In order to atone for subjecting my readers to those ridiculous Twilight Syndrome movies and possibly setting the state of J-horror back even further than it already was, I’ve got more info on a horror movie that might actually have the potential to be halfway decent: Shinizokonai no Ao. Based on a book by Otsuichi, the movie stars Kenta Suga as a 6th-grader named Masao who’s hated and abused by his new teacher, Haneda (Yu Shirota). The other students take their cue from Haneda and start to bully Masao themselves. They continue to make his life miserable until a strange girl named Ao (Mitsuki Tanimura) suddenly appears. Ao is covered in scars, missing an eye, and is dressed in a straitjacket. One by one she torments Masao’s classmates until she eventually whispers in his ear, “Kill your teacher… or your life will stay the same.”

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Just a few days after the trailer for Twilight Syndrome: Dead Cruise horrified movie fans (for all the wrong reasons), we now have the trailer for Twilight Syndrome: Dead Go Round. This time around the setting is an amusement park in a remote country town. 7 teens gather for the chance to play a live-action horror game refereed by a freaky-ass clown. What they don’t realize, however, is that “game over” is followed by their own swift and violent deaths. Deadly traps are set up around the perimeter of the park, and the only way to escape alive is to win.

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The first teaser for Hiroshi Nishitani’s Yougisha X no Kenshin came out today and its official website was updated with more info. The story begins when a corpse is discovered with a smashed face and burned hands. Strangely, the cause of death is determined to be strangulation. When Detective Kaoru Utsumi (Kou Shibasaki) attempts to corroborate his ex-wife’s alibi she discovers the woman’s neighbor, a high school math teacher named Tetsuya Ishigami (Shinichi Tsutsumi), went to Teito University—the same school as genius physicist Manabu Yukawa, aka “Galileo” (Masaharu Fukuyama). She consults with Yukawa and he tells her that as far as he knows Ishigami is a true genius. Utsumi and Yukawa team up with only a few small clues and the victim’s personal effects to help them disprove a seemingly airtight alibi and figure out Ishigami’s role in all of it. Thus begins a battle of wits between geniuses.

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As Tokyograph reported back in April, Otsuichi's story Shinizokonai no Ao is being turned into a movie starring Kenta Suga as a student who tries to kill an abusive teacher (Yu Shirota). Now comes word that Mitsuki Tanimura (God’s Puzzle, Real Onigokko) also has a co-starring role. Screenwriter Toshiyuki Morioka (Another Lonely Hitman, Fudoh) wrote about her participation on his blog back in June. Tanimura plays a pale blue girl covered in scars. Shooting took one month and every day she had to spend 3 hours in the makeup chair. Removing it took another hour. She says since it went on for so long it began to wreak havoc on her skin, but she was willing to deal with it because she had fun and experienced many new things in the role. Stay tuned for more info on this one in the very near future.

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Handsome Suits, the new comedy based on a paperback novel written by “SMAP x SMAP” variety show writer Osamu Suzuki will be released on November 1, 2008. The story involves a goofy looking chef named Takuro (Muga Tsukaji) who has never been with a woman in his 33 years. When his mother dies he returns from studying abroad in Italy to take over ownership of her diner, “Kokoro-ya”. Although his food is a hit with the ladies, his face and body are not. He falls in love with a part-time worker at the diner (Keiko Kitagawa) but she’s not attracted to him. One day Takuro enters a men’s wear store and a conspicuously good-looking store manager says he has the perfect suit in mind for him. The suit seems too tight, but as he reaches half an arm through one of the sleeves he’s transformed into a handsome new version of himself (Shosuke Tanihara). Soon his luck with women takes a turn for the better, to say the least. Only a 34-second teaser is out so far but in this case I think it pretty much sums up the entire movie.

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