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

Cutey Honey **

Hideaki Anno, whose filmography veers from cult anime Evangelion to arthouse indulgences, has directed the live-action version of Go Nagai's cult manga "Cutey Honey." He crams it full of '60s candy pastel and lurid techno-color, loopy retro music, slapstick action, comic-book costumed villains in a nonstop fest of cheap video special effects. Emiko Sato is game as the leggy superheroine robot Cutey Honey, a secretary during the daytime but a multi-costumed fighter of dastardly evil at night. She looks great in all the highly fetishistic outfits she's forced to wear, but her acting is only just about bearable. A number of talented actors are buried beneath silly costumes and makeup as the evil Claw organization, and the film seems aimed squarely at pinup otaku fans. Expect plenty of lonely middle-aged men lurking in the cinemas, clutching bulging bags of Cutey Honey goods, posters, flyers, photo books, miniature figures, etc.

Shimotsuma Monogatari ***

A wacky comedy about the fashion-impaired, Shimotsuma Monogatari (misleadingly titled "Kamikaze Girls" in English) is a love song to Jusco fashion, shell suits, 50s rockers, permanent sneers, brand knockoffs and pachinko. Kyoko Fukuda is the misfit in this sartorial hell, a cutesy Lolita fan who should have been born in Rococo-era Versailles but is instead brought up by chinpira single-dad Hiroyuki Miyasako. This frilly doll's life changes when she meets Anna Tsuchiya, a bike-riding delinquent in yankee-fascist chic who comes to buy some fake brand goods and ends up ordering hand-stitched embroidery for her gang cape. Directed by Shinya Nakashima, this is a great premise let down by a story-free script, manga-style static comedy, Fukuda's one-note pouty performance and endless narration. Ex-teen fashion model Tsuchiya steals the show in her first major role as a bleach-blonde yankee with an icy glare and foul mouth. A star is born!

Loved Gun *

Directed by Kensaku Watanabe, who studied under Seijun Suzuki wouldn't you know. His first feature bears all the hallmarks of the master of Nikkatsu arthouse action. What should be an exciting tale of hitmen rivalries, murder by a Loved Gun that looks like something Wyatt Earp would have used, and classic yakuza showdowns, turns into a static, pompous parade of wacky characters and surreal situations. Masatoshi Nagase, Hirofumi Arai and Ittoku Kishibe star as three generations of gunmen, and talented teenager Aoi Miyazaki appears as a troubled girl who hires Nagase to eliminate her cheating dad's lover. Alas, like maestro Suzuki's last film "Pistol Opera," this is genre filmmaking with no sense of tempo or tension. The few action sequences are laughable, the meandering story of double- and triple-cross singularly uninvolving with such mannered performances.

Omohinotama **

Special effects expert Tadahiro Okano supervised the production of this collection of nine short horror stories for satellite TV, and it's now getting a short theatrical release. The stories range from monster flicks, black cartoons, TV satires, and social commentary, to the usual creeping dread of recent Japanese horror films. A decidedly mixed bag, therefore, but some of the best are very good indeed. "Ore Ore," with Satoshi Tsumabaki, packs a surprisingly emotional wallop in its tail; "Omoi" has a good performance by Hijiri Kojima as a wife mourning the loss of her husband, while "Vending Machine Woman" and "Mushroom Hunting" successfully exploit the age-old fear of the countryside in urban youths. Nothing really that new here, but good old gothic horror premises executed in the main with decent scripts and performances by an all-star cast.

Fukushu (DVD) ****

A completely deadpan, no-nonsense thriller that moves with relentless tension, this is one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's straight-to-video gangster films from the '90s, before he became famous for his superb horror movies "Cure" and "Kairo." V-cinema gangster hero Sho Aikawa is cast against type as a traumatized cop, still haunted by a childhood memory of seeing his family rubbed out by a couple of lowlife gangsters. While investigating a drug crime, he finds himself up against his parents' killers, two nondescript brothers Naomasa Musaka and Daikei Shimizu embroiled in a clinging, incestuous relationship with their sister Yoshiko Yara. Aikawa and Musaka make terrific opponents, two average-looking men driven by abnormal passions. Kurosawa takes these genre cliches and fashions a completely riveting film noir.