanese directors in the west those last few years. Some would say he’s like a respectable Takeshi Miike. Like Miike he’s working a lot, directing between 1 and 2 movies a year, and like Miike his filmo spans over countless different genres from auteuresque drama to yakuza skin flick, to horror movies.
The big different between the two would be that Miike is well known for his genre movies while Kurosawa is mostly known for his auteur movies.
Loft is a horror movie about ghosts (yawn) and mummies. It’s Kurosawa so we can expect something interesting but the plot is very boring :
“A prize-winning writer, Leiko (NAKATANI Miki), moves to a quiet sub-urban house to finish up her new novel with a help from the editor. That night while sleeping, she sees a man in a storage room transporting an object wrapped in cloth. She soon finds out that he is a renowned archaeologist, Professor Yoshioka (TOYOKAWA Etsushi), researching ancient mummies, and that object was a recently discovered mummy. Working late on her book, Leiko witneses a ghost and finds out that her room once belonged to a woman who had been misssing for a while. This brings unexplainable fear to Leiko as she starts to uncover more stories from the past.”
Then again, Kourei was another Kurosawa’s horror film and was very boring.
If you’re interested in Kurosawa’s work my personal recomendations would be Cure and Barren Illusions. He has yet to top those two movies, imho.
Anyway, Loft official site (in english) and the trailer(.wmv).

I watched The Exorcist at age 12 thanks to some hippy relatives that thought it was ok for my developement as a young adult. They also let me watched Eraserhead at the same age. An enlightning experience if you ask me. Just to say that i know the effects an efficient horror movie can have on you. Until 16 i couldn’t sleep in a bedroom with a similar layout as the one in The Exorcist.
The next heavily promoted horror japanese flick is Noroi ! Noroi means cursing and the movie’s tagline, everybody dies kinda gives the plot away.
Anyway there are posters for Noroi all over the subway network right now. That’s probably why the movie is shot in dv, they blew the budget on promotional stuff.
Now the thing in Japan is that everybody believes in ghosts. The basic question is not “do you believe in ghosts ?” but “have you ever had an experience with a ghost ?”. And a lot of japanese people have actually.
To prove my point just check the prices of apartements located next to cemetaries. Those are the cheapest in the country. You can make good deals cause some of the locations are real nice. Take the gaijin cemetary in Yokohama for example, it’s on the best part of town, on a hill with a view on the whole city. Now maybe because it’s a gaijin only cemetary it doesn’t apply, us white barbarians probably don’t have the spiritual material that makes good ghosts. Plus gaijin ghosts can easily be bribed with booze and whores, japanese ghosts seek true redemption.
Anyway here’s the nifty flash site for Noroi and since it’s all flash i’ll let you find the trailer yourself. The navigations menu is billingual so i shouldn’t be too hard.
Careful though it looks like they put the picture of a naked guy on left side of the trailer section.

Miike’s new flick: Yokai Taisenso is about monsters. Not regular monsters: the Yokai monsters. ! The yokai monsters were the heroes of a popular serie of movies at the end of the sixties. It was a back to the roots move at that time. To compete with western monsters movies(Hammer-like ones), Daei created a line of monsters inspired by old folk stories. Those monsters were great and the movies are forever cult classics.
The Yokais were similar to certain kaijus who are terribly frightening but are in fact defending Japan against a bigger threat. You have to realize that the designs of the monsters were out of this world. The star of the cast was a living umbrella with a giant tongue and a human leg. Yes, a living umbrella with a giant tongue that’s the kind of monster the yokais were. Other memorable ones were the woman with the super long neck or the kid with two faces. You see one of the particularity of the Yokai serie is that there are 100 monsters. It’s the japanese monster army getting together to beat the shit outta foreigners or vile buisnessmen (yes i’m looking at you Horiemon). A hundred crazy looking japanese monsters in a single movie. That’s how wonderful those movies were.
Now Miike’s remake has to live up to those movies and it’s going to be hard but since, he’s Miike he won’t give a shit and might do something interesting. Anyway here’s the official site and the trailer.
And what the hell, here’s the imdb links to the old youkai movies :
Yokai hyaku monogatari
Yokai Daisenso
Tokaido abaketo chu

