One Missed Call (Chakushin ari)

 One Missed Call's premise almost reads like a parody of J-Horror: Young people in Tokyo start receiving a voice message from themselves, timestamped from a couple days in the future, which plays out their last few seconds before they die. And once they inevitably bite it, someone in their contacts list gets a similar message. Oh, and these calls always arrive with a creepy ringtone!

 Not even the Mighty Takashi Miike can save this story (screenplay by Miwako Daira, from a novel by Yasushi Akimoto). He can, however, make it look stylish (there's some terrible-looking camera effects early on, but luckily it simmers down quickly - the rest of the movie goes down very easy). And the sub-genre's conventions - already ossified back in 2003, when this came out - are almost always engaging.

 The plot of the movie hews very, very closely to the template set down by The Ring. Once it becomes apparent that there's some sort of supernatural menace preying on her university friends, Yumi (Kô Shibasaki) starts trying to find out more about the curse, with the help of a mysterious slightly older man (Shin'chi Tsutsumi) who's been on the case since the beginning. The investigation leads them to a family with a history of violent abuse (a major plot point) and a few pretty effective scares.

 No psychics in this one, thank goodness; Well, actually, there is one -an exorcist- but he's part of a fairly funny subplot about a TV show that catches wind of the ghostly phone calls. One of the few cases of a J-horror movie (successfully) sneaking in some satire - the only other one I can think of right now is Suicide Club.

I wonder if Marie Kondo ever had to deal with shit like this. Now there's an idea for a J-horror movie!

 The investigation -a traditional element of the ghost story which almost always lends structure to J-Horror- is interesting, and while the plot ends up tangling itself into knots by piling on multiple twists and red herrings and a (very obvious) Ringu-style fake-out, there are some genuinely cool reveals. Most of the time, though, it's dumb and derivative. Not to the extent that it stops the movie from being fun, but enough that it overshadows almost everything else.

 Miike's pretty restrained here - it could almost pass for a normal teen-oriented J-horror flick. A good-looking one, though, with good atmosphere. And he and his frequent editor Yasushi Shimamura pull off some unshowy but interesting sequences where the past intrudes seamlessly into the present. There is some fun stuff with the hapless police department (led by regular Miike collaborator Renji Ishibashi), the aforementioned TV production crew, and an excellent, very disgusting apparition later on.

 To be perfectly honest, some of the dumb parts are pretty fun, too, like a severed hand busily operating a clamshell phone, or an attempt to foil the curse by cancelling a mobile plan. I mean... come on, that's pretty funny; I did wonder if the whole thing was taking the piss, which is something I've found myself pondering a lot over the years while watching even the most craftsmanlike of this particular director's movies. It's an auteur thing. If this one is tongue in cheek, though, it's plays it too safe, staying too faithful to other, oh-so-serious J-Horror staples.

Beyond Re-Animator

 Brian Yuzna doesn't make good movies, and is probably completely uninterested in making good movies. When given enough creative freedom, though, he makes things like Society, or the movie we're discussing now, which has a mid credits sequence where a rat fights a re-animated severed penis.
 That's right. Brian Yuzna doesn't make good movies - he makes awesome movies. At least when the stars are right.

 Beyond is the second sequel to Stuart Gordon's classic Re-Animator, set (and released) thirteen years after the previous movie. Dr. Herbert West, Re-animator (Jeffrey Combs), has spent the intervening time locked up in jail serving a sentence for one of his zombie's crimes.
 We are shown this crime, and it's a good one: the zombie in question spies a cute, scantily dressed woman drinking milk, then breaks into the house and kills her - and then lustily starts chugging from the milk carton. It's a great gag, but also an incredible image because the dude is missing the whole of his lower jaw:

Brian Yuzna and Screaming Mad George in the house, bee-yotches!

 The girl's murder is witnessed by her younger brother Howard Phillips (groan), who grows up to be Dr. Howard Phillips (Jason Barry). He's obsessed with West's work, and joins the infirmary at the jail he's imprisoned to get closer to him.

 Soon the two are working together and are running experiments again with the re-animation serum. There's a few complications this time around:
 a) A sexy journalist (Elsa Pataky), becomes romantically entangled with Dr. Phillips, and interested in Dr. West's work and history.
 b) Prison warden Brando (Simón Andreu), who plays the villain with scenery-chewing relish, hates Dr. West and is almost cartoonily infatuated with the journalist.
 c) West has run some experiments on a fellow inmate's pet rat, which did not go down well, and is getting death threats.

 West also has developed a new technology over the last thirteen years - a transference of electrical nano-wotsits from body to body, which in theory should stop the cadavers going completely psycho after reanimation by virtue of some extremely poorly written technobabble. I demand more scientific rigour out of my reanimation movies!
 As you might expect, the experiments don't turn out that well, and in the chaos that ensues the prisoners break out and cause a riot. The movie was fairly nuts before that, but the real madness starts after this point.

