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Sasha Rainbow's superficiality satire Grafted feels like a J-horror inversion of Coralie Fargeat's breakout body-horror stunner The Substance. Shudder's latest original plays in a sandbox with titles like Sion Sono's Exte: Hair Extensions, where cosmetic alterations lead to unsettling results. Rainbow pulls from traditional mad scientist frameworks to tell a coming-of-age struggle from a Chinese immigrant's perspective, but in doing so, creates push-and-pull friction between a host of thematic intentions. Grafted deals in body-horror squeamishness, slasher heartlessness, and university ecosystems, but it's not always the steadiest execution. Highs are high, but they come at a cost.

Joyena Sun stars as Wei, a shy, reclusive daughter who watches her father die during a skin-replacement experiment gone Twilight Zone-y. He tries to cure them both of genetic facial birthmarks by inventing a self-healing patch using regenerative Corpse Flower cells—but the mind-of-its-own flap spreads over his mouth and nostrils,...

Oh J-Horror! It has been years since you were worth my cinematic time. From your heyday in the late 1990s -- Ringu, Dark Water, Ju-On and Pulse -- to Sono Sion putting a very sharp fork into you in the mid-aughts with Exte: Hair Extensions, you were the black-haired angel of contemporary genre filmmaking. But remakes, an endless stream of terrible sequels, and subsumption into seemingly every facet of the horror genre diluted your vibrancy and all but rendered the style irrelevant. No small irony that the sucking the life out of things mirrored the very curses you seemed to embody In your characters.So colour me surprised when female director Asato Mari, as rare a thing in Japanese genre film as in every other part of the world,...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Closing off the 2013 edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival is a new film by long time Fantasia favourite Sion Sono. Sion Sono is one of the few filmmakers to completely embody the ethos of Fantasia and he has been an almost constant presence at the festival since he won the award for most ground-breaking film for Suicide Club in 2002. His newest movie, Bad Film, was edited together from over 150 hours of footage he shot in 1993 and will be making its Canadian Premiere at this year’s festival. In anticipation of this film, I am counting down Sion Sono’s five best films.

5. Noriko’s Dinner Table (2006)

A vague prequel to Suicide Club, Noriko’s Dinner Table remains somewhat on the fringes of popularity with North American audiences. Though it does not reach the breadth of Love Exposure, it is perhaps closest to that film in style, as it examines...

Closing off the 2013 edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival is a new film by long time Fantasia favourite Sion Sono. Sion Sono is one of the few filmmakers to completely embody the ethos of Fantasia and he has been an almost constant presence at the festival since he won the award for most ground-breaking film for Suicide Club in 2002. His newest movie, Bad Film, was edited together from over 150 hours of footage he shot in 1993 and will be making its Canadian Premiere at this year’s festival. In anticipation of this film, I am counting down Sion Sono’s five best films.

5. Noriko’s Dinner Table (2006)

A vague prequel to Suicide Club, Noriko’s Dinner Table remains somewhat on the fringes of popularity with North American audiences. Though it does not reach the breadth of Love Exposure, it is perhaps closest to that film in style, as it examines...

Hair that Kills? It’s been a popular theme in Asian horror in the last few years first with Korea and ‘The Wig’) and then in 2007 Japan joined in the fun with Sion Sono’s ‘Exte: Hair Extensions.’ Well now Chinas getting in on the follicle fun with a Hair related horror of their very own, The Deadly Strands, that follows the story about the dreadful truth behind a series of accidents, around a celebrated radio host. And yes you guessed its there’s a wig involved. Deadly Strand opens next month.

Among the movies joining those already slated (see item here) for the fest, which runs Wednesday-Sunday, March 27-31 at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Ma, is the tongue-in-cheek big-bug epic Big Ass Spider (pictured above), fresh from its world premiere at this month’s SXSW. Accompanying this closing-night screening will be director Mike Mendez (of The Convent and The Gravedancers, who discussed Spider here), and producer Travis Stevens, also repped at Buff by E.L. Katz’s Cheap Thrills.

Also added to the Buff lineup are Chad Crawford Kinkle’s rural shocker Jug Face (see story here), with Kinkle and producer Andrew van den Houten on hand for this East Coast premiere; Guilty Of Romance, an eerie thriller from Suicide Club, Exte: Hair Extensions and Cold Fish director Sion Sono; The Rambler, an exercise in comic brutality from The Oregonian director and V/H/S co-star Calvin Reeder, also making its...

Among the movies joining those already slated (see item here) for the fest, which runs Wednesday-Sunday, March 27-31 at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Ma, is the tongue-in-cheek big-bug epic Big Ass Spider (pictured above), fresh from its world premiere at this month’s SXSW. Accompanying this closing-night screening will be director Mike Mendez (of The Convent and The Gravedancers, who discussed Spider here), and producer Travis Stevens, also repped at Buff by E.L. Katz’s Cheap Thrills.

Also added to the Buff lineup are Chad Crawford Kinkle’s rural shocker Jug Face (see story here), with Kinkle and producer Andrew van den Houten on hand for this East Coast premiere; Guilty Of Romance, an eerie thriller from Suicide Club, Exte: Hair Extensions and Cold Fish director Sion Sono; The Rambler, an exercise in comic brutality from The Oregonian director and V/H/S co-star Calvin Reeder, also making its...

Among the movies joining those already slated (see item here) for the fest, which runs Wednesday-Sunday, March 27-31 at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Ma, is the tongue-in-cheek big-bug epic Big Ass Spider (pictured above), fresh from its world premiere at this month’s SXSW. Accompanying this closing-night screening will be director Mike Mendez (of The Convent and The Gravedancers, who discussed Spider here), and producer Travis Stevens, also repped at Buff by E.L. Katz’s Cheap Thrills.

