At over 2 hours long Pandemic combines a disaster movie, love story and psychological thriller.
It’s particularly moving to see Tokyo deserted and empty during the film (in light of recent events) and the horror witnessed is intensely psychological.
How would anyone cope with being told they could not leave town when confronted with the prospect of dying from a virus that is decimating the local population?
It’s also uncomfortable to watch the convicing performances as the pain seems etched accross the characters’ faces when they are witnessing their loved ones slowly dying from the virus. There are some truly strong performances from the cast and the director appears to have done his medical homework as demonstrated when describing in depth the virus and possible vaccines.
The plot is not unbelievable and could happen to any country in the modern world. That’s probably the key aspect of the film which makes it really frightening.

With so many disasters taking place in the world at the moment, this is a harsh reminder of what can happen when someone travels from one country to another, knowing full well that they have a disease. In a society where illness is prevalent in many forms both physically and mentally, it’s still quite terrifying to think that we still don’t have cures for most fatal illnesses.
The stark reality of Pandemic is that any country under threat of an airborne virus would have trouble coping with the impact both on it’s citizens and its state infrastructure. And of course, the worst case scenario being that the virus could spread worldwide and kill most, if not all of us.

Overall Pandemic is fast paced, tense and most strikingly, makes you think about your own mortality.
At over 2 hours long and with subtitles it did eventually begin to wane a little. As the film began to lose momentum half way through, I found it hard to maintain my interest.
Thankfully though the pace does return and there are some decidely good twists in the tale as it progresses.

Pandemic is ideal to watch if you have a viewing partner who does not share your interest in pure horror. As it’s not violent in any way, it provides a good compromise – fear, withough being too extreme.

Movie Rating: ★★½☆☆ 

Trailer:

Shock Labyrinth 3D, from the director of Ju-On (The Grudge) and other iconic Asian classics looks to be more of the same old thing. And to some extent it is.

When a group of children break away from their parents at a theme park, they find the most terrifying ride – a horror maze – to be closed.
Keen to see what all of the fuss is about, and somewhat motivated by a desire to impress the ladies, the two boys of the group manage to find a way into the large, delapidated building. The others join them for an after-hours tour.

But things go wrong when the children are scared by something quite real that is in the maze with them. The following events are so shocking that the minds of the kids can’t cope and all of them forget what happened until they meet up again years later, as teenagers.

This is where things get a bit strange.

One of the girls, Yuki, turns up in the rain and no-one seems to be quite sure if (a) she really is who she says she is (b) whether she should be dead or not (c) whether she is quite mad.
To confuse things further Ken, the lead character keeps getting an unexplained pain in his head, and Rin, a blind girl, periodically gets her sight back – although it’s more creepy outlines than blurry shapes which just adds to her – and our – fear.
Yuki falls down some stairs, so the teens take her to the local hospital, but in a curious (and confusing) twist, the hospital turns out to be the horror maze, and they end up having the re-live that terrible day from their youth.
Oh, and there’s a ghostly bunny rucksack that flies through walls.

Shock Labyrinth is very much like a weird dream, for the characters and the viewer. There are constant jumps in both time and location, and what’s supposed to be real is never certain. Plus there are plenty of freaky, unexplained things, like the bunny rucksack and the never-ending hospital/maze.
More troubling are the distorted figures that occupy the labyrinth. These mannequins are part of the theme park attraction, and are always waiting unexpectedly around corners to give everyone a scare.
A few nasty repetitive flashbacks are thrown in to really add to that nightmarish feel.
It could be perceived that the themes of the film are rooted in the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The mannequins looking very much like those that you see in the grainy nuclear weapons test videos, and the dummies in the labyrinth all show mutations or burns, commonly identified with exposure to radiation.
The director, Takashi Shimizu could well be using shock labyrinth as a wake-up call to the world, who seem to have forgotten (as have the children in the maze) about the horrors of their past.

Shock Labyrinth is odd and hard going at times, but is generally weird and creepy enough to keep your interest.
Plus of course, it is in retro 3D, which has to score it some points. This can however cause a distraction, as it’s hard to resist commenting on which parts of the film work ‘really well’ and which ‘look rubbish’ as you watch with your fellow 3D spectacle wearing buddy.

An average J horror with a nice three dimensional edge, Shock Labyrinth is like a bad dream that won’t end… Except with subtitles!

Movie Rating: ★★★½☆ 

Trailer:

And so to recent Japanese flick Big Tits Zombie 3D, the film that the Jenna Jameson fronted Zombie Strippers wishes so desperately it could be.
I can say that Big Tits Zombie is not a technically good film, camera issues abound, the micro-budget affords them one set and the script is generally pretty abysmal.
But I can also say that this is a movie featuring a chainsaw wielding stripper, fighting a zombie version of what appears to be the Mighty Boosh’s “hitcher”, who has been transplanted to Japan and wears those paper 90s anaglyph green and red glasses whilst an Ennio Morricone inspired score soundtracks the ensuing violent insanity in three psychedelic dimensions. Three! Well its sometimes in 3D at least.
And if that sounds like the sort of thing you’re into, a little poor filmic technique is probably not going to matter a great deal.

