Tokyo Psycho

It takes a certain kind of mind to really love low-budget J-Horror. It's really one of those you get it or you don't situations. But if you get it these are amazing films, seething with creativity and energy. They're blood soaked freakouts, with technical prowess riding backseat to raw emotion and visceral horror. Things happen that you would never see in a slick Hollywood horror production. When a pile of worms is pored on someone's face it looks terrifying - they're not well lit, computer enhanced worms, they're real. And they look real. Like if you got your camcorder, grabbed someone, tied them up, and tortured them. For reals.Tokyo Psycho is like that. Shot on mini-DV, natural lighting, hyper realistic (meaning, yeah, the worms are real) it doesn't look like the money was sunk into post-production. It looks like they spent the budget on gallons of fake blood. And barbed wire.Unfortunately, until now, all the versions of the film that have been available have been horrible transfers with even worse sound. Really unwatchable. This has at last been corrected by Panik House, who have taken a new master and given it the color correction and cleanup that it deserved. The sound has been re-mastered as well and is now in 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby Digital. The packing is cool, with the usual amray case including an actual puzzle, adhered to the front.It's a nice job of treating what some people might think of as a throwaway film with respect and in turn treating J-Horror fans in North America with the respect they deserve.

Eleven Arts is pretty well known in Japan for distributing animation and lower budget genre, sexploitation films. They are also responsible for many of the late Teruo Ishii titles. I appreciate smaller companies who give young (or old) artists an opportunity to get their films seen. There is something about Tokyo Psycho I can't quite put my finger on. The film has a really strange mood. The story, allegedly based on a child serial killer, is just totally sick n twisted in that freakish fashion only the Japanese can seem to manufacture. This is easily the best DVD version of the movie I have seen. Well worth it for lower budget J-horror fans.

The second star goes for a couple of really creepy and nice moments in the film. Unfortunately there was only a couple and the rest was very weak. I don't quite get the other two reviewers for I couldn't find anything to like actually in "Tokyo Psycho".The story is pretty simple: a girl starts receiving weird letters saying "You have to marry me" and no less weird parcels. A little investigation points out that must be a crazy admirer whom the girl went to high school with and who was in love with her all the way. The plot seemed pretty intriguing on the back cover of the DVD so I expected some really chilling stuff especially given the fact it's a J-horror.And I was extremely disappointed bacause it turned out "Tokyo Psycho" looks like an amateur movie. It's shot on video, the visual and sound quality leaves much to be desired, some truly interesting parts are being interlaced with long and boring segments which are very hard to sit through, the dialogs are dull and also very long, it seems that the makers of the film don't know at all what dynamism and the development of the action are. There are few terrifying and unexpected moments though.But the worst of all is the acting. It's very poor to say the least. I'll repeat - sometimes everything reminded me of some student drama classes. The horror genre knows multiple examples when low-budget films were done right and became instant classics. Nowdays it's more and more difficult to make something outstanding having not much money, but still possible. So if you don't have enough funds you better do something extraordinary ("Cube" or "Blair Witch Project" come to mind first). And such efforts as "Tokyo Psycho" are inexcusable already. Filmmakers have to know how to do their job and not just to take the camera for the first time trying to make cinema.Actually such amateur works being sold in these fancy, colorful boxes with these intriguing annotations really offend me. I always feel cheated when I'm bought into this and curse myself then for the wasted time and money.

Yumiko (Sachiko Kokubu) is annoyed by letters by someone in her past...someone who is a bit psycho. He wants to marry her, but lacked appeal since he offed his parents with piano wire, something apparently frowned upon in the Japanese culture. Well guess who shows up at the end of the film?There was no real horror aspect. No real slasher aspect, and no torture...oh wait, a guy cuts his hand on glass.Nothing to see here folks.$2.99 with puzzle Mountain View Movies.

I was given this movie by a friend who said "No one wants to watch this movie with me. Since you like Asian Horror you can have it." 'Okay,' I thought, 'this just has no one to watch it.' The product description on the back excited me. I was ready to love this movie. Unfortunately, it couldn't happen.This movie was terrible! Thinking back on it there is NOTHING I could say I liked about this movie, and it's the worst asian horror movie I have ever seen. Spitting worms on someone is juvenile, not torture. It was real, but we could also watch the same thing (along with getting exercise) if we walked to the nearest playground.Because of this movie I will NEVER buy a movie from Panik House. I won't throw this movie away, but I will definantly never watch it again.

In fact, the photograph depicted on the cover of the DVD case must have been staged especially as a selling point to lead potential viewers to believe that what you see is what you are going to get in the movie. Not so. That particular scene is shown nowhere, or if it was, then it has been deleted from the movie, but I usually check to make sure I am getting uncut versions of movies and I guess the picture on the cover was used purely to make people want to watch the film. It would have been okay if it had been exciting and thrilling thoughout, but it dragged a bit, in spite of some reasonably effective shots of deserted corriders in blocks of flats which were used to good advantage but sadly not much else was.The story was implausible and unbelievable and the characters didn't ring true either. The cover on the DVD box is the best thing about this movie.I guess they need that, because it doesn't really have much else going for it to lead people in. I believed it would be good, but I was disappointed.