ABOUT THE AUTHOR: When Frederick Burdsall isn’t at work or watching movies while covered in cats, you can find Fred in the front seat of Knoebels’ Phoenix. 

Noroi: The Curse is a 2005 film from Director Koji Shiraishi (Occult and Carved: The Slit Mouthed Woman) and stars Jin Muraki and Rio Kanno.

The story itself focuses on a documentary filmmaker named Kobayashi, who has recently vanished after his home went up in flames and his wife’s body is found among the rubble. He was working on a film about a demon named Kagutaba and the curse attached.

In a found footage style we see his investigation start with Junko Ishii whose neighbor hears crying babies coming from her house. Ishii moves and the neighbor and her daughter die soon in a car crash. He moves on to Kana, a young girl with incredible psychic ability who appeared on a TV show and has now vanished.

The trail leads him to a crazed psychic named Hori, who points them in the direction of an apartment complex and Osawa, a strange man who drags pigeons into his home for some unknown reason. Osawa soon goes missing.

A trip to a shrine leads him to the discovery of Kagutaba, a demon imprisoned under the village of Shimokage, now underwater.  I don’t want to spoil the surprises that come after all this so I’ll stop myself here but the movie courses along to a finale after the early closing credits, where the last piece of footage is revealed and is, to me, the best part of the movie. Immensely creepy and visual.  I leave it up to you to see it all for yourself and don’t let the iffy beginning ruin you to it…it will really pull you in if you let it.

Rio Kanno, who plays young Kana, got her start a few years earlier in the film Dark Water and is better known as the voice of Madge in Howl’s Moving Castle. This is one of those movies that you either love it or you don’t so watch and enjoy Noroi and as always, I’ll see you at Knoebels.

Hentai Family New Wife Nasty Attack is a great movie title but Semen Demon? That’s the kind of title that gets me watching whatever this is.

Reiko Yamaguchi, who was the star of the Wife Next Door films, has just gotten married and it seems like everyone in her new family is so possessed that they’re acting like Sonny and Patricia in Amityville II: The Possession.

What does it say about me when I do a week of Japanese movies and I could have featured Kurosawa, Imamura or Mizoguchi and instead, I’m writing about Semen Demon?

This movie does have something to say about the futility of war and how Japan’s soldier spirit faltered in the face of nuclear fire, but cursed its children to labor under archaic notions of sexual morals and now, even a simple home is cursed by a demon who demands that every man in the home becomes obsessed to the point of horrifying debauchery. Or maybe it’s just a Japanese AV movie that has a ghost couple doing it — proving the Donald Trump-starring movie Ghosts Can’t Do It incorrect — and has a woman who misses just how pent-up her husband and father-in-law once the problem is solved.

What’s wrong with me?

Following the events of The Prophecy: Uprising, Allison (Kari Wuhrer) continues his mission of protecting the book that writes itself, the Lexicon, as it predicts the war in Heaven and the name of the Antichrist.

Now, Stark (Tony Todd) is leading renegade angels called Thrones to get the book while Allison is assisted by Dylan (Jason Scott Lee, who played Bruce Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story), a killer who decides to not kill her and keep her safe.

Filmed at the same time as the last movie in Bucharest, Romania by director and writer Joel Soisson who would soon make a trilogy of Dracula movies for Dimension — also with Lee — the fifth Prophecy film is better than you’d think and if you miss Christopher Walken, at least you can appreciate the world-building and mythology that gets carried across five movies.

Compare that to how Hellraiser got treated and come back to these movies and let me know what you think.

There’s no Christopher Walken, but would you perhaps like Doug Bradley, Sean Pertwee, and Kari Wuhrer instead? No? Oh well…

Joel Soisson, who produced the last films in this series and wrote the third one, both wrote and directed this one. And much like every movie made in the 2000s that was a horror sequel, it was shot in Bucharest, Romania and made at the same time as the fifth movie in this series The Prophecy: Forsaken.

Theology student Allison (Wuhrer) has discovered The Lexicon, a mysterious book of prophecies that writes itself, including a brand new chapter of the Book of Revelation that will explain how the war between the angels comes to an end and who the Antichrist is. The demon Belial and the angel Simon both want to use the book for evil and good, so Belial kills people and steals their bodies while Simon starts to guide Allison by using her mental illness to speak directly to her, which is not something that works in a movie in 2021.

The thing I do enjoy about this movie is that it turns out that even Satan doesn’t like the black and white world of evil and good any longer. That makes sense and is very true to who the devil could be.

You may come into this movie upset that it changes so much, but in truth, it’s a good film. By comparison to the Hellraiser series and where that goes, this holds up well.

Based on a short story called “Dark Can’t Breathe” by Joel Soisson — check out our interview with him here — this Rick Bota-directed sequel is the first to have Lance Henriksen in it (he was originally going to play Frank in the first movie, but chose Near Dark instead*) and the last to have Doug Bradley as Pinhead.

