Audition (1999)

  I was so looking forward to this movie.  I had heard it was the bee's-knees as far as Japanese horror goes.  What a disappointment.

Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is a widower with a son about to move out.  He decides that he should get remarried but isn't sure how to meet girls.  His friend Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura) is a movie producer with a great idea:  hold an audition for a fake movie.  At the auditions, Aoyama sees a girl he likes.  She's young, beautiful, modest, and talented, having studied classical ballet for twelve years before a hip injury ruined her dreams.  They begin to date, despite his friend's warning that her background doesn't quite check out.  Soon, he proposes, but the night after, she disappears.  Despondent, Aoyama searches for her but only finds one creepy thing after another.  Reality and memory blur a bit as he reflects back on the conversations they had, until she shows up at his house, drugs him, and saws off his foot with piano wire.

Men, this is why you shouldn't lie when you're trying to pick up women.

There's surprisingly little gore in the movie and only one scene that made me jump.  See, the girl keeps a big burlap sack in her apartment.  Every once in a while...well, you'll have to see for yourself.

Honestly, just seeing the sack and not knowing what was inside it was much more suspenseful than when it gets opened up.  Although, that scene had its own pitfalls.  It's been a long time since I've seen something in a movie that actually made me want to throw up, but I wouldn't call that horror.  Oldboy was much worse in terms of violence, suspense, and fucked-upness.  Now there was a movie that reveled in its own weirdness.  This one could have been so much more.