A successful model is aging, and she does everything she can to stay beautiful. However, after undergoing too many cosmetic surgeries, her face and body begin to betray her, and a new rival emerges, stealing all the spotlight. Is this the beginning of the end?

On paper, Helter Skelter seems interesting, but at 126 minutes, the runtime is far too long. The script lacks the substance to justify such a prolonged duration. This movie should have been 50 minutes long—that would have been perfect for its stylish approach.

The protagonist is a terrible person, rotten on the inside. The only thing she cares about is herself and her looks; everyone else she treats like trash. Then one day, she discovers dark spots on her skin, and it turns out she is not just rotten on the inside—the model is a demon from hell, rotting on the outside as well.

The clinic she uses for her surgeries is shady, and a prosecutor is determined to take down its owner. But he needs help, and he has targeted the protagonist.

Helter Skelter is engaging for the first 45 minutes, but after that, it becomes boring and repetitive. It’s exhausting to follow a protagonist who has no soul. The other characters are dull, and they all seem cartoonish—as if they belong in a comic. Yes, the movie is based on a manga, which might explain the silly tone and exaggerated characters. We are not following ordinary humans in Helter Skelter.

The most intriguing aspect is observing the protagonist and her lifestyle, seeing what she does to stay on top. She is lonely, selfish, and rude, believing she owns the world and that the spotlight will always shine on her, making her immortal. She is determined to remain number one at any cost, but she hides secrets in her dark closet that the world is not ready to see. Is she a fake? Or is she the real one?

The movie is colorful, but the characters are tiresome. Some sex scenes are unappealing, especially those involving the protagonist’s assistant, who looks like a man. By this point, it becomes clear that Helter Skelter is more fantasy than reality.

Helter Skelter is a bad and boring movie that lacks substance. Its only redeeming feature is the cinematography—it’s vibrant, with quick cuts reminiscent of Requiem for a Dream. But I wanted more substance. I wanted to follow real humans, not cartoonish caricatures.

The model business is fascinating, full of things happening behind the scenes that rarely see the light of day. Unfortunately, Helter Skelter fails to reveal anything new or insightful. It’s all style and no substance, resulting in a dull movie experience.

My recommendation: skip this movie and watch The Neon Demon (2016) instead. While I wasn’t a huge fan of that movie either, Nicolas Winding Refn proves to be a far better storyteller. Oh, and I almost forgot—The Substance (2024) is really good in this genre, exploring aging and the obsession with staying young and beautiful forever.

Rating: 2/10

Innlegget Helter Skelter (2012) – English Review dukket først opp på Not Only Hollywood.

She’s having a rough day!

Innlegget Tumbling Doll of Flesh (1998): Full-length movie commentary and review in English dukket først opp på Not Only Hollywood.

That body!

A welfare worker tries to help a mentally challenged woman who lived with her father, but one day the father dies, and the welfare worker takes the mentally challenged woman to a place where she can live with other mentally challenged people. But the problem is that the man who is running the place is a pervert, and he loses his mind if he sees women dressed in red. So you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?

I have heard a lot of good things about Red to Kill, and I was expecting a lot since this was supposed to be a filthy and disgusting Category III movie.

But I was in shock when the movie was over. This was so disappointing for a pervert like me, and the only thing I could enjoy was watching Lily Chung and her fantastic 10-out-of-10 body. She has the perfect body for a woman, and oh my. But if you have watched her in the sick and perverted Daughter of Darkness, you will be so disappointed if you think Red to Kill will be as dark as that movie.

Red to Kill has some positive elements. For the most part, the acting is good, especially the creepy pervert who walks around with his muscular body and does some crazy things.

The problem is that you expect this to be a movie where you can enjoy beautiful women, but if you think this is a movie that focuses on a crazy man doing bad things to women all the time, then you will be sorely disappointed. There are just a few sex scenes, and both of the sex scenes I remember are the same. The creepy pervert lasts only 15 seconds—except for one extended scene. So he is such a disappointment as a man, but at the same time, I can sort of understand him when he’s enjoying himself with Lily Chung. I think I would have lasted two seconds. And I didn’t say that! It wasn’t my voice!