The “film” begins by introducing us to Lena, who after a recent jaunt to Mexico (the reason, I presume, is to justify the fact that she is dressed throughout the entire movie as a cowgirl)  returns to Japan and falls foul of a small time gangster.
Our heroine is a hard drinking, good time girl and takes to his suggestion of exotic dancing at his club in “the Texas of Japan” with little to no protestation. At the seedy joint we meet her fellow strippers, namely a Goth who will go on to raise the dead whilst wearing a sort of emo schoolgirl get up; the Madame who does tarot readings; a South East Asian immigrant who is always after money to send back home to her sisters (troublingly for the bleeding heart liberals out there); and the spunky one who recently got out of the clink after serving a term for murder.
Together they’re a bit like a stripper version of Sharpe’s Rifles.

After some gratuitous topless wrestling over who gets to wear the fluffy sex kitten outfit we arrive at the first of many arbitrary 3D scenes. In this case the girls kind of line dance in old school green and red 3-D, and yes the little glasses sign comes up in the corner of the screen just like it did on Comic Relief 93.
However for those of you worried (or hoping) that Big Tits Zombie 3D is but a mere excuse to see lady udders in all their bouncy glory then fear not (or return dejected to your Google searches, pervert) for there is very little actual nudity. In fact with the exception of a fire breathing vagina dentate, a weird bit involving eating Sushi off a naked girl and a pair of topless women being sprayed suggestively by blood from a decapitated body, the whole thing is, thankfully, rather tame.

Not that this is a bad thing, it just squarely positions the film as a silly fun rather than a borderline porno.
The influence of The Evil Dead films hangs heavy. Indeed the previously mentioned Goth stripper actually finds a book entitled “The Book of the Dead” (from Italy) and with her inexplicable Latin fluency she uses it to raise an army of the damned. She then torments the other girls with said zombie army because they used to bully her about her self-harm problem and body issues – which actually seems fair.
There’s also something about a sister of one of the strippers being murdered, and that’s why she went to jail because she killed the guy who did it and now he’s a zombie and she has to kill him again but he’s a zombie pervert who touches the living’s boobs or something.
But it all seemed rather ham fisted and out of place in a film that also has zombies playing ping pong dressed as ninjas and geishas so we’re just going to ignore that aspect just like we‘re going to ignore: The rest of the script, the acting, the cheap, tacky looking CGI blood, the fact that some zombies do Kung Fu, the dated 3D for which I did not have glasses for, the sound effects (when breasts are revealed they are revealed to a loud cartoonish “Boing” sound, fun until you think about), the juvenile nature of the subject matter, the eyeball lollipop, that bizarre sushi moment the horrible digital stock, the…

Ah hell you just can’t quite ignore it after a while; this is a bad movie.

But your enjoyment of the movie should not be tied to this fact. The “it’s so bad it’s good” mantra is a real cop-out and excuses a lot of problems that seem to undermine many of horror’s budget gems. The Troma movies show that whilst a movie can be silly and nonsensical, cheap and lurid your enjoyment of these films stems from the fact that they are pure Hollywood, pure Americana blockbuster movies filtered and distilled into something subversive and new.
I mean is Surf Nazis Must Die, a film where gangs of fascist surfers patrol the California coast, but are brought down by a retired African American lady with the best Blaxsploitation one liners this side of Blacula, really sillier and than, say, Avatar?
No, it does the exact same things, it plays with conventions and uses spectacle to create a satisfying effect somewhere in your stomach by the time the credits roll.
The real reason anybody sees either of these movies, or any movie is because you know you’re in for a certain amount of fun and to make a film fun takes craft, technique and intelligence. Big Tits Zombie 3D delivers on the fun but only in fleeting moments.
The set pieces are great, the fights are depraved and ridiculous, the zombies are ghoulish and over the top, and there are the more base charms of attractive topless women but the majority of the film is spent waiting for any of the above to come into shot.
There is no scaffolding around these moments of sheer unadulterated entertainment to support the rest of the film, no real moments of craft, technique or, perhaps most importantly, wit and charm – the qualities its far superior spiritual father Evil Dead II had in abundance.

As such Big Tits Zombie 3D comes close to that sublime state of a filmic idiot savant but just, and only just, misses out on the savant part.

Movie Rating: ★★½☆☆ 

Trailer:

Part of the problem is that when animated, Manga movies seem to have unlimited potential – amazing effects, unthinkable beings and unbelievable fight sequences. With these ‘cartoons’ the artist’s imagination is the only boundary.
Now, thankfully with the developments in CGI, it seems that at last we are able to see this sort of unrestricted, imaginative creativity expressed in live action.

