The Secret of Sinchanee

The Secret Of Sinchanee (2021)

Dir. and written by Steven Grayhm

Starring Steven Grayhm, Tamara Austin, Nate Boyer

 

I watched THE SECRET OF SINCHANEE as a Hail-Mary style random Tubi pick, based entirely on "hey, looks like there's some kind of monster or a giant bird or something on the poster." I knew nothing about it, had no reason to assume it was good, and much reason to assume it was probably garbage. Inadvisable, certainly; self-destructive, probably. But it is the kind of utter recklessness which is my legal right during Half-O-Ween, that magical time of the year when you can watch stuff you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole even in October.

And despite the consistent level of shocking doggerel that I post about here, there are movies even I wouldn’t bother with, and this would normally be one of them. It belongs to a broad category of about nine hundred million indie horror flicks which were seemingly released direct to the internet without a word starting in the late ‘naughts. They all look reasonably professional --mostly since cameras and sound equipment have evolved so much that it doesn't take a tremendous amount of skill to shoot a movie which looks basically competent-- they all have perfectly professional acting…* and not one of them has anything even the least bit interesting in it. Unlike the raucous, anything-goes zero-budget hokum of yesteryear, they feel respectable and responsible and crisply professional, movies that were made at the behest of career councilors, rather than fevered nightmares forced onto the screen by delusion madmen with delusions of grandeur. All of them, I assume, were cranked out by the self-reinforcing cycle whereby streaming services require content --a volume business wherein it doesn't particularly matter what content-- and consequently there's always money available for a first-time filmmaker looking to pad their resume to crank out a bland, mercenary horror flick about whatever, just to prove they can handle bringing a shoot in on time and under budget, and hopefully use it as a springboard to move on to more interesting things. You sell the result to Netflix or Tubi or somebody who buys 'em in bulk, sight-unseen, then they slap a generic title like THE UNDERNEATH or DEMON HOUSE or something on the cover along with a gloomy-looking picture of a scared lady cowering in an all-grey abandoned house, and presto, chango, content has been created. An algorithm has been fed. And there it is popping up when you search for "horror" on Tubi, adding quantity but no actual value to your lengthy selection process. Unless, of course, you take the plunge and just click anyway, at which point, well, you can't say they didn't warn you.

THE SECRET OF SINCHANEE doesn't exactly buck the stereotype, but it does feel at least a little more committed than I was expecting. Far from a mercenary effort to churn out content, it's almost a vanity project, a showpiece for producer-writer-director-star Steven Grayhm ("Russ -- Party Boy" in WHITE CHICKS), one of those longtime working actors who has had a perfectly successful 20-year career without ever quite hitting the big times. The surprise here is that his big Orson Welles moment reveals him to be a more-than-capable director, producing something with an unflashy but effective atmosphere, generally strong performances, and steady, intentional pace. It has an old-fashioned vibe, a serious-minded movie for adults without being pretentious or insisting it's about anything other than the pleasure of a good spooky story. With its snowy New England milieu (the lived-in, real-world locations help immensely to give it some weight and texture) and stately, slow-burning paranoid vibe, it kind of reminds me of a low-concept X-Files monster-of-the-week episode, which I consider a good thing. Or of the recent, grievously under-valued THE EMPTY MAN.