Also added to the Buff lineup are Chad Crawford Kinkle’s rural shocker Jug Face (see story here), with Kinkle and producer Andrew van den Houten on hand for this East Coast premiere; Guilty Of Romance, an eerie thriller from Suicide Club, Exte: Hair Extensions and Cold Fish director Sion Sono; The Rambler, an exercise in comic brutality from The Oregonian director and V/H/S co-star Calvin Reeder, also making its...

Among the movies joining those already slated (see item here) for the fest, which runs Wednesday-Sunday, March 27-31 at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Ma, is the tongue-in-cheek big-bug epic Big Ass Spider (pictured above), fresh from its world premiere at this month’s SXSW. Accompanying this closing-night screening will be director Mike Mendez (of The Convent and The Gravedancers, who discussed Spider here), and producer Travis Stevens, also repped at Buff by E.L. Katz’s Cheap Thrills.

Also added to the Buff lineup are Chad Crawford Kinkle’s rural shocker Jug Face (see story here), with Kinkle and producer Andrew van den Houten on hand for this East Coast premiere; Guilty Of Romance, an eerie thriller from Suicide Club, Exte: Hair Extensions and Cold Fish director Sion Sono; The Rambler, an exercise in comic brutality from The Oregonian director and V/H/S co-star Calvin Reeder, also making its...

Himizu; Revenge of the Electric Car; Delicacy

The word "maverick" is overused in modern film criticism, but Japanese avant-garde performance-poet-turned-director Sion Sono is one of the few film-makers to whom the term can be applied without fear of contradiction. From early experimental shorts such as I Am Sion Sono!!, through edgy international breakthrough features such as Suicide Club and Exte: Hair Extensions, to more recent releases such as Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance, Sono has conjured a baffling body of work spanning arthouse invention, Manga-inflected fantasy, violently explicit comedy and thought-provoking horror.

His 2008 magnum opus Love Exposure (the first instalment of his Hate Trilogy) is one of the most genuinely peculiar and unexpectedly indefinable movies I have ever seen – a tale of religious guilt, family feuds, young love, ancient curses, sinister cults, industrial pornography, covert cross-dressing and martial-arts-inspired "peek-a-panty" photography. At once insanely ramshackle yet obsessively focused, this head-scrambling...

For the horror buff, Fall is the best time of the year. The air is crisp, the leaves are falling and a feeling of death hangs on the air. Here at Sound on Sight we have some of the biggest horror fans you can find. We are continually showcasing the best of genre cinema, so we’ve decided to put our horror knowledge and passion to the test in a horror watching contest. Each week in October, Ricky D, James Merolla and Justine Smith will post a list of the horror films they have watched. By the end of the month, the person who has seen the most films wins. Prize Tbd.

Justine Smith (9 viewings) Total of 40 viewings

Purchase

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Directed by Tobe Hooper

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the best horror films ever made, in competition with Possession, The Exorcist, The Birds and Suspiria.

Sion Sono, whose Himizu sees its world premiere in Venice next week before screening in Toronto, wasn't much known outside of Japan "until 2002's Suicide Club, which famously opened with a chorus line of angelic schoolgirls cheerfully leaping into the path of a subway train," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "Since then he's made the first of two projected Suicide sequels, the surreal psychosexual nightmare Strange Circus (2005), and deadly-'do J-horror exercise Exte: Hair Extensions (2007), to name a few. Though not in the Miike league of complete unpredictability (let alone productivity), Sono's films have been a diverse lot, not excluding an exercise or two in straight-ahead naturalism. The mega-dose of Sono that the Roxie offers this month, however, feels like two very large pieces cut from the same pie. Opening Friday is 2008's Love Exposure, clocking just under four hours (not counting intermission); next up is 2010's Cold Fish (starting Sept.

Great news from the folks at Bloody Disgusting Selects! They've announced that they'll be releasing Sion Sono's nasty serial killer thriller Cold Fish in Us theaters starting August 5th. The violence starts in New York and La and will spread from there to other select cities. After that, it'll be released on DVD and iTunes on August 23rd and hit VOD in late September. Sono is the director of films like Love Exposure, Suicide Club, Noriko's Dinner Table, Exte: Hair Extensions and is one of our favorites. If this is playing near you, we highly recommend you check it out.

Great news from the folks at Bloody Disgusting Selects! They've announced that they'll be releasing Sion Sono's nasty serial killer thriller Cold Fish in Us theaters starting August 5th. The violence starts in New York and La and will spread from there to other select cities. After that, it'll be released on DVD and iTunes on August 23rd and hit VOD in late September. Sono is the director of films like Love Exposure, Suicide Club, Noriko's Dinner Table, Exte: Hair Extensions and is one of our favorites. If this is playing near you, we highly recommend you check it out.

Texas Frightmare Weekend has established itself as one of the biggest and best conventions in the country, stacked top to bottom with some of the genre's biggest stars, and this April they're looking to tear the roof off of the place!

From the Press Release

Texas Frightmare Weekend announced Audition star Eihi Shiina and Tokyo Gore Police director and special effects artist Yoshihiro Nishimura are confirmed to attend this year’s edition of the popular horror and genre convention (April 29 – May 1). This will mark the first time that Shiina has made an appearance of this nature in the United States.

They join other high profile recent additions including influential horror and genre author and filmmaker Clive Barker (Hellraiser, Midnight Meat Train), independent filmmaking legend Roger Corman and Tom Six and Dieter Laser, the director and star of last year’s hit and much-talked about cult film The Human Centipede. In addition,...