The neigbor number thirteen is an adaptation of a cult manga from Inoue Santa (oh mangaka and their crazy aliases). It’s preceded by a good reputation and is showing now in only two theaters in Tokyo.
Yep, that’s how most indy flicks are treated here to the suprise of gaijin observers who usually worship japanese directors totally unknown in their own country. Tsukamoto Shinya and Kurosawa Kyoshi being two of the most prominent exemple.
Anyway Neighbor number thirteen looks quite nice, it’s about a guy with a split personality each one being played by a different actor. One of them is Nakamura Shido( Ping Pong, Iden & Tity) who’s becoming more and more popular..
No trailer per see, but if you go on the “experience” section of the official site you can see weird excerpts embeded in flash animations. The site is kinda nice and is in flash for a reason, not another gimmick with fade to black on picture and annoying music.
Anyway i want to see that one and it’s been a while since i wanted to cough up the 1800 yens necessary for a ticket.

3yen is all about metapublishing goodness, or as Yves puts it, Plexuspublishing(tm). Anyway a medium mainly talking about or from the medium. It’s not a surprise then to have such a nice piece of meta-movie here. A movie showing people watching another movie, not to be confused with meta-film, a movie showing people making movies. Don’t worry i just make this up as i write.
Recently, it has been a trend in the japanese movie industry to promote horror movies by showing people watching said horror movies. Last year when Chakushin ari was released, you could see on tv, teenage girls in movie theaters ripping their own vocal cords by screaming in terror in front of the last Miike’s horror flick.

This video is similar. It shows the Morning Musume, a pre-teen band of cute girls, watching a sequence from The Ring. They censored it but the one crying actually peed her pants. Well she didn’t but i had to make this a little more interesting.
Enjoy the screams of terror of teenage talent from Japan, please.

School girls are finally falling from the sky thanks to Koibone. So it looks like a horror movie but with some chunks of comedy in it. Well maybe it’s not supposed to be funny but i lauged a little while watching the trailer. That trailer also ran on those big screens in shibuya so i guess it’s not as cheap as it looks like, but boy does it look cheap.

You realize how rotten the world has become when your jalapenos flavored pretzels are spicier than real jalapenos.
Also, when there’s a dog boom in your national movie industry it’s the begining of the end. Yes, good old apocalypse’s coming our way friend. Buckle up cause it’s gonna get as nasty as it gets.
And it won’t start with the dead rising from their grave with chunks of garlic between their teeth. It’ll start with inu no eiga which litteraly means “Movie of Dog”. Get it ? No ? Well there’s nothing to “get” that’s why. It’s Movie of Dog and that’s just how it starts. Then we’ll have Movie of Horse, Movie of Pig etc… Up to Movie of Man and then the dead shall rise. That’s kind of cool because i got bored writing all those words about meaningless japanese movies. So this is probably my last post.
Oh boy, i’m gonna throw the biggest party ever, this is gonna be great. See you on the other side.
For people wanting a preview of things to come , here’s the trailer. For those in need to experience the eschaton in its full power, you can buy inu no ongaku (Music of Dog), music “inspired” by inu no eiga. I really want to chill to pussy dog waltz while watching my neighbors spontaneously combust.

Three…extremes (Three monsters in south korea) is a horror flick featuring 3 of the most hyped asian indy directors working today. That is Fruit Chan(Made in Hong Kong), Takashi Miike(Dead or Alive) and Chan-wook Park(Old boy).The film is divided in three segments each one directed by one of those guys. Dumpling is Fruit Chan’s, Cut is Chan-wook Park’s and Box is Miike’s. Apparently Fruit Chan has also made a director’s cut out of her segment called Dumpling: Three…Extremes. Heroic-cinema.com has a review of Three..extremes, but not of the Dumpling: three…extremes which has a review in lovehkfilm.com.
And it’s not over until i say so ! So keep reading.
Now Three…extrremes is actually a sequel to a film called Three or San Geng(probably korean), released in 2002. Three was based on the same idea of getting three asian directors on the same horror flick. Unfortunately there was no japanese director to be found on Three so i won’t talk further about it. Yes, it’s not cinema.3won.com ok, it’s 3yen and i already have enough trouble keeping with japanese related movie news not to care about what’s happening in South Korea. It’s over hyped anyway.
Three…extremes on the other hand seems quite interesting, but it hasn’t been released in Japan yet so i didn’t see it.
Moviesonline.ca claims to have the trailer for two of the segments of Three…extremes but i didn’t get them to read properly maybe you’ll have more luck.