 This is a Yuzna movie, not to mention a Re-Animator sequel, so you should expect a lot of questionable content - sexual violence, boobs and dicks getting bitten off to comedy music, that sort of thing. The pacing is all over the place, and the tone... well, it's firmly a comedy, but way too over the top. Spanish comedy/horror legend Santiago Segura is unfortunately the worst offender in this respect, mugging at the camera with abandon while scarfing down drugs as if they were popcorn and other wackiness. But I can't let the script (by José Manuel Gómez and Miguel Tejada-Flores) off the hook - Warden Brando, for example, might be having a little too much fun squeaking like a rat, but he's playing his role as written.

 This is an English-language Spanish production* which got distributed by the sci-fi channel (and released as a PG cut! Wonder how long that is). The upshot is that most of the actors are Spanish, which lends the movie an even lower-rent quality as they are dubbed or unsuccessfully try to pass for native speakers. The acting is almost uniformly terrible - even Jason Barry, who's Irish - but honestly I think that's down to the material and directorial decisions. Everyone is pitching to the rafters.
 With Combs an a honorable exception, of course: he plays West as he ever has, all acerbic wit and medical detachment. The guy can elevate anything.

 Being a B-movie all the way down to its ugly, deformed soul, the production values are actually all right; The crew had access to a whole jail, which looks suitably imposing, and a ton of extras. The effects are also top notch, with the legendary Screaming Mad George delivering some pretty nuts gore effects which deserve to be put up there with the best this series has to offer.

 It's nowhere near as good as the first movie, but no one expected anything else out of a second sequel. Also- I like Yuzna but he's definitely no Gordon.
 I should re-visit Bride, which I didn't think much of at the time, to see how it's aged. But this, this was a very pleasant surprise - I somehow missed it completely when it came out, and found it to be a blast. A minor Christmas miracle.

*:Just like the excellent Dagon, which was released two years before this one, but by different production companies. I wonder if Gordon was involved in getting his partner in crime this gig.

Undead

 Here's another Australian zombie apocalypse movie directed by two brothers that gets by on cheap CGI effects, lots of gore, an outlandish concept and industrial amounts of enthusiasm. Made about a decade before the first Wyrmwood film, too.

 Undead was written and directed by Michael and Peter Spierig, who pooled their life savings to finance it (giving them the producer role as well, by default). It's a very bloody piss take on 50's sci-fi schlock with a plot that's got more than a passing resemblance to Plan 9 From Outer Space.

 Things kick off with René (Felicity Mason, doing a lot of her acting just with her striking grey eyes) trying to get out of the small Australian fishing town of Berkeley on the same day that meteorites start falling from the sky and turn people into ghouls. The undead invasion puts a hamper on her plans, so she's forced to take shelter in a derelict farm along with a young couple (Rob Jenkins and Lisa Cunningham) and two police officers (Dirk Hunter and Emma Randall). Said farm is actually something called "Marion's World of Weapons", and Marion (Mungo McKay) lurks inside, armed to the teeth.

 Fortunately for everyone, he's the good kind of well-armed survivalist nutjob: one who had a forewarning of the doomsday, and turned out to be right. He carries around a triple shotgun (reminded me of the sword from The Sword and the Sorcerer) and pulls silly/cool moves like throwing his guns in the air, shooting a zombie with a shotgun, then catching the guns again and shooting two more zombies. His usage of spurs got a chuckle.

 Because this is a zombie movie, you have to have internecine tension. In this case, the policeman turns out to be an incompetent dick, and no one trusts poor Marion despite the fact that he saves their bacon multiple times. And there's also the matter of this not being your garden variety day of the dead; there's a sort of acid rain, rays of light sucking people and crickets up into the sky, a newly-built wall around the whole of the town, mysterious robed figures...

 The plot ends up making some amount of sense (as long as you don't look at it too closely or start asking questions), but the script is... well, it's not very good. That it's mainly a purposefully kitsch comedy excuses a lot of the internal consistency and logic issues, but then you're left with gags that just aren't very funny, and the actors aren't up to redeeming either the comedy or the action. Poor McKay really struggles with selling Marion as an Ash-like badass, and the less said of some of the others' relentless mugging the better.

 It strikes me as a film that was designed with the visuals in mind, and had the rest hitched to them later. And there's some varied and striking imagery to be found here; It's heavily stylized, too, which helps it look good despite its homemade quality and desaturated palette. The gore is also fun, with maybe a little more in the way of physical blood and prosthesis than other films like this (though some of the CGI, being low budget and two decades old, is pretty bad).

 Despite its superficial similarities, it's unfair to compare it to the Wyrmwood movies - those were much more straightforward in their ambitions. Unfortunately, Undead kind of fails in its own terms, but it's an interesting, likeable, and entertaining sort of failure. It did serve its purpose as a calling card, letting the Spierigs go on to helm two of the more idiosyncratic sci fi films of the following decade.