Blind Love (2005) – Daisuke Goto.

The acclaimed director of Pink classic 'A Lonely Cow weeps at Dawn' presents the enjoyably tweaked Rom-com Blind Love that follows the amorous misadventures of the blind, dazzlingly beautiful acupuncturist Hikari (Konatsu), who falls deeply for the entirely wrong ventriloquist! While one often hears the phrase love is blind, but only rarely do we see it dramatised so succinctly than in maestro Daisuke Goto's often whimsical, compellingly dark eroto-drama 'Blind Love'. For reasons I have never quite fully understood, I have always been able to identify more fully with the weird-beard antagonists in Japanese pink cinema, than with the fatuous archetypes in routinely recycled US product. I've long been fascinated by the seemingly effortless way some Japanese Film-makers are able to put so much more depth, intrigue, and inventive playfulness into an hour, whereas their American counterparts waffle inanely on-and-on through film after film without ever once truly hitting the sweet spot. Blind Love is undeniably erotic, yet the emotive dramatic content, and winning strangeness proved entirely complimentary. It goes without saying, Hikari is an absolute doll, and I must confess, the final scene unexpectedly choked me up a bit.

 Gore Whore (1994) – Hugh Gallagher.

Coming penis hard at you like a mongrelized 90s Michael Findlay scrubber nasty, hybridized with H.G. Lewis, lysergically reimagined by Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes. There's just no way a gonzo exploitation howler with a lean, hot-looking skeezer biting off a dude's schwantz can ever be seen as bad art!!!! I'm super-glad Gore Whore stole the documents, I fucking hate documents, and I fucking hate Ivy League stink funnels even more!!!! Gore Whore remains a thrillingly forward-stinking film, created for future deadbeats, and it's lava hot, in a dime-store creeper, armpit fetid, pornoid way. I cannot substantiate this, but I earnestly believe that Gore Whore is doing God's work, God being Grindhouse splatter, 'natch! GAH!!!!!!! A tweaked lesbian assistant that needfully consumes blood? Such a righteously lurid premise could not fail, and it manifestly did not!!!! The skinny Satanic slay siren in Gore Whore inspires more evil boners than Kathleen Turner did in Serial Mom!!! Gore Whore remains the finest genre film Kristen Stewart never made, tiny part greasy-Grisly crime-noir, big part blood wank, all wrapped up in a billion dollar's worth of snarkiness!!!!

 Her Father, My Lover (2015) – Kenji Yamauchi.

'Pure love is abnormal!'

The close relationship between two female companions is gradually put under increasing stress as one of them Maya (Wako Ando) begins to amorously obsess over bestie Taeko's (Yukino Kishi) father. (Mitsuro Fukikoshi) A richly layered, joyfully eccentric romantic drama with an exceptional text, compelling performances, and a deliciously twisted sense of humour. Mismatched lovers have frequently provided fertile cinematic grist, the avatar being Harold & Maude, and in this instance, Her Father, My Love is a winningly off-beat Maya to December romance! While Maya is often accused of being a sicko, she seems absolutely earnest, the fact that she acts so obliviously to the chaos unfolding around her singular choice of life partner was ultimately pretty adorable. The refined film-making, and wholly naturalistic performances are exquisite, the frequent awkwardness of life are acutely rendered with remarkable sensitivity, and director Yamauchi's choice to let the more emotionally salient moments play out in real-time allowed for greater emotional verisimilitude. I was fully expecting a left-handed climax, but it concluded dramatically in a considerably more skewed fashion than I could have predicted! While I overuse the term 'gem', Kenji Yamauchi's immersive Her Father, My Love truly is a burnished jewel of quirky Japanese cinema.

 Zombio 2: Chimarrao Zombies. (2013) – Petter Baiesdorf.

