Tokyo Grand Guignol

 Four French directors, working with a mainly Japanese cast and crew, are given equal (tiny) budgets, schedules, and a mandate to shoot something in Tokyo that explicitly invokes grand guignol tradition of gleeful carnage. No frills, no framing story, just four shorts of varying fucked-upness. Let's go!

 First off is Yann Moreau's Endless Love, where Shinichi (Hiroyuki Mori) gets stuck in a time loop. That usually sucks after a while, but the day Shinichi is stuck in is particularly bad - his beloved wife's died less than a month ago, and the Yakuza he borrowed money from to pay for her operation keep sending thugs to put pressure on him. After contacting a suicide agency (as you do!), he finds out that the agency had someone else on file with the same problem - and apparently, they found a way out of the loop... by sacrificing someone else.

 Shinichi successfully tests out the hypothesis with one of the Yakuza, and quickly figures out that it has a second, undocumented side effect - one which he can exploit to travel through time. But that will need a lot more sacrifices.

 It's a silly, mostly non-sensical tale that works mostly thanks to a very commited performance from Mori, slinky, crisp, very stylish digital cinematography, and smooth handheld camerawork - especially during a couple of chases through the city's narrow streets and byways. It looks lovely. There's even a pretty cool one vs. many action sequence with some decent choreography, though it's marred with some truly terrible CGI gore (more on this later).

 Then comes the highlight of the collection: Trahison (treason), by François Gaillard, a director who seems to specialize in Giallo homages. As is his contribution here, a gorgeous, tale of vague supernatural menace that goes heavy on dream logic and ambiance.
 Nami (Megumi Nasano) spends her nights dancing alone at nightclubs and drinking moping around her apartment after a nasty breakup. But when she tries on an evil hairpin (we know it's evil because the excellent retro synth soundtrack helpfully turns ominous), she starts being harassed by her creepily smiling reflection (I do wonder if Parker Finn saw this). There's not a lot of story, just some cool supernatural weirdness: A slumbering Nami is molested by her shadow, a hapless neighbour (Haruka Yamamoto) gets killed with the hairpin, mysterious phone calls, an inscrutable cat...
 It all looks beautiful - the lighting and production design brings out the requisite blue and red hues that are what most people take from Suspiria, but pulled off with more elan than usual. There's a lot of off-kilter coolness, some very cool editing, and the lone kill is a vicious, wonderful throwback to the Italian masters. You know the ones I'm talking about. This one's worth the price of admission alone.

 Gilles Landucci's Shadow Hunter is a very otaku fantasy - a pixie-ish twenty-something woman (Satomi Kurebayashi) belongs to a shadowy conspiracy that sends her out to hunt demons (or ghosts) only she can see, to kill them with a special high-tech phosphorus gun.
 The demons are... well, they're basically fucking mimes with the ability to jump into shadows. One of her quarries (Shuhei Ohkawara) ends up getting curious about her, starts haunting her, falls in love, all while Eri deals with some of her own personal shit.
 It's a kind of cute story, but it's slight as all hell and it doesn't hold much interest neither on the story nor the visual department. 'Mimes. Why does it always have to be mimes?', muttered no one, ever.

 And finally we get to Nicholas Alberny's Good Boy, which is... how do I even describe this one. If you were desperately looking for a graphic depiction of exactly what happens to someone's penis during a werewolf transformation, you're in luck! (Also -and I don't want to kink shame- but maybe seek help).
 It follows the (mis)adventures of Hidesaburo (Jigoroh), a callous asshole first seen calling his mistress a whore in no uncertain terms and then carving a rude message on a Tokyo landmark with his penknife. The landmark is the Hachikō statue (which gets its own, very shoddy animated prologue), a depiction of a dog that exemplifies loyalty; Hachi takes exception to this mistreatment at Hideboro's hands by turning into possibly the worst digital effect I've seen on film in a very long time - basically, it looks like a really shitty motion comic, a 2D image lazily manipulated to give some semblance of life:

It looks even worse in motion. A hell of a lot worse.

 The dog bites Hidesaburo and goes back to statue mode. The bite victim then wanders off in a daze, walking through the red light district until Momo (Ayumi Tomiyama), a prostitute, takes him off the street.
 Hidesaburo is, of course, turning into a werewolf, and imprints on Momo immediately, following her everywhere with puppy eyes. This, of course, unsettles the clientele and workers at the brothel, leading to a confrontation with the local Yakuza. Unlucky for them, then, that it's a full moon outside.

 Where to even start with this? The 'plot', such as it is, is all kinds of terrible. And it looks appallingly bad: Not just the CGI, which remains terrible throughout, but the flat, desaturated digital video they went with drains every scene of life. The werewolf makeup, for the record, is pretty fun
 But if you can ignore that, it's a fucking riot. There are a lot of really great jokes (my favorite one being a novel use for a weird stool with a hole in the middle). The morphing penis I mentioned above also got a huge laugh, as did a hapless Yakuza who tries to intimidate the werewolf by... flashing him his badass cat tattoo, Momo servicing a client in multiple ways as she fields a phone call, and a few more very silly gags.
 As an excuse to go all out on ridiculous ideas, it's a success. Shame about the execution. The director of this short also worked on some effects for the others, and a quick search reveals a failed IndieGogo campaign to complete the film (12% of approximately £8000). I guess that explains that. My guess is Trahison wasn't affected because it was conceptualized as practical effects from the beginning.

 On the whole, though? As mentioned above, one of the shorts alone is reason enough to recommend it. The rest are at least ok; I think the main problem, besides that they ran out of money [citation needed] is that most of these are too long: the first one struggles to fill out its prescribed 30 minutes, and the runtime seriously sinks Demon Hunter, which barely has material for a third of its length. On the plus side, all the shorts have a distinct look and sound, most of the acting is pretty decent, and they all frame Tokyo in different ways.
 With some bits excised out, maybe another pass at the effects, I'd be much more enthusiastic about singing its praises; As it is, I'd say give it a shot if it sounds interesting.