Rating: D
Dir: Kei Morikawa.
Star: Tomomi Nakatsuka, Koujin Gama, Naoto Iyoku, Yûka Rikuna.
If I had a nickel for every time I watched a Japanese movie about haunted hair extensions, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. Yes, seven years after Exte: Hair Extensions, J-horror went back to the same well, which feels a bit too long to be considered an attempt at a cynical mockbuster. But it is a sterling demonstration that, given the same questionable subject matter, a talented film-maker like Sion Sono can make a good film, while… [/gestures vaguely in the direction of this thoroughly underwhelming garbage]. Right from the start, this simply looks cheap, with lighting which imbues the whole movie with an ugly, fluorescent flatness.
The basic premise is very similar, both films being based around the perils of using hair extensions whose origins are… uncertain, shall we say. In this case, the heroine is Mami Takano (Nakatsuka), a junior stylist in a salon. She is sent by the owner to pick up another batch of extensions from their rather creepy supplier, Hiroo Aizawa (Iyoku). Except, right from the get-go, it is clear there is something off about the latest batch. Unfortunately, it appears that the director has only one tool to show us this: ramping up the spooky soundtrack. The problem is, he uses this trick even in the most benign of circumstances. Someone is handing over an envelope, containing an adequate amount of money for salon services? OMINOUS MUSIC!!!!
Anyway, it turns out that there’s a chain of custody, with these particular extensions being passed from one brutally murdered victim to the next. Now in the extensions’ cross-hairs – pun not inten… oh, who am I kidding, pun very much intended – is Mami’s perky flatmate, Shiho (Rikuna). She never previously had any interest in this style, but on seeing them, she is immediately (MENACING AUDIO CUE!) consumed with desire for them. This ends as well as things usually do for bubbly secondary characters in low-rent horror movies. We also discover that corpses in Japan are stored in a discarded storage-room, while the local police have absolutely no interest in a string of suspicious deaths, no matter how neo-scalped the victims might be.
Actually, it’s far more likely that this film simply couldn’t afford to depict anything like law enforcement. Indeed, it can’t afford to depict very much in general. Exte did at least have animated hair attack footage. Here, you get nothing more scary than disgruntled former owners showing up (top), looking like they had just won third place in the local heats of a 2014 Sadako look-alike contest. At least this has the grace to last barely seventy minutes, including the credits. So while it is basically a waste of the viewer’s time, it’s not a waste of very much of it. If you watch only one Japanese horror movie about haunted hair extensions this year… I strongly recommend skipping this one, and going with Exte instead.