This sequel gets meta as a group of young adults are obsessed with the game Hellworld which is based on the Hellraiser movies. One of their friends, Adam, goes full on Mazes and Monsters and kills himself after he gets way too involved.

Two years later, they’re invited by an invitation inside the game to come to an asylum once owned by Lament Configuration creator Philip Lemarchand. It turns into a slasher, as The Host (Henriksen), Pinhead and the Cennobites Chatterer and Bound wipe out most of the cast.

Much like most of the other Hellraiser sequels, this would be a fine low budget horror movie without the name Hellraiser. That term implies that we’re getting something special and sadly, this does not deliver on the promise. If it were just called Hellworld, I’d probably say it was a minor success.

*As it was, Henriksen was already in Romania making Mimic 3: Sentinel and Khary Payton was in another sequel made at the same time in the same country, Dracula II: Ascension. I mean it when I say that nearly all low budget horror in the 2000s came from this country.

Peter Briggs had written an unmade script for Freddy vs. Jason that was a hit with the studio, so he was hired to write this and he chose to ignore those two films above and just concentrate on the first four movies.

But oh yeah, this was a Dimension Film.

And you may have heard it before (Hellraiser: Inferno and Hellraiser: Hellseeker are other examples) that this wasn’t a Hellraiser movie.

That’s because the script that Biggs wrote would have been too expensive, so the studio picked up Neil Marshall Stevens’s spec script Deader and Bob Weinstein told Tim Day to rewrite that story into a Hellraiser sequel but you know, make it J-horror.

And to save even more money, it was filmed in Romania, where all 2000s horror came from, at the same time as Hellraiser: Hellworld.

Amy Klein (Kari Wuhrer) is a reporter sent on assignment to Bucharest. There, she’s to investigate the Deaders cult who engage in the ritual murder and reanimation of their members. She discovers the body of the girl who sent the tape as well as a Lament Configuration, which she opens in a dream and summons Pinhead.

It turns out that she’s been meant to come to the cult, as its leader — and Lament Configuration creator descendent — Winter LeMarchand can’t open the box himself. He has faith that he is destined to lead the Cenobites. He only needs someone who is so emotionally vulnerable and nihilistic that they will submit to dying and being brought back. That’s when he forces Amy to relive the abuse that her father put her through — as well as her killing him — before Winter puts her through the ritual.

Then Pinhead comes and hijinks ensue.

Man, this sounds so much better in words than it does in movie form.

Satan is a lustful lesbian rock chick out to seduce satanic rock star Belcebu — who asks his fans to kill themselves for him — with the promise of eternal life.

Sounds good? Well, Troma distributed this and I was ready to just shut the whole thing off, but as you may notice in other reviews, the last five minutes deliver the kind of Satanic orgy that you don’t often see outside of a Tim Vigil comic book.

IMDB lists this as a TV movie, but I have no idea how this played on TV with that ending that’s filled with crucifixions, blood, demon bats, a monstrous beast having doggy style sex while blazing with the hand cannons, an impalement and things blowing up real good.

There’s a lot to get through to get there, like I said, like the hard scrabble tale of Belcebu’s sex worker ex. Look, if you’re going to call your movie I’m Your Whore from Hell just get to that big blowoff quickly.

Yes, it’s another Full Moon remix — did they invent the remix or did Bad Boy? — in which several of their African-American themed movies all come together, get cut down to one-third of their length and don’t even get a wraparound or narrator to make sense of them all.

“Demonic Tunes” is The Horrible Dr. Bones, a movie in which the Urban Protectors discover that their music is being used to command an army of zombies by the titular Dr. Bones (Darrow Igus, The Fog). This was directed by Ted Nicolaou, who I would put on the good side of the Full Moon balance sheet thanks to movies like TerrorVision, Subspecies and Bad Channels.

“The Killing Kind” is better known as the 1999 Nicolaou film Ragdoll, which was also edited into another Full Moon remix movie called Devil Dolls, which has Doll Graveyard and Demonic Toys as the other segments. Man, a lot of companies have been talking about how they’re into being green and all about recycling, but Full Moon is actually doing it. Actually, this movie comes from their Alchemy Entertainment/Big City Pictures sub-line, because if Full Moon is about something instead of redoing things, they’re about sub-lines. Another of those would be Big City Records, a music label owned by Full Moon, which released the soundtrack, Ragdoll: Music Inspired By The Motion Picture. Diversification, people!

Finally, “Hidden Evil” is another Big City Pictures release, The Vault. Students and a teacher visit an abandoned school that was once a slave house and things go badly, as you can imagine when the supernatural gets involved. Director James Black has 144 acting roles on IMDB, but only made this one film. This one was developed for Band’s Empire Pictures as far back as 1989.

The second story is pretty decent and I think I may actually go back and watch Ragdoll to see how good it is at its full length. As for the rest, I feel like seeing a limited version may have been best for my sanity.

You can watch this on Tubi.