The gratuitously splatter-slathered sequel to Brazilian cult classic Zombio ecstatically ups the glutinous quotient of gore, and certainly doesn't stint on delivering Grindhouse-levels of scintillating sleaze and arbitrary nudity. Spectacularly lurid, audaciously be-slimed, gleefully amateurish, fabulously crude, and never once less than wonderful! Zombio 2 is so immaculately old school it should come with a super-8 mini-edition, manifestly not 28 Days Later, resolutely cut from the very same foully be-rotted funereal shrouds as Burial Ground, and Hell of The Living Dead, sinisterly slow-moving harbingers of righteously gut-ripping, luridly bile-barfing death! Even without the winningly Russ Meyer-esque sequence of weaponized pendulous breasts, the gruesomely oleaginous, lurch-core zombies won me over almost immediately. Baiesdorf's Zombio 2 is an uproariously entertaining, jungle-set gore-blaster, an unfiltered amphetamoid rush of intensely bloody, exhilaratingly retrograded sleazoid splatter epicness!

Hello Zombie aka Haisai Zonbi(2014) – Soichi Takayama.

Passionate, yet down on his luck indie director Domon's no-budget zombie flick takes a terrifying turn into reality after they closely encounter a bona fide, brain-munching denizen of the dead!!!! Takayama's consistently lively Zombie-com doesn't take itself too seriously, and bouncily provides many juicy, boisterously executed splatter-gags. Hello Zombie is a playful, entertainingly goofy example of super-jocular, J-Horror jackanapes, and if you keep your brain in a jar, a gorily good time will be had by all! I have absolutely no shame in admitting that I watched this solely based upon my zealous appreciation of the fabulously lurid poster art, which effectively captures the spirited energy of this indie gem. While it's clearly spoofing the innate absurdity of the genre, it does so with great charm, and a wholly infectious wit,and it packs a lot of engagingly blood-spattered buffoonery in its 60 min. running time! Hokey Hollywood horror is like a prodigiously watered down JD & coke in a club, whereas J-horror frequently delivers a roundhouse kick like the heroic doses of JD & coke you prepare at home. I'm not even that partial to Zombie horror, but I massively dug this, and Takayama deserves kudos for the righteous, sexy-freaky Geisha zombie, which, I must openly admit, got me feeling more than a tad sexified! Gorehounds may care to note that the bodaciously bloody FX are by madman Yoshihiro 'Tokyo Gore Police' Nishimura.

 The World of Kanako (2014) – Tetsuya Nakashima.

An estranged father chaotically undertakes an increasingly disturbing odyssey as he searches for his missing daughter (Nana Komatsu), starkly discovering her multitudes of sins on his descent into her profoundly twisted world. An extremely bloody, compellingly stylised, live-wired, deeply engrossing crime thriller that offers viewers a number of grisly twists and turns as we follow the tormented ex-detective into Nakashima's violent, deliciously squirely rabbit-hole! It's safe to say The World of Kanako is a frequently hectic one, Nakashima's bravura aesthetic is often day-glow bonkers, providing some exhilarating scenes of truly visceral violence. The World of Kanako references Natural Born Killers, Schrader's Hardcore, and Arthur Penn's downer noir classic Night Moves, and has a sledgehammer performance from charismatic Thespian Koji Tyakusho. The World of Kanako provides Asian genre cinema fans with a high-voltaged jolt of adrenalized thrill-spillage, and while often somewhat shrill, you could never call it dull!!

Moi, Christiane F (2022) – Claire Laborey.

A fascinating discourse over the cultural/sociological import of a German teenager's unexpurgated experiences as controversially precocious heroin addict/protagonist Christiane F. Both the epoch-defining autobiographical book and the subsequent, appreciably gritty film ultimately became an international phenomenon. Laborey's earnest, insightful, informationally dense documentary is winningly replete with some especially compelling period news footage. Well made, and appreciably humane in its outlook, Moi, Christiane F covers a lot of emotive, sociopolitical ground in under an hour, providing a cerebral deep-dive into the social tumult of post-war Berlin/West Germany, and the extraordinary, ultimately melancholic life of this remarkable young woman's terrible battle with addiction. The increasingly displaced youth of Berlin, mirroring the similarly disenfranchised plight of London's urban teenagers of the 1970s, oppressed in the concrete, inhumane colossi of new build Tower Blocks, forced out into the streets to discover their own identities in an increasingly repressive state.