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The Asian film industry has a very interesting taste in movies. They either produce awesome action movies like Hard-Boiled (or any Johnnie To film) or they produce some of the strangest horror flicks that Hollywood decides to Americanize. The film Audition falls into the second category, which means Hollywood is bound to make an American version of this movie sometime soon.

Audition is an adaptation of a novel with the same title by Ryu Murakami. The story follows a man named Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi). Aoyama is a middle-aged widower (according to the story, his wife died of an illness seven years ago), who is urged by his teenage son (Tetsu Sawaki) to find a new wife and start getting laid again… his theory being that his father would be happy again. Anyway, one day while at a bar, Aoyama tells his friend about what his son said. His friend, who is a film producer, laughs at him at first but then he starts to think that it’s a great idea and decides that the two of them are going to hold an audition to find Aoyama a new lady. During the process of narrowing down the likely candidates, Aoyama falls for a 24-year-old woman by the name of Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina). Everything seems to be going well until we find out that Asami was abused as a little girl and the fact that she lives in a small apartment with nothing but a phone and a sack that obviously has something inside of it. I won’t go into more because I’d spoil it for you. Just note that if you’ve seen Bravo’s Top 100 Scariest Moments, you know what’s in that sack already.

As far as the movie goes, personally, I think it’s overrated and I don’t understand why Rob Zombie finds the movie to be disturbing or why Eli Roth praises the movie. In my opinion, the film has many flaws. The first flaw being that the pacing feels way off. The movie is a little under 2 hours and it takes forty minutes (forty boring minutes) before something “scary” actually happens. After that “scary” moment, the movie reverts back to its boring pace until it finally picks up for the final act, but this is also a problem because once it gets to this point, the movie feels rushed and seems like the writers couldn’t think of anything else to do and just decided to wrap it up. The second flaw is with the editing of the movie. For some reason, there are scenes between Asami and Aoyama where the scene has a bunch of jump cuts in it. Now, I can understand why they would do that at the beginning during the auditions, but when it was just scenes between those two, it made no sense. The final flaw with this movie is that the movie isn’t scary. Granted it probably would have had a nice little scare if I hadn’t seen that Top 100 list but I doubt it.

Overall, Audition is an overrated horror movie. It’s praised by a lot of people out there but, in this cynic’s opinion, the movie is only mediocre. However, there are some scenes in the movie that are brutal and those scenes save this movie from being a complete waste of time.

Final Synopsis: The brutality is the best part of the movie. Other than that, it’s a mediocre horror movie that doesn’t have anything really scary to it.

Points Lost: -1 for pacing problems, -1 for not being scary, -1 for being boring for a majority of the film, -1 for some bad editing, -1 for dull writing.
Lesson Learned: If your son tries to give you pointers on your love life… punch him in the face.

Burning Question: How come this guy didn’t know that the quiet chicks are usually the freaky ones?

Audition
5/10

Tags: 1999, adaptation, Eihi Shiina, horror, Jun Kunimura, latest movie review, recent, ryo ishibashi, takashi miike, Tetsu Sawaki