The cinematography is also good, and the camera work is solid. So there are a lot of positive things here, but I’m not here to watch beautiful cinematography—I’m here to watch beautiful naked women. But the problem is that we see too much of the protagonist and his muscular body and disgusting butt crack. So you know that this movie was made in the ‘90s.

In fact, Red to Kill has some social commentary about the neighbors who hate that mentally challenged people are living in their neighborhood. So they will blame the mentally challenged people if something goes wrong, so you, of course, hate the neighbors. So you hope that the crazy perverted man will teach them a hard lesson that will last longer than 15 seconds.

And since this is a dark Hong Kong Category III movie, the ending is just perfect. The ending is such a tease and so cruel—which I, of course, like.

But in the end, Red to Kill was a huge disappointment for me since I expected to watch a filthy, dirty, perverted movie with a lot of erotic scenes, and in that department, Red to Kill was a huge disappointment. But at least we can enjoy the body of the perfect 10 body, Lily Chung.

Rating: 4/10

Innlegget Red to Kill (1994) – English Review dukket først opp på Not Only Hollywood.

A boy bullies a deaf girl at school, but then the tide turns, and he becomes the one who’s bullied and frozen out because of what he did to her. The girl transferred to a new school because of the bullying. Now he’s miserable, starting to understand what he put her through as he experiences his own personal hell. Eventually, he tries to find her to make things right.

It’s so nice to sit down and watch a movie with a great and tender story to tell. A Silent Voice is one of those movies that really captivated me with the emotions it creates. It plays on every string of the emotional guitar.

The protagonist isn’t very likable at first. He bullies a deaf girl who’s done absolutely nothing wrong to him or anyone else. His group of friends follows his lead, but they’re not as bad as he is. He’s pretty messed up in the head to bully someone with a disability, and he definitely deserves the karma that comes his way. At the same time, it’s hard to fully understand him because he has a caring mother, so it doesn’t seem like he comes from a bad home, meaning he can’t really use that as an excuse.

It’s easier to understand the deaf girl and why she’s depressed. I felt so sorry for her when she received bad news, and you realize what happened as she starts using only one hearing aid instead of two. As mentioned, she doesn’t do much wrong at all, but she ends up angering another girl who used to be close friends with the protagonist. That girl blames the deaf girl for ruining their friendship and causing their group to fall apart. She comes across as a bit unstable and cheap.

The protagonist later tries to reconnect with the deaf girl after she transfers to a new school. He also attempts to reunite with his old group of friends, hoping they can become close again. He’s completely alone in the world after being ostracized and bullied himself, and he can’t even look people in the eye anymore. That’s visualized cleverly; the people around him have Xs covering their faces, and those Xs fall away when he finally makes a connection with someone.

Speaking of “cheap,” there are some weirdly creepy Japanese moments here. The camera tends to linger on women’s legs a lot. Normally, I wouldn’t mind, but this is an animated movie, and yeah, it feels kind of creepy. And no, I don’t get turned on by animated feet, you sick pervert!

Ultimately, this is a movie about not giving up and trying to become a better person, and that message really works in A Silent Voice. After karma hits him hard, you see the protagonist genuinely trying to change, and you start to feel sympathy for him. You hope people can give him a second chance because he’s sincere about improving himself.

The characters we follow are flawed, but that’s what makes them relatable, even though there are some you never get deep under the skin of. But that’s okay, because it’s the feeling you’re left with that matters most during and after watching this movie.

It’s a story that ultimately gives you hope, that even if you’re alone in the world, you can learn from your mistakes, man up, and take responsibility for your wrongdoings. And that’s where A Silent Voice truly excels.

Rating: 9/10

Innlegget A Silent Voice: The Movie (2016) – English Review dukket først opp på Not Only Hollywood.

Don’t play with karma!

