Anaza hevun

A brutal killer with superhuman strength is murdering, then cooking the brains of the victims. The police are baffled, the entire city is terrified, and the brains are medium rare.

ANOTHER HEAVEN is a wonderfully gory horror / sci-fi thriller with an intriguing story line. The first three quarters are fantastic, with the unstoppable killer on a rampage. The final part isn't as exciting, sort of grinding to a rather sappy, drawn-out conclusion.

While still worth watching, the 2 hours+ running time could have been shaved by at least 20 minutes, resulting in a tighter, more suspenseful experience...

I would have given the film 8 stars if it had been a bit more tightly edited. Clocking in at 2 hours and 10 minutes it's just too long. Maintaining tension is a tricky business and this exhausts itself after about 105 minutes. That being said, it is still a very enjoyable action/horror/sci-fi flick. The cast, a mix of novice and veterans, acquit themselves nicely. I actually cared about what happened to them. A scene of brutality between two of the main characters a little over half-way through really shocked me and reminded me of a scene that could have been written by Neil Labute. Unfortunately, some other scenes tended to drag on too long and the movie lost its dark humored edge sometime after the first hour. The revelation at the end of the film is a bit anti-climactic and surprisingly unimportant by that point. Otherwise, the film is enjoyable with some great action sequences and a script that continues to surprise and thwart viewer expectations. I look forward to seeing more from this director and cast.

Hmm…had mixed feelings;

I couldn't stand the main detective Manabu played by Yosuke Eguchi. He reminded me of the reason cops have bad reps. He wasn't corrupt; rather took police brutality to another level. Yet he was supposed to be the protagonist.

I enjoyed the character Asako…One of Miwako Ichikawa's better performances.

This is worth seeing for the fact that it has a unique plot. Be warned that there are a lot of slow points that are meant to built certain characters up.

The movie Audition aka Ôdishon, (1999), was way better.

Two cops investigate a series of gruesome murders involving gourmet cooking with human brains as the main ingredient! After capturing the serial killer who also happens to be brainless (quite literally!) they close the bizarre case as solved. However, when sporadic copycat murders follow, the cops are drawn back deeper into the case and begin to discover some unsettling truths about who, or more precisely what they're dealing with. Even though the film doesn't score high for originality, director and writer Jôji Iida does a fantastic job maintaining the suspense factor, keeping the audience guessing right to the end. As a result, the occasional slower moments in the movie don't really slow the overall pace, if anything, it helps with the character development. All the acting is on a superior level, more notably the two cops displaying awesome on-screen chemistry. Yosuke Eguchi plays the younger, 'good cop' with Yoshio Harada as his older, slightly more ruthless counterpart. Overall, this genre merging sci-fi / horror movie manages to deliver, captivating the viewer with suspenseful twists and at the same time not over-doing the gore to unbelievable levels. The shocks are kept moderately frequent and the intelligent, well thought out ending followed by the excellent Japanese theme song at the credits make this a movie guaranteed to satisfy fans of the genre(s).

Personally, I came to 'Another Heaven' with serious misgivings, particularly noticing that after the enormous turkey that was 'Rasen', 'Joji Iida' had magically changed his name to 'George Iida'... sorry, but you're not fooling us with that one ;) However, having heard that this movie made a killing at the Japanese box office, I was interested to see if it was in any way an artistic improvement on 'Rasen'.

And surprisingly, it was. OK, so it's over-long at more than 2 hours, which means it gets a bit meandering in the middle, and it has a ponderous and superfluous ending, not to mention the gigantic plot-holes, but for all that, 'Another Heaven' has infinitely better visuals, has a more interesting and involving storyline, and is at times severely gruesome, particularly with the cannibalistic element - a word of warning: do NOT eat during the first half of the film, it put me right off my breakfast ;)

All in all, though, it's pretty mediocre, despite some quality acting. It's unfortunate that the pace gets bogged down in the middle section, because otherwise it would have been a real cracker. I've seen worse, but I've also seen better... you might be better off watching Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 'Cure' or Sion Sono's 'Suicide Circle' if you fancy a supernatural-type murder drama, because both of those movies are superior products to this film.