Unfortunately, the sturdy direction ends up being in service of a script that never takes off. The plot is one of those simultaneously undernourished and overbuilt things which can be summed up in a single sentence, or summed up in five paragraphs, and nothing in-between will quite work. Suffice to say, then, that it’s about this dude Will Stark (Grayhm, solid enough in a role which mostly just requires him to silently look uneasy) who is forced to move into his recently-deceased fathers’ house, and quickly begins to get mind whammy’d by the sinister forces which were also presumably behind a horrific tragedy from his youth. Grayhm approaches this bedrock-simple setup with a bizarre, almost lackadaisical indirectness, however. The movie maintains a holding pattern, circling becoming a possession movie without actually doing it, for a surprisingly long time, and in the process drawing in two detective characters (Tamara Austin [The Walking Dead] and Nate Boyer [former Seattle Seahawk and US Army Green Beret, DEN OF THEIVES]—both doing unusually fine work to make their characters feels worth investing in), who have a complicated, somewhat resentful relationship but still manage to work together while they gradually, um… It’s a little hard to explain from here. There’s like, this whole thing where someone Will used to know as a child has been murdered, and for some reason the detectives think Will is the killer and he acts sort of suspicious even though we know he’s innocent (unless he isn’t and it’s just not very clear?) and it all relates to this cult who worship an ancient American Indian spirit of death, except that actually they’re the descendants of colonial Satan-worshippers, and they want to kill the last members of a magical (and fictional**) Indian tribe called the Sinchanee, who are described as “a peaceful mixed-race tribe discovered to have a unique immunity to diseases brought to the new world” who were “liberated” when “at the turn of the 18th century, French and Native forces attacked an English Settlement at Deerfield, Massachusetts.” For some reason, this resulted in a situation where “for years, locals have reported unusual paranormal phenomena that to this day…. remain unexplained.” And that scans because everyone keeps getting haunted by this evil little ballerina girl, except that I think she’s Will’s sister who was horribly murdered when he was a child? And also there’s an evil mirror? And a haunted piano?

I honestly have no idea what’s up with any of that, and it’s the main problem with the film: it’s well-directed and well-acted, but this story is a complete mess, cluttered up beyond belief with characters it doesn’t need (the two detective characters contribute literally nothing to the plot, are not even present at the climax, and everything in the movie would have worked out exactly the same if they had not been there) and a jumbled backstory it is completely incapable of making use of (despite the four impenetrable paragraphs of explanatory text at the start of the movie, which are then basically reiterated verbatim by another character in the final act, none of the stuff about the Sinchanee being invulnerable to smallpox or an 18th-century French-and-Indian raid or a secret pagan cult actually end up mattering all that much. There is definitely a cult hanging around, I guess, but I was never clear on exactly what their deal was or why they would want to possess this one dude instead of just killing him. And it never ends up meaningfully altering the basic possession narrative at work here anyway. It would pretty much be exactly the same story if he was just haunted by the ghost of his crazy dad or something. Although at least the masks are pretty boss. Might get back into organized religion if they started handing out badass skull-faced masks on major holidays.).

 And even if you can get past all the clutter, it kind of bungles the structure, puttering about, skirting the edges of a possession story and framing it as a mystery for so long you keep assuming there's gotta be some kind of twist -- but there isn't, it's all bedrock-standard possession stuff, it’s just bedrock-standard possession stuff buried in a haphazard pile of all sorts of mostly irrelevant bric-à-brac, none of which adds enough texture to be worth it. For a while it seems kind of interesting to have two parallel stories, one about this nice guy getting haunted, and the other about the detectives who wrongly think he's a killer, but you'd need them to eventually intersect for that to have any kind of payoff, and since that doesn't really happen, it's all for naught. Instead the whole thing just feels fatty and dawdling, floundering around and throwing out characters and worldbuilding without a clear idea of how any of it could be constructively woven together into a satisfying narrative. It sort of feels like it was originally meant to be a TV mini-series --complete with all the meandering subplots and side characters and time-wasting that format entails in this current cultural moment-- all edited down into one way over-burdened movie, but also not edited down quite enough, because the flippin' thing is damn near two hours long. And there's just not enough payoff here, in terms of whammy or in terms of simple imagination, to justify 115 extremely unhurried minutes.

Still, it’s trying, and for a good half of the movie --when it was still unclear that all this was going absolutely nowhere interesting-- I was pretty into it. If it’s a swing and a miss, at least there was a swing, and that's about the best case scenario for a Tubi blind watch, so I'm inclined to be generous.  

And speaking of generosity, the movie ends with text saying it's part of a project to employ veterans and their families? So even if doesn't land as a horror classic, at least it succeeds as a New Deal-esque WPA project. Homies gettin' paid and all that. Maybe that's the real Secret of Sinchanee?