In Karma, we follow selected characters who will get a visit from karma. Most of the characters we follow are bad people, and you hope that they will die and burn in hell and all that stuff. Most of the characters that die in Karma have a connection, and there is just one central character who is innocent. She is a doctor who experienced something awful that scarred her for the rest of her life. When a new patient arrives who is badly burned, she sees her chance to get revenge. But is she prepared to face the consequences?

Karma is a short miniseries that consists of six episodes. I would call Karma a slow-burning series even though it has just six episodes. The series is entertaining, but it’s hard to be completely engaged when you follow, for the most part, bad people. At the same time, since this is a Netflix series, I have to say that South Korean Netflix movies and TV series give me a bad taste in my mouth, because they should stick to their own side of the world and not pollute my favorite entertainment countries with their political nonsense for the insane people in the West. I don’t expect to experience that genuine South Korean feeling when watching a series with the Netflix stamp on it.

And yes, I can’t say that this feels like a 100% real South Korean TV series. There is something about how the characters are written and how few episodes there are. The characters are never fleshed out, and to be honest, most of them feel too much alike. I wasn’t that impressed by the acting either, and I never felt that any of the actors except Shin Min-a were any good.

In the end, Karma has too much repetition for my taste. The universe is small and dark, and the characters are unlikable. The first few episodes reminded me of the black humor that the Coen brothers are known for. But after those episodes, Karma feels too repetitive, and the pacing is, for my taste, too slow.

Rating: 6/10

Innlegget Karma (2025) – English Review dukket først opp på Not Only Hollywood.

The Japanese have made three movies based on the Junk Furuta murder case that shook the nation and the entire world. So today I’m going to rank the three movies they have made about this case.

So I’m going to start from the bottom and work my way to the top.

3. Juvenile Crime

Juvenile Crime is directed by a sleazy and provocative director. He is most known for his All Night Long movie series, which has two good movies out of the six. He made some of these movies before he made Juvenile Crime, and he is a pretty nasty and childish director. I lost all respect for him after he made Juvenile Crime.

Juvenile Crime isn’t much of a movie. It’s a short movie, and the character that is supposed to be Junko Furuta shows up on a bicycle when the movie has already spent almost half the runtime on the perpetrators, where they do bad things to people, especially women. When this so-called Junko Furuta shows up on her bicycle, you get the impression she has spent some quality time with the bicycle seat, if you catch my drift.

What this movie mostly focuses on is sex scenes and nothing more. After watching this movie a couple of times, I also believe that it must be a real adult movie because of how they have shot some of the sex scenes and the way the camera is angled. I’m not sure about that, but to me it looks like this is a real adult movie, and you know I’m an expert at that, right?

The actors stink, and the actress playing Junko Furuta looks like she is having a blast with the guys, smiling and laughing in some scenes, so you should understand that you can’t take this piece of filth seriously. The same goes for the opening scene, where a woman is laughing while playing tag with the three guys. What she is laughing about is up to your imagination. But I can say that the perpetrators aren’t good-looking guys, so maybe she had to imagine having fun with Brad Pitt or something like that, because they are hard on the eyes. These three are mirror breakers.

2. Concrete Encased High School Murder Case

This feels almost like a real movie, but it isn’t that interesting because it lacks subtitles, and the movie has a TV host who talks a lot, and he loves his own voice. He just hugs the spotlight and keeps on talking like a TV crime episode.  

But the actors in Concrete Encased High School Murder Case aren’t that great. They are kind of goofy, and the only highlight is the actress playing Junko Furuta, who is the best actress of them all playing this character if you compare the actresses in the three movies.

The violence in the movie is more realistic than the violence in Juvenile Crime, so I have to give the movie that. But I have never loved that true crime feeling of this movie because it should have used the time it spends on that stupid host on the characters and given them more depth. Why didn’t they kick this jerk out of the studio and the movie?

1. Concrete

The best movie of these three movies is Concrete. It had the biggest potential, and in the start, it also feels more mature than the other movies since it tries to give the leader of the perpetrators some layers as a character, where we follow him and see what type of people he hangs around with. But even if he tries to become a part of society and act like a real man, deep inside, you know that he is spineless and he will always be a loser. But he has a hot girlfriend, though, hot and stupid. It can’t get any better than that!

