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Special Features
- 20-minute interview with director Kiyoshi Kurosawa
- Director filmography
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Veteran director Kyoshi Kurosawa (Serpent's Path, the recently-optioned Pulse) weighs in with this 1997 offering, and the best way to describe it is giallo gone Yakuza. It has all the highlights of good giallo, from an overly gory mystery storyline to broad cinematic shots in the best Argento style to characters who sometimes just say the silliest things imaginable to one particular plot twist that makes absolutely no sense to anyone until you've seen the movie fifty times. And with the Japanese so much farther out on the bleeding edge of extreme horror than the Italians these days, you can bet a Japanese giallo is going to be two hours of bang-up knockdown bloody fun. And oh, my, it is.
Cure (the English title) revolves around a series of brutal murders with one thing in common: the throat of each victim is slashed in a large X. Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho of Tampopo, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, etc.), the inspector assigned to the murders, soon discovers that they all seem to center around an odd amnesiac (Masato Hagiwara). He's not the murderer, but each one of the murderers-yes, they're all different people-came into contact with him not long before killing their victims.
While the style is giallo all the way, the pacing is Japanese New Horror. Kurosawa starts things off in the nastiest way possible, then gives us the finding of the amnesiac and some buildup in the characters of Kenichi and his reluctant partner in this, Makoto Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki of The Eight-Tomb City and Full metal Yakuza fame) before the murders kick off again and everything rolls into high gear. There are more than enough snippets to satisfy gorehounds and a fine, albeit slowly-paced, mystery for fans of more explicit mysteries (I'm sure I'm not the only one who spent the latter half of the film drawing comparisons to Silence of the Lambs). But the true fanatic audience of this film are going to be the giallo lovers, those who eagerly await every new film from Dario Argento. For them, Kurosawa is sure to be a fantastic find. Hopefully, everyone else will come up to speed eventually (perhaps when the American version of Pulse, directed by... ulp... Wes Craven, is released next year). *** ½
Inspector Takabe and Criminal Psychologist Sakuma believe they are on the growing trail of a serial killer forcing others to commit grisly murders, but one fact doesn't add up: the killers have no recollection of what they've done. Enter Mamiya, a psychology student turned 'mesmerist' who plants suggestions in the mind -- latent impulses upon which everyone he comes into contact with will eventually act upon.
Vindicated by his capture, Takabe and Sakuma begin their quest to understand how Mamiya has accomplished what he's done, risking both their lives and sanity in order to bring the entire bloody affair to an end.
Extremely well done and grippingly paced, CURE is a great flick to pop in and sit ready to pull the covers up over your eyes!
Years ago "Akira" drew me into Anime. Read more
Where are you?
That's the nagging question posed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, or more specificially by its uber-enigmatic antagonist, Mamiya. Read more
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