*One of the great mysteries of our time is the utter vanishment from this earth of that great 80's and 90's style bad acting that was full of enthusiastically alien line readings and brisk energetic nonsense. What happened? Where did it go? Did the dour seriousness of the torture-porn years just kill off our capacity for frivolous artifice? Is this the next step in human evolution, that we're just all gloomy and sober all the time?

** Grayhm is descended from the Weskarini Algonquin on his father's side, according to IMDB, so I'll try not to get too weirded out about his making up a new tribe who are vaguely implied to be magic, I guess? Anyway, at least they're the good guys, and the colonialists are the bad guys, or so the dialogue says although none of that ever really plays out in the story itself.

The Invitation

The Invitation (2015)

Dir. Karyn Kusama

Written by Phil Hay, Matt Manfredini

Starring Logan Marshall-Green, Terry Blanchard, Michiel Huisman, Emayatzy Corinealdi

THE INVITATION is another in a recent line of serious-minded, talky, psychologically fraught and glacially paced micro-budget horror films, which definitely seem to be in vogue right now. We talked in my EYES OF MY MOTHER review about the recent trend towards arthouse horror, and while I don’t think you could quite pin things like THE BABADOOK, COHERENCE, THE CANAL, THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE, or THE INVITATION as “art” films per say, there’s definitely a kindred spirit between these two trends, an understanding of horror films as fundamentally psychological, reliant on subtle unease and bracing social discomfort, presented with a starkly self-conscious realism. Most of these film have only a very, very light sugar coating of genre elements, and some have almost none at all. A generous reading might allow us to harken back to the days of Val Lewton as inspiration for this recent crop of indie filmmakers, who perhaps identify with his steadfast assurance that psychological horror combined with an intentionally limited use of explicit horror imagery could produce a much more potent kind of fear which occurs in the viewer’s deepest primal imagination. A less generous reading might be that these films are dirt cheap to make and ambitious young indie filmmakers with no real understanding or affection for the horror genre still know that horror fans are undiscerning enough to watch literally anything they plop in front of them, making this a cynically calculated step to get on the radar and move on to “real” movies.

Not that I want to accuse any of the films cited here of such motives (which, honestly, would hardly crack the top ten most disreputable reasons horror movies have been made, even at its most ungenerous reading) -- indeed, I really enjoyed almost all of them. Except, unfortunately, THE INVITATION. It’s definitely trying hard, really struggling to be about things, to explore some issues in a mature, realistic way without resorting to cheap shock tactics and old horror cliches. But unfortunately its drama, while clearly earnestly intended, is pretty rote and superficial. And in fact the best part here is the end, when it finally throws up its hands and takes a decent stab (ha) at offering some of those exact horror cliches it spends most of the runtime avoiding. I guess on some level you sort of have to admire its ambition, but it really lacks the actual substance to back it up, and the result is middling in the extreme. It’s a genuine attempt at slow-burn tension, but sadly there’s not nearly enough actual fuel here to get the “burn” part going. So it’s just slow. That’s a pretty risky strategy, but it might still be salvageable if it wasn’t also kinda empty.

The film tells the gripping tale of a bunch of smarmy LA yuppies who get invited to the posh Hollywood Hills residence of David (Michiel Huisman, BLACK BOOK) and Eden (Tammy Blanchard, BLUE JASMINE) for an awkward social reunion among a group of friends who have become somewhat estranged. This is problematic for two reasons, the first being that Eden is the ex-wife of bearded, angsty Will (Logan Marshall-Green, the boring hunky guy from PROMETHEUS), and their separation came as the result of the accidental death of their young son a few years back. So, awkward. The second is that it quickly becomes apparent that this casual get-together has some sinister undertones that only Will seems to pick up on.

The film gets by for awhile on a simmering unease primarily borne of the uncomfortable social situation, with a bunch of somewhat emotionally fragile people bouncing off each other in an embarrassed, alcohol-fueled off-kilter way, saying the wrong things, picking at each others’ vulnerabilities (sometimes intentionally, sometimes without realizing it). And it gradually gets worse, as their hosts start to push them into off-puttingly intense sharing moments. And then they finally show their hand and play their cult’s recruiting video. Gulp. But at least it didn’t turn out to be a MLM pitch, so, silver lining there.