When it comes to Junko Furuta in this movie, the actress is way too apathetic. She doesn’t sell the injuries and what she’s going through that well. In fact, she sucks at selling anything, so that becomes a huge problem. The movie also tries to make us care about her more than the other movies since we see some flashbacks to her past and her parents, but those scenes are lazily executed.

But the last scene with the victim, Junko Furuta, leaves an impression compared to the other two movies, which fall flat because of the injuries we see on the face and body of Junko Furuta when she takes her last breath. So this movie spent more money on making the injuries look more real than the other two movies.

Out of the three movies, Concrete is clearly the best movie that at least tries to give the leader of the perpetrators layers as a character. And you can also tell that it has a bigger budget than the two other movies. It has more class, if that is the right word. Even though it’s a weak movie, I have always meant that a movie about Junko Furuta should have been about her life, who she was as a person, and the aftermath.

Innlegget Ranking the movies based on the Junko Furuta case (newest ranking) dukket først opp på Not Only Hollywood.

The angry, smiling man is coming.

A selfish journalist who’s willing to sacrifice a normal family for her career destroys a man’s life after she gets a tip that he may have killed a well-known lawyer. The angry man smiles a big smile in the video someone gave to her, which makes him appear guilty! This man is angry at her and starts stalking her. But she won’t go down that easily! It’s the sacrificer against the angry, smiling man!

“The Frame” is an entertaining movie featuring a terrible human being who is willing to say farewell to her child for the sake of her career. She is a despicable human being, and I was hoping something terrible would happen to her and that her life would be destroyed. She is a rotten and selfish fish!

She works as a journalist, and she is contacted by a man who gives her a VHS tape showing a man following a lawyer who was shortly after killed. She identifies the man, and they make a news piece about it and broadcast it. After that, the man loses everything. He gets angry and starts stalking and harassing the journalist. Poor, innocent woman. She is the victim since she’s a woman, you know. That’s politically correct in these times when people are insane and spineless. So, poor, poor woman.

Then the journalist has second thoughts, wondering if she was played by the man who gave her the VHS tape. She can’t let the journalist inside her rest, so she tries to dig deeper while the angry man stalks and harasses her. But even though she is a woman, she is willing to fight back, and it turns out that maybe the angry, smiling man isn’t the only one who has lost his marbles. It’s time for the duel of the cameras!

The movie has some tense scenes, like when the angry man starts running after the journalist while she’s trying to escape on her bicycle. That scene is pretty cool and suspenseful since the angry man has been lurking around the building where she works all day long. Is this man guilty because he smiled in the video after a man died, or is he innocent and just insane?

The ending is perfect, and I loved it. I can’t say more than that, but it was perfectly executed.

I enjoyed “The Frame”. I don’t think many have heard of it, but if you like smaller crime-thrillers, this is worth a watch. However, it’s also a movie that won’t give you many answers to the mystery. The main focus of the movie is the duel between the journalist and the angry, smiling man who loves to hate each other as they do everything to destroy each other’s lives. Who will win?

Rating: 7/10

Innlegget The Frame (2000) – English Review dukket først opp på Not Only Hollywood.

Two brothers, one a lawyer and the other a doctor, have different moral and ethical values. But their values are put to the test when their two children do something bad that can hurt their future.

A Normal Family has my favorite South Korean actor, and one of my favorite actors of all time, Sol Kyung-gu, in the lead role, together with an old favorite of mine, Dong Jang-gun. But he made some bad choices when he was at the top and starred in some blockbuster failures. But it was nice to see him again, and he is pretty solid in A Normal Family, though he is nowhere near as good as South Korea’s best actors, together with my favorite forehead, Jeon Do-jeun.

