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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Even though Paco and the Magical Picture Book seems like it’s pretty squarely geared toward little kids, it’s been getting a lot of attention in the west both for its director: Tetsuya Nakashima (Memories of Matsuko, Kamikaze Girls), and its star-studded cast: Koji Yakusho, Satoshi Tsumabuki, Anna Tsuchiya, Sadao Abe, Ryo Kase, and Eiko Koike to name a few. The story involves a little girl named Paco, played by newcomer Ayaka Wilson, who is staying in a hospital following a car accident that killed both her parents and left her with a brain injury that limits her memory to a single day. One day she tries to read her picture book on a bench next to grumpy old man named Onuki (Yakusho), but he bumps her off and laughs. However, as he discovers more about her he begins to change as a person and decides to do something special for her involving her picture book.

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We’ve had death by videotape, death by dial-up Internet connection, death by cell phone, and death by pretty much every modern technological convenience you could possibly think of. That is, until now—because in one of the more unlikely product tie-ins in recent memory the upcoming teen horror flick Twilight Syndrome: Dead Cruise will feature death by Nintendo DS Lite. When I first wrote about this movie back in May I knew the story involved a vindictive bullying victim named Eri (Saki Terashima) who traps her classmates in a deadly virtual reality game while on a class trip, but I had no idea she’d actually be walking around controlling it through her DS touchscreen. Check out the trailer below to witness the unabashed commercialism for yourself.

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