Unfortunately, the film’s achilles heel is that none of these people are even remotely interesting, they’re just a checklist of stock LA rich hipster douchebags. I’ve read some reviews praising the film for eschewing the traditional horror dramatis personae of sexy teens and making a film completely populated by grown-ups, but this just proves a demographic change can’t make up for actual content. It’s a slightly different demographic, but not, it turns out, a more interesting one. This is exactly the sort of crowd whose idea of appropriate party conversations are limited to their mortgage and how they’re “spiritual” now. So they’ve got very little of interest to contribute, and the film’s sole psychological point (“sometimes when people are sad they join cults and irritate their friends by trying to recruit them, but really they shouldn’t though”) is waaaay too thin and vapid to hang as much of the movie on as director Karyn Kusama (GIRLFIGHT, JENNIFER’S BODY) tries for here. None of the actors instill much inner life in their characters beyond their basic stock type (Marshall-Green is appropriately broody but pretty one dimensional, and some of the other acting feels a little pitchy with the overwritten dialogue) and consequently nearly all the movie is the cinematic equivalent of hanging out at a lame party with a bunch of particularly obsequious Hollywood yuppies. Horrifying, I’ll grant, but probably not in the way which was intended here.

Once the hammer finally comes down (very, very late into the last act) things improve a little and the film works itself into a respectable, if completely undistinguished, trapped-in-danger thriller. It’s fine, there’s probably an effectively tense moment or two in there, but I also can’t really say it’s worth it, or that it even meaningfully relates to the long slow burn that came before it. In fact, for all its talky pretensions and efforts to mine this fractured group for hidden social anxieties, all it can think to do for a finale is to throw a knife-wielding maniac at us, and it turns out that none of the backstory really matters much in the face of a generic trapped-house slasher scenario. They could probably have achieved exactly the same effect with five minutes of setup instead of 75. So the movie is gonna live or die depending on how effective you find the waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop slow burn which makes up the vast majority of the movie.

Seems like I’m in the minority in finding that part dull and shallow and obvious; critics were pretty kind to the film and particularly offered praise for its long restraint. But I’m also starting to notice that with these well-reviewed indie horror movies, the consensus seems to be that the thing critics like best about them are that they’re mostly not horror movies. They consider it a sign of refinement and maturity that they only begrudging offer up any legit genre goods, and offer a somewhat condescending forgiveness for its unpleasant inevitability. But while I can certainly appreciate a director trying to do something a little different with the genre, this time it didn’t cut it for me; the stuff they replaced the good stuff with isn’t interesting or effective enough to be worth the trade. I don’t require a lot of realism and depth from a generic slasher, but if you’re going to try for unsettling social nuance, you’re going to need more of those things than THE INVITATION is able to muster if you’re going to have much impact. But at least it has a silly twist ending to show its heart is in the right place. If we horror nerds are gonna have to learn to play with these indie cool kids, at least it’s nice to know we have some shared interests, and goofy twist endings are one of them.

 

yes, they did a series of "character posters" for this movie too. Guys, not every movie needs to be fuckin' CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR. Give it up. 

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	There Is Nothing To Be Afraid Of. Which is kinda the problem, IMHO.
TITLE ACCURACY	They are all invited to a party, so sure.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	No
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Psychological Thriller, Trapped-House Thriller, Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Maybe Logan Marshall-Green? He was in PROMETHEUS, but seems to have had a pretty minor career since then. John Carroll Lynch has also had a pretty distinguished carrer as a character actor in stuff like FACE/OFF, ZODIAC, and SHUTTER ISLAND so it’s nice to see him turn up here.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None.
NUDITY?	IIRC there’s a scene early on where we spot on the the guests not wearing pants.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	Most definitely
MADNESS?	Yeah, at least one of the culties seems legit fuckin’ crazy
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Yeah, briefly
MORAL OF THE STORY	Everyone hates a bunch of pretentious Hollywood phonies, but the earnestly for real ones are probably even scarier.

