The J-Horror fondness for making us afraid of the sight of long, black hair has reached its zenith this year with two movies in which the hair itself (rather than the ashen faced ghoul it’s attached to) represents the major threat. South Korea’s THE WIG was a surprisingly somber take on outlandish, borderline-spoofy material, but EXTE is as bizarre and tonally wild as you might expect when the director of SUICIDE CLUB makes a movie about malevolent hair extensions.
Opening with the memorable line “My nose hair’s out of control lately”, the movie veers recklessly from surrealistic horror (with some of the most elaborate images resembling the more outlandish nightmare visions of the ELM STREET franchise in the 80s) to goofy humor to a grim child abuse sub-plot involving the heroine’s troubled niece. While the latter element does yield an excellent child performance and gives us an evil older sister character to despise, it also helps elongate the film’s excessive running time to almost two hours. That’s more time than a movie about killer hair extensions really should occupy…though under director Sion Sono’s command, this is still an impressively deranged ride.
It opens at a Japanese harbor, where cops open up a cargo container and discover lots and lots and lots of hair…in addition to the female victim of an organ-harvesting ring. Her hair has carried on growing, it seems, to a supernatural degree after death. Cut to appealing young trainee hair stylist Chiaki Kuriyama (already something of a cult icon thanks to stand-out turns in BATTLE ROYALE and KILL BILL VOLUME ONE), who lives in a nearby coastal town with her dancer roommate and works at the ominously named Gilles De Rais salon. (De Rais, of course, was the infamous 15th century French mass-murderer and alleged occultist). In an offbeat touch, at the outset of the picture, Kuriyama has a habit of talking in over-explanatory dialogue like she’s constantly narrating – and continues to do so even when alone!
Deranged hair-sniffing fetishist and some time coroner Ren Osugi is drawn to the corpse from the cargo container and takes the body home with the intention of using the dead girl’s remarkable, constantly sprouting hair to sell to the local salons for extensions. This dude – signature line “I’m going to fill this world with lovely hair!” – is unaware that the hair is cursed via a fairly standard Asian horror movie back-story, and bad shit goes down.
While Kuriyama is as cute as ever, this movie is well and truly hijacked by Osugi, maniacally entertaining as a lunatic who collects dead hair, talks to cadavers and often gets the word “bitches” mixed up with the word “women”. Osugi plays it to the hilt and energises the story whenever the pacing seems to flag. He also prominently figures in the eccentric denouement, ranting cheerfully “Now I’m happy…bound together by hair” as he drives with the kidnapped heroine and her niece in a car swathed with possessed hair. It’s his performance and character that tips a potentially serious movie over into outright comedy at times, notably at the very end, when he gets overcome by his beloved hair (“It hurts – but in a good way!”) during a scene that’s capped by a marvelous sight gag.
Like the recent THE WIG, EXTE has recurring imagery of living, evil CG hair, though tends to lose its sense of menace whenever the digital hair flows to extreme lengths. Nonetheless, Sono transcends the one note absurdity of the premise with a fine line in unnerving imagery : there are striking moments of spiky black hair emerging from a cadaver’s chest cavity, and, throughout, of hair protruding creepily from tongues, feet, legs, et al. One oddly disturbing moment involves a woman pulling a seemingly endless strand from her eyeball and her fingernails.
In a stand-out sequence, and one of the odder genre scenes of the year, Sono focuses at length on the terrorization of a lone woman and takes the sequence to vaguely Giger-ish levels of surrealism as the victim is suspended in mid-air by outrageously long, spider-web-like strands of evil hair that almost threaten to rip off her scalp. For such moments, this beguiling combination of camp humor, downbeat social drama and idiosyncratic physical horror is worth staying with.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
