Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with my opinion on a pair of Asian horror flicks that played Fantastic Fest last month. Both are ghost stories of some sort, one about a pair of conjoined twins that were separated with only one surviving and the other is about haunted hair. No shit.

EXTE: HAIR EXTENSIONS

If you thought the Japanese have gone as far as they can go with their fear of hair, you have not yet seen this movie.

Yes, it’s a ridiculous premise. Haunted hair extensions that brutally kill its wearer. But I think that is part of the reason I like this movie. It’s a bug-fuck stupid premise, but they take it deadly serious.

Plus there’s enough SUICIDE CIRCLE-ish bizarre tangents and characters. The main human villain, the one cultivating and selling this hair (from a the corpse of a murdered girl who keeps growing huge amounts of hair), is so fuckin’ crazily executed that I can’t but help revel in the balls the filmmakers had in making this guy a real character in a movie. He’s over the top, wearing some ridiculous outfits (including an “Americanized” cowboy outfit) and just completely off. I don’t think I would have liked this movie much if he wasn’t in it.

But it also doesn’t hurt that our lead is a young aspiring hair stylist played Chiaki Kuriyama, who you should know from BATTLE ROYALE and as Go-Go Yubari from KILL BILL.

This movie doesn’t change the face of horror or is even really all that different a twist on J-horror, but it’s worth catching just for the fucking insane “Only in Japan” characterizations and plot points.

ALONE

ALONE has an interesting premise. It’s a story about a pair of conjoined twins. There’s an operation in their youth and one of them dies. Years go by and the surviving twin is called back home when her ailing mother falls sick and suddenly this woman isn’t so alone anymore, the rotting corpse of her dead sister appearing randomly.

This isn’t a very good movie. It’s not poorly filmed or acted, but the story is so stale, the plot devices so familiar that you’ll find yourself constantly 2 steps ahead of every character.

That said, there are some okay scares and some decent imagery, like the lead character walking down a beach and finding there’s another set of footprints right next to her own tracks in the sand. The make-up on the dead sister is pretty creepy and there are a couple moments of decent tension, but in the end those didn’t outweigh the dull script.

I didn’t leave this movie upset at how bad it was, not did I leave it impressed with any aspect of the film. It’s a solid mediocre movie.

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com