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

In the Pool ***

Wacky TV comedian Satoshi Miki directs this patchy comedy that links together three slight tales of abnormal behavior. Suzuki Matsuo is a nutty psychiatrist in leopard-skin shirt and boots who operates out of the basement of his father's hospital, a bizarre building with a phallic tower. The three patients are Jo Odagiri as a permanently Priapic man, Miwako Ichikawa as an obsessive woman forever checking her apartment, and Seiichi Tanaba as a guy obsessed with swimming laps in the pool. Alas, the film plays like an NHK documentary on personality disorders whenever Suzuki is off screen, and fails to exploit the endless hysterical possibilities of the permanent erection - coat hook, towel rail, hat rack - and instead tries to get weak laughs from debagging young heartthrob Odagiri at every opportunity. Probably would have worked better as a stage play.

Densha Otoko **

Fuji TV director Shosuke Murakami's first feature is an avant-garde romantic comedy - completely free of love or laughs. It is based on the true story of a Japanese nerd who found support from faceless chat-room netizens for his inept attempts at seduction in the real world. Takayuki Yamada plays the 22-year-old computer geek as a stuttering, whimpering, Akihabara crybaby, unable to get excited by anything except computers, anime and character figures. For completely unfathomable reasons, successful career woman Miki Nakatani not only tolerates the nerd, but actually falls for him. Murakami uses all the usual annoying Fuji TV drama tricks to enliven the action, but the bottom line is that half the film is taken up with shots of people typing emails to each other. Ho-hum. Relentlessly chirpy, up-tempo music, multiple insets, rapid-fire editing, colorful text snaking around the screen, all of it fails to disguise the total lack of chemistry between the lead actors. In the real world, Miki would run a mile from such a pervy, socially dysfunctional creep.

Sengoku Jieitai 1549 **

Another ludicrous fantasy, this is a remake of Sonny Chiba's "GI Samurai" that actually outdoes the 70s original for poker-faced nuttiness. Kyoka Suzuki really screws up this time when her playful experiment with the time-space continuum accidentally sends an SDF unit back to 1549. Whoops! Worse still, black holes appear in the fabric of life itself! Suzuki persuades renegade soldier Yosuke Eguchi to travel back in time with her and, back in the civil war era, they discover that ego-crazed SDF unit commander Takeshi Kaga has taken history into his own hands. He's built a fuel refinery out of timber and daub, and cobbled together a nuclear device out of netsuke and sword hilts. Godzilla-veteran Masaaki Tezuka directs this piece of silly hokum with labored intensity, while the actors look like they've just realized that the real stars are the tanks, helicopters, and military hardware of the SDF. It's not a movie, it's a recruitment promo.

8.1 (Hatten Ichi) *

This video horror film from 2004 receives a late-show release at one Tokyo cinema on the basis of the new popularity of its teen star, the very ordinary Tomoka Kurokawa. Kurokawa is a high-school girl who discovers an unsettling fact - all the youths born on August 1 in the same hospital are falling dead. Her parents Kyoko Donowaki and Akio Tanaka are concealing a secret from her that has something to do with a haunted tunnel, a landslide, and a miraculous escape. Director Yohei Takahashi tips out the usual bag of horror tricks, with jumpy editing, shakicam tracking, weird angles and endless feedback and white noise on the soundtrack, but this one never adds up to anything more than some low-key creepiness with a few cute high-school girls.

Pink Ribbon *

Directed by Kenjiro Fujii, this is a 2-hour documentary on Japanese "pink film," that peculiar soft-porn genre that flourished from the 60s until the arrival of video in the 80s. The hook is that many of Japan's leading contemporary directors started out in pink films, such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata, and Kazuyuki Izutsu, while a few were content to stay there, like eternal renegade Koji Wakamatsu. Alas, despite its prurient subject matter, this is one dull doc. Endless talking heads, almost all chain-smoking old men, shot in featureless offices on low-grade video, interspersed with all too brief clips from key pink films from the 70s and 80s.