I guess this is competently assembled enough that I can't quite give it two, but in terms of entertainment it's pretty low, think C-. 

Creepy

Creepy aka Kurîpî: Itsuwari no rinjin (2016)

Dir Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Chihiro Ikeda based on Kurīpī by Yutaka Maekawa

Starring Hidetoshi Nishijima,Yuko Takeuchi, Teruyuki Kagawa

I’ve been seeing some reviews calling CREEPY a “return to form” for director Kiyoshi “Not Akira. No, not even related. Do Americans ask the same question about Tim and Woody Allen?” Kurosawa. It has been awhile since the revered horror auteur (of such acknowledged modern classics as CURE, PULSE) returned to the genre that made his name -- since 2006’s RETRIBUTION, in fact. Since then he’s been playing around with different genre variations --icy familial drama in TOKYO SONATA, mind-bendy sci-fi in REAL, action-thriller in SEVENTH CODE, romance in JOURNEY TO THE SHORE-- and only briefly dabbled in the icy, ambiguous dread that was once his bread and butter in his terrific 2012 mini-series Penance (which came out in this country only last year, when I hailed it collectively as one of the best ‘films’ of the 2015). So it is a return of sorts, and quite a triumphant one at that; probably his best in a decade. But it’s also not quite like anything he’s ever done before, indulging in a surprisingly crowdpleasing straightforwardness (at least superficially) which has never been entirely absent from his work, but is seldom so dominant as it is here. It’s recognizably Kurosawa in every frame, but it’s definitely the great artist on his best behavior, perhaps hoping to craft something a little more accessible than the surreal, impenetrable nightmares which defined his work (but also pigeon-holed his career) in the last 90’s and early 00’s.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, because this is a expertly crafted and --well-- creepy little serial killer yarn, making the most of the conventions of that particular subgenre while also offering just a light taste of that dreamy unease that you want out of a Kurosawa movie. It concerns ex-detective Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima, Takeshi Kitano’s DOLLS, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s LOFT and one of his his first, pre-horror movies, LICENSE TO LIVE) who has taken a cushy professorship out in the suburbs after a tragic workplace misjudgement. But of course, he’s gonna get pulled back into the detective game for a mysterious cold case by a former colleague (Masahiro Higashide, former model and star of the unasked-for live action DEATH NOTE sequel LIGHT UP THE NEW WORLD) despite the protestations of his lonely wife (Yuko Takeuchi, holy cow, she was the first victim in the original RINGU!). But while Takakura is snooping around old crime sites, his wife is finding the new neighbors to be unfriendly to the point of hostility, particularly the socially awkward, implacably threatening Mr. Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa, DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP, TOKYO SONATA, Takashi Shimizu’s TORMENTED). Are Takakura’s increasing suspicions about this creepy weirdo justified --or, perhaps, related to his other investigation-- or is he just starting to crack up and let his obsession with his work bleed into his personal life?

For a long time, CREEPY isn’t telling. At its best, it beautifully marries Kurosawa’s mastery of slow, disquieting insinuation with the more visceral punch of a plot that actually posits a specific, tangible threat. The director has always had an intuitive, vividly cinematic sense of the medium, but is most known for patient (and, to some audiences, patience-testing), mysterious and quiet horror which eschews the expected horror stings and money shots the genre usually relies on. Here, with a more concrete and --at least in some ways-- conventional horror structure (co-written by the director but with a plot borrowed from the 2012 novel Kurīpī by Yutaka Maekawa) Kurosawa subtly showcases his more accessible side, moving along at a steady pace, keeping the camera nimbly in motion (even indulging in a show-offy drone shot which drifts endlessly skyward) and making room for an uncharacteristically bossy and present score by Yuri Habuka (mostly Japanese TV, in his first collaboration with the director). I’d almost be willing to call sellout, except that Kurosawa turns out to be so good at it; there’s an effortless, Spielbergian quality on display here, the work of a true master of moving pictures who knows exactly when to linger and when to cut, when to go for an intense close angle and when to hang back and watch dispassionately. In a way it’s no surprise; we got to see the more entertainment-friendly side of the director as far back as SWEET HOME in 1989, and more recently in the weirdo dinosaur battle that ends REAL. It’s always been there, but it’s not his usual speed. That a guy as good as Kurosawa is capable of this seems completely natural; the fact that he seems so comfortable with it is a little more surprising after a career doing mostly the exact opposite. But if the last decade of his career has taught us anything, it’s that he has some range.

