When Saki’s mother dies she gets herself involved with a bad crowd at school. Her lifestyle changes to one of sex and violence and she dedicates herself to finding her long-lost sister.

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A bizarre series of murders occurs in which all of the victims have a large X carved in their flesh. Strangly, their murderers are different people, all found within the vicinity of the crime. They can give no motive other than thinking it was a perfectly normal thing to do. Police detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) is put in charge of the case with the assistance of a psychologist and their investigation eventually leads them to a strange drifter with the ability to influence people through hypnosis. In dealing with this man, Takabe’s temper repeatedly gets the better of him and a battle of wills ensues.

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The site for Chameleon: Long Goodbye, which we first wrote about here, just rolled out a new flash layout and added a new trailer. There are no new movie clips in the second trailer but there is some production footage, a short clip of Tatsuya Fujiwara talking about the project, and at the very end we get to see him doing a pretty cool stunt sliding down a metal staircase on his butt. I, for one, am officially sold. The menu is in English so check out the official website and click on “Trailer” for the video.

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Shozin Fukui, whose directorial style is often compared to that of Shinya Tsukamoto, put out two extremely strange DV-shot cyberpunk horror films in the 90s, 964 Pinocchio in 1991 and Rubber’s Lover in 1996. Both of these were picked up by Unearthed Films and got released on R1 DVD in 2004 packaged with his previous shorts. After that he sort of dropped off the radar until 2006 when he put out two DVD releases, Onne and Den-Sen (Infection) - both of which went largely unnoticed. His latest offering, The Hiding (Senpuku) will be part of Cinema Artone Shimokitazawa’s late show rotation from May 10th - June 6th 2008. 964 Pinocchio, Rubber’s lover, and a completely re-edited version of Onne will also get separate screenings during the event.

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Satoshi Tsumabuki (Waterboys, Dororo) has been cast alongside actress Rei Dan in the 2009 Takahisa Zeze film Pandemic (Kansen Rettou). The story, inspired by recent fear of avian flu, involves a large-scale virus which infects 25 million people. Tsumabaki will play a doctor working to save lives at a field hospital and Dan will play a medical officer from the World Health Organization.

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