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

Vital **

Director Shinya Tsukamoto continues on his mission to ostracize his core sci-fi and horror fans with this abstract, art-house effort. Shot in the same washed-out metal tones of his last film "A Snake of June," but without any of that film's palpable erotic charge, "Vital" is sorely enervated. In a mute, lifeless performance, Tadanobu Asano is an amnesiac at medical school performing an autopsy on his dead girlfriend. As he cuts through the mustard-yellow rubbery body (cue Tsukamoto's beloved squelchy noises), he slowly remembers moments of his life with his lost love (ex-ballerina Nami Tsukamoto skipping around on the beach). When he's not daydreaming about her, the mopey necrophiliac gets frisky with ex-model Kiki, a fellow autopsy student with a fondness for rough stuff. Desiccated, morose stuff.

Jyukai **

Directed by first-timer Tomoyuki Takimoto, this omnibus feature has four tales of life and death set in the notorious suicide spot of Aokigahara, the primeval forest in the foothills of Mt. Fuji. Takimoto makes the most of the forest's surreal vistas, all gnarly roots and mossy caves, but fails to find any drama in the four stories. A loan shark chases a debtor, a regular Joe is quizzed about the suicide of a stranger, an embezzler survives a murder attempt and camps out near the body of a recently hanged man. They exchange tales of loneliness, divorce, debt and stalking. After three miserable episodes, you wait for the final one featuring last year's "iyashikei idol" (healing babe) Haruka Igawa with some hope. Alas, even the comely Igawa is miscast as a frumpy kiosk woman who's bought a one-way bus ticket to Aokigahara... With suicide rates soaring in Japan, this is hardly what the doctor ordered.

Kita no Zero Nen **

Yukisada Isao, director of the youth films "Go" and "A Day on the Planet," tackles an old-fashioned epic on the hardships faced by the first settlers in Hokkaido. It starts with eternal idol Sayuri Yoshinaga and baby daughter disembarking from a matte painting and joining manly Ken Watanabe in a hut in the frozen north. The family faces all sorts of trouble from bears, blizzards, famine, and roving rapists, but manages to survive by communal living (the heroic sod-busting and ground-clearing sequences look like scenes from Kim Jong-il's propaganda movies) and a bit of help from renegade Ainu hunter Etsushi Toyokawa. Years pass, Ken goes AWOL, Sayuri snuggles up to Etsushi, they start a successful horse-breeding corral - and the film turns into a John Ford western. By the time the plague of locusts arrived, I headed for the hills...

Marebito **

This is one of a dozen ultra-low-budget films shot on video for Eurospace's "Eiga Bancho" series. Directed by horror maestro Takashi Shimizu ("Tomie," "Juon") and starring cult-director Shinya Tsukamoto ("Tetsuo," "Gemini"), you really expect something better. Tsukamoto the actor has two expressions: bug-eyed terror or barely awake. He spends most of the movie like a somnambulant, mumbling a bored narration even as he shoots gruesome footage in grainy shakycam, explores subterranean Tokyo, and discovers naked girl Tomomi Miyashita (the "distant person" of the title) chained up in a cave. You are forced to piece together your own story from blurry video images, vague shadows in viewfinders, webcam images of a feral girl, and Tsukamoto's unfathomable expression - the totally inscrutable face of a deranged salaryman on the last train. Rather than a collaboration by two accomplished filmmakers, it looks more like a first effort by a film-school graduate.

Gokudo no Onnatachi (DVD) ****

The first film in the popular series of "Yakuza Wives" movies, this one was directed by samurai-action veteran Hideo Gosha in 1986. When the white-suited don of the Osaka mob takes a short prison vacation, his regal, kimono-clad wife Shima Iwashita takes over the gang. Her first priority is to arrange the marriage of rebellious younger sister Rino Katase to a man outside the mob. On vacation in Guam, however, Katase is raped by a rival gangster and, because he's the king of sneers Riki Takeuchi, she not only forgives him, but elopes and marries him! Gosha focuses on the women's rivalry rather than the sneering gangsters, and it's a welcome change from the usual scowls and growls. The rococo 80s fashions and interiors also add a certain Imperial Roman decadence to the proceedings. Worth watching for the slam-bam, knockdown, catfight at the end, that leaves both sisters sweaty, half-naked and exhausted.