Even so, it’s good to see him back in the more disreputable genres again. Unfortunately, after an absolutely masterful slow burn, tension-building run, the movie doesn’t quite nail the finale. Revealing the answers is always a harder trick than milking the mystery, and although CREEPY’s conclusion is not lacking in harrowing moments (the killer has a particular method for disposing of bodies which is likely to linger in your subconscious for quite a while), it treads water a bit too long after the big reveal, repeating story beats without really escalating and resulting in a few too many false starts and stops just as things ought to be spiraling out of control. None of it is bad at all -- in fact, it’s all exceedingly well executed, assuming you’re willing to accept some typically silly serial-killer-movie logic. But there’s no getting around the fact that the finale could stand to lose an easy 15-20 minutes of its extended final act without sacrificing anything in terms of payoff or tension. This is almost certainly a result of fidelity to the novel it’s based on, but as a film it would benefit enormously from a streamlining of the conflict at the end, so that the reveal and the final struggle build off each other rather than strand themselves with a few too many complicating wrinkles sown between them. In a movie which is all about slowly turning the screws, that serves to deflate things a little, though the final resolution still packs a real wallop.

That’s a minor complaint, though, in a film which is otherwise about as marvelously assembled as you’re ever likely to find in this genre. The cast --given a bit more room to emote than is customary for a Kurosawa joint-- really excels here, particularly Kagawa in the showy role of the unstable neighbor. Nishijima plays a more typically reserved Kurosawa lead (in a role which seems tailor-made for usual Kurosawa stand-in Kōji Yakusho) with a hangdog world-weariness that gives the whole film a lingering sense of stagnant entropy, lending a note of odd sadness which only starts to make sense towards the end of the film, as Takeuchi gets to show off just how deeply her husband’s alienation has been hurting her. If the story ever threatens to get unworkably unlikely, the cast ensures that there’s a relatable human heart that keeps you invested, which is a rarity in horror movies in general and an almost unique move for Kurosawa. And it adds up to an absolutely gripping, deeply unnerving serial killer flick which seems likely to become something of a modern classic if more widespread audiences ever discover it. If CREEPY is perhaps a bit too insubstantial to be considered among the great works of a nearly peerless auteur, it’s still one of the very strongest mainstream horror movies of the year, and a testament to the potency even the played-out serial killer genre can still have in the hands of a true master craftsman.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

ALIAS	Kurîpî: Itsuwari no rinjin
TAGLINE	The poster says, That Man Isn’t My Father. He’s a Total Stranger. Which is a weird tagline in the extreme, especially since there’s nothing on the poster to explain who is saying this or who he or she is talking about. It makes more sense in the movie, but I’m not convinced these ad guys understand what a tagline is, exactly.
TITLE ACCURACY	Definitely creepy, although that’s a fucking stupid title in English (I believe the original title, Kurîpî, is an English loan word --”Creepy” written phonetically in Japanese-- but although the translation is correct I don’t think it has the same punch in its native language, and regardless is an impossibly generic title for an interesting movie.)
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the 2012 mystery novel by Yutaka Maekawa, which does not have an English version that I could locate.
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Japan
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Serial Killer
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	No one is slumming in a Kiyoshi Kurosawa production.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Kiyoshi Kurosawa
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	While there’s a sexually threatening element here, it’s never made explicit
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	(VAGUE SPOILERS) sort of, actually, although not in the usual way.
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Yes, there’s definitely a crazy person here, and an implication that other people may be close to or over the edge by the end.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Not really
MORAL OF THE STORY	Japanese cops really need to get better about calling for backup.