TRAILERS AHOY!

Trailers are everywhere today!

John Williams, a Welshman who directs Japanese movies, has a new flick, STARFISH HOTEL, coming out and the trailer looks gorgeous. The synopsis sounds like a Haruki Murakami novel, and the billowing red drapes look like TWIN PEAKS, and there is a disconcerting glimpse of that DONNIE DARKO bunny, but it's got a lush spookiness all its own. And, of course, Akira Emoto.
(View the trailer)
(read the synopsis)

Twitch has posted a nice teaser trailer for Kiyoshi Kurosawa's RETRIBUTION and although I swore that I'd never watch another Asian horror movie featuring a dead girl with long black hair, let alone a Japanese horror movie featuring a dead girl with long black hair, this looks really good. And it's Kiyoshi Kurosawa who's never been one to just recycle the same-old, same-old. It's playing NYC soon.

And finally, THE HOST, has debuted a new trailer over at MSN. Compare it to the original trailer and you can see that they're really trying to zoom in on a way to make this movie work for American audiences. No Korean dialogue in the second trailer, hardly any reveals of the monster, and they place it firmly in the foreign arthouse movie camp with its shots of family fun and goofy Italian seaside music at the start. It's certainly a more interesting trailer and it feels far truer to the movie. Let's see if it pays off on March 9 when THE HOST opens. There's a lot riding on how THE HOST does - if it flops or underperforms I think you're going to see a lot less interest in Asian genre movies being picked up for distribution for a while, and that would be a real shame.