That brings us nicely to Higanjima – Escape from Vampire Island, a conventional movie with real actors but that unmistakable Manga-ness.

It’s your usual set-up. A young handsome boy named Akira lives in a big Japanese city, struggling to live up to his parents expectations whilst keeping his family together. He spends a majority of his time hanging out with an odd bunch of friends and getting into scrapes with local bullies.

Things take a turn however when a mysterious woman takes Akira aside and says that she needs his help. She explains that she knows his older brother who mysteriously vanished without trace two years previously.
Akira and his friends soon discover that this woman is working for vampires, apparently involuntarily, to get mortals from the main land and ship them to a mysterious island called Higanjima. There these unsuspecting humans are used to feed the island’s vampire population.

Akira and his ill-prepared buddies vow to help the woman and find Akira’s brother and thus embark on an adventure involving lots of long pointy teeth and flashing blades.

Higanjima is a slow starter and to begin with it’s difficult to figure out what sort of movie it’s going to be. With the initial comedy elements, you could be fooled into thinking that it’s going to be a Lost Boys/Goonies style movie with a Japanese Manga twist. This isn’t really the case though as the mood gradually sobers and the film progresses.

Once on the island, the action seems to take an age to build. The young mortals are captured, escape, and are captured again and there is little fighting to speak of, which is a little frustrating.
There are some confusing elements too, such as a character called Pon who is part of the group of youths but seems to be randomly hated by all of them for no particular reason.

Other members in the group seem to have little purpose at all, such has the ‘fat kid’ character who doesn’t even really bring any comedy value to the film.
Worryingly the movie remains mildly entertaining way beyond the half way point, with only flashes of action and excitement to keep the viewer’s interest.

But when all seems lost, Higanjima recovers.

As soon as Akira and co meet with a band of rebel survivors, you can almost smell the impending action. And it’s worth the wait, with the effects and choreography really demonstrating that the imagination of the illustrated Manga films has finally been liberated by CGI.
It’s not ground-breakingly good, but conidering that this isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster, visually, this film really does impress. Blood, monsters, explosions all in good measure.

The end result, a vampire movie that is interesting and entertaining. At times it’s dangerously close to boring, but with the likelyhood of a sequel on the horizon, there is plenty of opportunity for Manga to make good this decent beginning.

Movie Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Trailer:

He’s the man who brought us ‘Sexual Parasite: Killer Pussy’, ‘Sumo Vixens’ and the ‘ExorSister’ movies.
Big Tits Zombie is based on Rei Mikamoto’s infamous manga, ‘Kyonyu Dragon’, and stars legendary Japanese porn idols Sola Aoi and Risa Kasumi, the hugely popular pin-up model, Mari Sakurai, and controversial comedian, Minoru Torihada.

‘Zombie Strippers’ meets ‘The Evil Dead’ Japanese style in Big Tits Zombie, an insane horror-comedy that delivers everything the title promises and much, much more… and all in eye-popping, in-your-face 3D!

Recently returned to Japan from a stint in Mexico, exotic dancer Lena Jodo (Aoi) gets what she hopes will be a temporary gig dancing at a run-down hot springs resort in a deserted suburban town. Her fellow strippers – Ginko (Kasumi), Maria (Sakuri), Nene (Tamayo) and Dana (Io Aikawa) – seem to spend most of their downtime sitting around bitching at each other, until one afternoon, after discovering a hidden door in their dressing room, they decide to break the monotony by venturing into the club’s basement. There, they unearth a mysterious well and, nearby, a dusty volume that Maria declares is a rare copy of the Book of the Dead.

Reading aloud from the tome, Maria inadvertently summons the dead back to life and soon Japan is overrun by rampaging flesh-eaters. For the strippers, however, that’s of no interest. For the time being, at least, the only zombies they are worried about are those who have descended upon their club and are ready to chow down on their bare, tasty and voluptuous bodies. What’s worse, though, is that Maria, on discovering she has the power to control the undead as her slaves, has gone power mad and is intent on ruling the world with the help of her zombie army. Arming themselves with some swords and chainsaws that are handily lying around, the remaining busty babes are forced to employ their formidable ass-kicking skills in a fight to the un-death!

Chainsaw-wielding cowgirls, bloody decapitations, eyeball lollipops, zombie sushi, human buffets, samurai sword slashing strippers, gratuitous nudity, the most inappropriate flame thrower ever and a gorgeous Goth-Lolita villain who is literally to die for are just a few of the delights on offer in Big Tits Zombie, which comes to DVD as a single disc release featuring both 2D and 3D versions of the movie.

Big Tits Zombie 3D (cert. 18) will be released on DVD (£14.99) by Terracotta Distribution on 11th October 2010.

Check out the trailer: