EXTE ~Hair extensions~ (2007)

Country: Japan

Format: movie

Genre: horror
Cast: Kuriyama Chiaki, Osugi Ren, Sato Megumi, Tsugumi, Sato Miku, Machimoto Eri,
Synopsis: One day a woman's corpse is found from a port in a container full of human hair. Having defined that the victim has had her organs harvested for a black market, the corpse goes missing from the morgue as the morgue keeper takes the corpse home in order to make hair extensions as from the revenge for the world, its hair is still growing. Meanwhile, Yuko is practicing to become hairstylist in a local hair salon. Once the hair extensions are attached to a person, the corpse is ready to kill it.
Rating: 1/5
First of all, I would not say it is exactly horror movie, but it is disturbing and sick. Despite making pauses while watching it, I felt like puking most of the time. In addition, as you can see you can make a horror movie out of everything.

It is surprising that Yuko is learning to because hairstylist already for two years. In my country the study usually is just 1 year. She is left beside from the training and seems like she is more of a administrator or cleaning lady there. They also bring in a story about abortion that is mentioned just once and then it is forgotten like nothing was mentioned. I do not like these kind of things, because they do not have any connection to the main storyline. I guess it is pointless to ask if Kuriyama Chiaki was the right choice for it or not - she does have one of the best hair from Japanese actresses and this long black natural hair is her brand look. I guess the second option would have been Kuroki Meisa, but Kuriyama's acting is better and she looks a bit more suitable for horror movie.

Her older sister Kiyomi is a drunk woman how steals stuff and abuses her daughter. She has no family feelings and uses Yuko as she wants. For a moment she gave me a feeling that she abused Yuko also when she was younger, but then again it seemed that they never lived together and she had a totally different childhood than Yuko. In a way her daughter Mami loves her, though half of this love is more pure fear in front of her. This fear makes her obey mother's orders. In many moments I thought that it would be just easier to go to police about Kiyomi and legally take the kid away, but the story had its own way how to deal with her.

The main guy is Gunji Yamazaki who has extreme hair fetish that leads to even stealing a corpse from the morgue and going around the city in search of beautiful hair. In his mind, only beautiful hair is natural hair that has been taken care of. During these years it was common for Japanese women to dye their hair and have hairstyle that I like to call "ragged squirrel". Yamazaki is creepy and looks like a pedophile. I think that it is actually right to say that he just does not have an extreme fetish, but he has a huge mental disorder.

The whole idea about the horror movie was the growing popularity of hair extensions in Japan. In a way I understand it as for real natural hair, you actually do not know who was the rightful owner of the hair or how it ended up as hair extension. I have seen some documentaries about hair extension industry and some take away all the desire to ever put hair extensions. At the same time, I really appreciate when hair is donated to make wigs for cancer survivors.

The overall story is very slow-paced and the real action starts just in the middle of the movie. There are a lot of things that do not make sense even on the best try and as I said, it was just extremely disturbing movie. It is not easy to make a quality horror movie without going over the limit when it gets stupid. This movie was sitting on my watch-list for years and it ended up there just because of my sister..