New Japanese film reviews appear every last Friday of the month.

River ***

Directed by Takayuki Suzui, who did the interesting Manhole, this is a stylish, indie movie that refuses to fit into any genre. It stars five unknown actors (Yo Oizumi, Ken Yasuda, Takuma Oto, etc.) in a convoluted tale of slow revenge. Five schoolboy friends meet again at a school reunion and discover they all have painful memories (a cop who shot a hostage, the hostage's boyfriend, etc.). By chance, they run into another schoolfriend, an exchange student who was part of their group for only a few months. He offers them a new drug that can erase memories - only they have to steal it from his factory. Suzui teases the audience with hints and (mis)information to construct a thoroughly intriguing mystery. After the halfway mark, things start to fall into place. The last 30 minutes has a gruesome, well over-the-top retribution sequence that rivals Russ Meyer's exploitation movies.

Hanochi *

Old hangdog Akira Terao plays a glum wife killer in Hanochi, a tearjerker to follow last year's very successful weepy Inochi. Since the murderer is an elite cop, the police try to cover it up as a mercy killing, but a young journalist Mayu Tsuruta, a lawyer and a cop stay on the case to discover exactly what happened in the two days between the murder and Terao's confession to the police. The mercy killing defense looks shakey when it's revealed that Terao spent the time in Shinjuku's sleazy entertainment district Kabukicho. The film is well acted and neatly mixes weepy drama material with detective thriller conventions, but it fails to deliver the three-hanky ending the silver audience is expecting. Main problem is Terao's stony, droopy-jowled face - stays that way for the entire two hours. The movie's a festival of frowns and pained looks.

Saru *

TV and straight-to-video director Yoichiro Hayama's first feature film is a Blair Witch-like fake documentary about film students who become guinea pigs in a bizarre drug experiment - with horrific results. Nao Omori, Jun Toba and Kenji Mizuhashi play the film students with unnerving naturalness as they spend their days eating hospital food, urinating into specimen cups, and receiving injections. Hayama is all too successful in showing the excruciating boredom of hospital life, and the poor-quality video imagery with little sound and no music has a numbing effect. When the strange events start to happen - a fight in room 501, an elevator rising at night, patients shrieking like monkeys, a toilet door rattled by unknown hands - they are quite unbelievably terrifying. Alas, the film winds down as slowly as it built up, and leaves everything unexplained and mysterious. A most annoying film of a good idea.

Chakushin Ari **

Famous abroad for his excesses (Ichi the Killer, Audition, Visitor Q, etc.), director Takashi Miike sets out to prove that he can do mainstream, atmospheric horror just as well as horror-meisters Nakata or Kurosawa. The result is only a partial success, since the image of pale, long-haired women crawling out of the woodwork is now so cliched as to be almost comical. (Shimizu's Juon was intended as an over-the-top parody of the genre conventions - until the Hollywood remake guys started shrieking.) The story has Kou Shibasaki and Shinichi Tsutsumi trying to stop a spate of supernatural murders that are preceded by mobile-phone messages (just like in CHAIN or the Korean movie PHONE). Shibasaki does good fear (her big eyes almost pop out in terror) but the film takes way to long to get into gear. It only starts to create sustained horror tension in the last hour in a seedy, derelict hospital. It's ultimately unsatisfying however, as the scriptwriter provides multiple explanations (it's the mother, it's the daughter, it's my mother!) and even rewinds time itself to provide further thrills.

1980 ***

A slight movie that celebrates the bad-taste of the early 1980s, the years of YMO, Seiko Matsuda haircuts, techno robot dancing, Rubik cubes, "no-pan kissa" (bottomless coffee cups served by bottomless waitresses) and wood panelling. Two sisters have their lives upturned when the middle sister, a notoriously slutty pop idol, shows up at their school and starts to seduce everyone. Theater director Keralino Sandorovich handles the pop fun with a light touch, and Rie Tomosawa has great fun playing the tarty ex-idol with a lopsided grin, while Aoi Yu plays her permanently embarrassed younger sister with a horrible haircut and the delightfully named Inuko Inuyama her older sister with husband troubles. More fun for Japanese who lived through the decade, I suppose, and can groan along with all the awful crimes against good taste.

Kyuketsuki Goke Midoro ****

This month's classic DVD selection is, amazingly, a high-camp Shochiku production from 1968, Goke, Bodysnatcher from Hell. It starts like a disaster movie as a regular flight to Azumi hits some freaky weather: the sky turns blood red and suicidal birds start divebombing the windows. The plane's passengers are a mixed bunch - a corrupt politician, an arms dealer, a US soldier's widow on her way to Vietnam, a nutty psychologist, a Bond-like hitman and a terrorist with a bomb! Before the movie can turn into Airplane, a UFO knocks the plane out of the sky and an alien being (that looks like a moving lump of snot) invades the brain of one of the passengers and turns him into a bloodsucking zombie! Directed by Hajime Sato in 1968, this is tremendous fun. Even better, the DVD release has the English dubbed version. Will the plucky airline staff save the world from the foreign mucus - or not.