The movie is generally good until the last fifteen minutes, which are predictable and disappointing. Before that, we follow the two brothers, and we see how different they are, since one is a lawyer who represents Satan, while the other is a doctor who represents Jesus. But then their two kids do something horrible, and they must figure out what they are going to do, and things get interesting, because it seems like they are switching sides. Suddenly, the lawyer represents Jesus while the doctor represents Satan, and it’s no wonder he starts representing Satan since his wife must be Satan. I hated that bitch. She’s an insane old hag who is really old. I just wanted someone to end her. What a terrible loser of an old hag she is. She can’t even take care of her son, because she is useless and jealous of the beautiful wife of the lawyer. Talk about low self-esteem. Old hag!

Their two kids hang out together. The son of the doctor is a bully victim, and he looks like a vegetable, and he has a punchable face, so it’s no wonder people want to punch him. He is such a loser, like his old hag of a mother, and you won’t feel sorry for this Satan’s spawn. The daughter of the lawyer is your usual party kid who has that attitude that she is better than everyone else, because her father is a famous lawyer.

As mentioned, the last fifteen minutes of the movie are terrible. I’m not sure what happened to the script, but it feels rushed, and I just couldn’t buy that the two children are such monsters. It felt a little forced, but I guess the message is that when you have parents who really don’t care about you, and you live in a society with high pressure, things can turn out wrong. But in the end, I felt that A Normal Family took it too far, and not to mention the last “shocking” scene, which isn’t shocking when you see the opening of the movie, and you know what will happen. So the ending is a total failure.

A Normal Family has something to say about the society we live in, with high pressure and absent parents, and that your moral values may change if you have to protect someone you care about. The movie is interesting until the ending, which ruins a lot, and we are left with an unsatisfying ending, which is pretty ridiculous.

Rating: 6/10

Innlegget A Normal Family (2023) – English Review dukket først opp på Not Only Hollywood.

Susie, do you know anything about… witches?

An American woman travels to Germany to study at a dance academy. What she doesn’t know is that it’s run by witches. And they are evil witches.

The first 15 and the last 15 minutes are some of the best I’ve seen in any movie, in any genre. There are two things I’m going to remember from Suspiria. The way colors and light are used, and the score Goblin made. It’s wild to see how detailed and controlled the light and colors are in Suspiria.
Every time I watch Suspiria, I sit with my mouth open and just stare at the screen, taking in the incredible atmosphere during the first 15 minutes. Everything is so carefully planned, and the first murder is the perfect closure to the fantastic opening sequence. I can say the same about the ending. It’s fantastic.

But there’s a big problem with Suspiria. It’s brilliant for a total of 30 minutes. The rest of the movie is mediocre. Not much happens, and some scenes become involuntarily funny, especially the blind man and his guide dog. I’ve always hated the long scene with this annoying character, which I feel kills a lot of the pace.

The acting performances are uneven. But that has always been part of the charm with these movies. Some actors are more annoying than others, so that’s something we just have to live with.

There are a few murders, and only the first one impresses. The third murder is so bad, especially when a woman completely freaks out. She doesn’t block the door, and she’s terrified when she jumps into a pool of steel wire. It’s not barbed wire. It’s ordinary steel wire. Dario Argento should never have included this stupid scene. I understand what he’s going for, but he should have used barbed wire. Jackie Chan would have used real barbed wire. The entire scene feels out of place. Again, I know what Dario Argento is going for.

The story is pretty bad, and there’s not much point to the empty story Suspiria tells. It’s the visual style, the score, and the atmosphere that are the experience. The story stinks for the most part. There’s a lot of weird stuff going on here, so I have to agree with those who say this is a nightmare. One shouldn’t think too much when watching Suspiria. Just enjoy the visuals and the fantastic score by Goblin.

To give Suspiria an 8/10, based on 30 minutes, is something I have never done before. And I don’t think it will happen again.

Rating: 8/10

Innlegget Suspiria (1977) – English Review dukket først opp på Not Only Hollywood.

She is lonely, and she needs a friend.

Innlegget Tokyo Decadence (1992): Full-length movie commentary and review dukket først opp på Not Only Hollywood.