Dark Water – J-Horror at its best

Dark Water is a Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata and released in 2002. Its Japanese title is “Honogurai mizu no soko kara”
I borrowed the film from Stanton library and it looked like an interesting modern Japanese film. I watched the film by myself with the headphones on, and I haven’t been so scared [...]

Loop – Koji Suzuki (final book of the Ring trilogy)

This is the third book in the Ring trilogy. In the first book, Ring, the videotape was the vendetta of Sadako, a tragic girl who could not be sated with simple revenge. In the sequel Spiral, a mutating virus displaced the tape and came to threaten the entire diversity of life.
This third book is quite [...]

Spiral – by Koji Suzuki

Spiral by Koji Suzuki. Originally published in Japan as Rasen in 1995. English translation copyright 2004. Spiral is the second part of the Ring trilogy of novels by Koji Suzuki.
The story starts with Mitsuo Ando, a doctor who is performing an autopsy on the body of Professor Ryuji Takayama who had died of a sudden [...]

Ring – the novel

Ring by Koji Suzuki
Translated by Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Wally
(Originally published in Japan as Ringu in 1991.)
My motivation for reading this book was seeing the film Ring (released in 1998) directed by Hideo Nakata.
Notes from the book dust-jacket: Kazuyaki Asakawa is a dedicated journalist who has worked his way up from local newsbeat reporter [...]

Sandwich Board Spelling

I had a chuckle reading this sandwich board in the streets of North Sydney. There were sufficient spelling mistakes to warrant taking a photograph with my camera phone.
I wonder if the signwriter couldn’t spell, or was his customer spelling-challenged as well?
How many mistakes can you see?
News Papers should be one word, newspapers.
Smokes is a colloquial [...]

One Day in September – Book Review

After seeing the film of the same name, I wanted to learn more about the events of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The film focused on the kidnapping and the Germans’ abortive attempts at freeing the hostages.
The book by Simon Reeve, journalist, writer and author of “The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden [...]

One Day in September – Movie

I borrowed the DVD of “One Day in September” from the local library. The subject of this documentary (released in 1999) is the kidnapping and later murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic games.
I was 14 years old at the time of the events and my strongest memory is the image of a [...]