Sensei Sensibility

Welcome to Sensei Sensibility!  You  are the hungry mind yearning to devour Asian horror cinema;  I  am the (questionably) knowledgeable  Sensei , more than happy to satiate your cinematic appetite. Hair We Are Now - Entertain Us? Whether you're on Team Sadako or Team Kayako, it's fair to say that not many J-Horror fans were on Team Koji Shiraishi after his 2016 release: Sadako VS Kayako . Both Sadako Yamamura and Kayako Saeki are undisputed icons of the J-Horror genre, inspiration for the (now) over-used hair-scare in Western horror, and the cause of many a bedroom light to be left on since 1998.  Victims of male violence, these women now wreak spectral, and psychological, vengeance on any innocent party who stumble across either their Cursed Video Tape or House of Death.  Regardless of who you personally find scarier, we can all agree that being haunted by one of these ghouls on their own is bad enough. The big screen union of these two titans of t...

Welcome to Sensei Sensibility!  You  are the hungry mind yearning to devour Asian viewing;  I  am the (questionably) knowledgeable  Sensei , more than happy to satiate your televisual appetite. If you're looking for an entertaining (yet deeply uncomfortable) watch over the holiday break, you'd do a lot worse than the eight episode Studio Mir Korean anime Lookism .  Piggy in the Middle  Bottom Adapted for Netflix from Taejun Pak's webtoon of the same name, Lookism is part slice-of-life/part body-swapping fantasy that confronts the viewer with harsh themes of bullying, trauma and exclusionary social classification. Park Hyeong-seok is a chubby loner with unfashionable glasses and what is obviously a home haircut. Savagely bullied at school by his classmates, events escalate to the point where Hyeong-seok's mother must transfer him to a new school in the big city, where he can start again with a clean, un-bullied slate. (By the way, the overly adult,...

Welcome to Sensei Sensibility!  You  are the hungry mind yearning to devour Asian cinema;  I  am the (questionably) knowledgeable  Sensei , more than happy to satiate your cinematic appetite. If, this festive season, you're looking for a Christmas movie with genuine class and intelligence, the darkly comic  Tokyo Godfathers  (2003) is a 92 minute gift to yourself.  Already a fan of director Satoshi Kon’s work (in particular, the iconic horror  Perfect Blue  and anime thriller  Paranoia Agent ) I had long been anticipating a time when I would  finally  get to watch this unique re-imagining of... the birth of Jesus Christ. (Literally.) Tokyo Godfathers  kicks off on a Tokyo Christmas Eve, and  three homeless persons  stumbling upon an abandoned new-born girl, hidden in the garbage. This small trio of ragtag misfits then embark upon a fantastical, yet grimly real, quest to return the baby to her birth mother. L...

Welcome to Sensei Sensibility!  You  are the hungry mind yearning to devour Asian horror cinema;  I  am the (questionably) knowledgeable  Sensei , more than happy to satiate your cinematic appetite. Junji Ito's iconic Uzumaki - does the 2000 Higuchinsky film adaptation do it any justice or should the oeuvres of Ito just be left the hell alone, in a book, where they belong? I love Junji Ito and I want everyone in the world to revere his genius. Surely the endless film and anime adaptations are a sign that others agree with me, right? Yes, but as I said in my recent review of  Nagaiyume , the intricate and nightmarish works of Ito rarely translate well off of the page. Considering their often cosmic and other-worldly style, how can they possibly be replicated in the flesh?  Let's break it down. It's safe to say that we're all familiar by now with the basic premise of Uzumaki.  Sweet young schoolgirl Kirie (Eriko Hatsune) and her gloomy boyfriend S...

Welcome to Sensei Sensibility!  You  are the hungry mind yearning to devour Asian horror cinema;  I  am the (questionably) knowledgeable  Sensei , more than happy to satiate your cinematic appetite. J-horror found footage shocker Occult (2009) by controversial director  Koji Shiraishi - is it scarier than Noroi: The Curse ? That's exactly what we're here today to find out. You may or may not be already familiar with the 2005 J-horror found footage Noroi: The Curse   A supernatural  documentary style  murder-mystery; focusing on ancient demonic entities, enraged at the forward march of time and subsequent desecration of their old sacred sites.  Due to the slow-burn menace, masterful unfolding of the plot and downright unsettling events within the film, Noroi has garnered quite the reputation on the underground Asian horror scene as being the most terrifying Japanese horror of (nearly) all time. Yes, it initially took me three...

Welcome to Sensei Sensibility! You are the hungry mind yearning to devour Asian themed literature; I am the (questionably) knowledgeable Sensei , more than happy to satiate your literary appetite.  If you’re looking for a grim and ghoulish read this winter, may I recommend You-Jeong Jeong’s The Good Son ? This 2016 South Korean crime thriller is the perfect read to get your blood racing on a dark, dismal night. Han Yu-jin wakes one morning in the family’s luxury sea-view apartment to find his mother brutally murdered and laid out in the sitting room – Yu-jin, covered in blood. Yu-jin has absolutely no memory of the night before and must now retrace both his and his mother’s steps to uncover the events leading up to this terrible incident. Can he solve this mystery before anyone discovers a murder has taken place? And, must Yu-jin then clear his name, or hide his crime? Starting at the end and working backwards is a fairly common crime trope, and when handled poorly, can of...

Welcome to Sensei Sensibility! You are the hungry mind yearning to devour Asian horror themed cinema; I am the (questionably) knowledgeable Sensei , more than happy to satiate your cinematic appetite. Here on Sensei Sensibility we’ve covered plenty of ghosts ‘n’ ghouls (and even a gangster), no wonder we’re feeling peckish for something more… meaty… and delicious… like juicy, juicy braaaaaaains. (Or cabbages!) The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale , or as it’s succinctly known on Shudder: Zombie For Sale is a 2019 Korean zom-com that chomps away at the genre… and spits it back out. Against the backdrop of a thunderously dark and stormy night, a zombie escapes from a  local big pharma complex. Zombie-ism being an unexpected side-effect of a new diabetes drug, this once-test-subject is now making a beeline for the local village.  That would be a sinister enough opening to any horror movie were it not for the fact that our zombie, adorably played by Jung Ga-Ram , is the most inef...