Exte: Hair Extensions

UPC: 631595082784

Studio: Tokyo Shock

MPAA Rating: NR   Contains:null

Summary: Chiaki Kuriyama (Kill Bill, Vol. 1) and prolific character actor Ren Osugi (Nightmare Detective) star in Suicide Club director Sion Sono's alternately satirical and terrifying tale of hirsute horror. Yuko (Kuriyama) is a eager apprentice at the Gilles de Rais salon who dreams of one day becoming a famous hair stylist. As a child Yuko was tormented by her sadistic older sister Kiyomi (Tsugumi), though these days the abusive sibling is more inclined to satisfy her mean streak by abusing her own subservient daughter Maki (Miku Sato). Meanwhile, on a nearby freight car, the corpse of a young woman who appears to have become an unwilling organ donor is discovered in a massive nest of hair. When the corpse arrives at the local morgue, misanthropic hair fetishist Yamazaki (Osugi) abducts the cadaver after noticing that it produces an endless wave of hair from every orifice and incision. But these aren't your typical passive locks; strangely they seem to exhibit a life of their own. In order to turn a tidy profit, Yamazaki soon begins selling the strands to local salons so that they may be made into hair extensions. Later, when the murderous manes begin turning on the heads that hold them, the battle between two sisters for the custody of the frightened Maki is soon interrupted by a most unusual development. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Category: Horror

Awards: Film Presented – New York Asian Film Festival Film Presented – London Film Festival

Features: Behind the scenes featurette
Deleted scenes -music video
Theatricial trailer
TV Spots

Exte: Hair Extensions

Format: DVD

Release Date: 07/29/2008

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Theatre Wide-Screen

Audio: DD2 Dolby Digital Stereo, DD5.1 Dolby Digital 5.1

Runtime: 108 Minutes

Sides: 2

Number of Discs: 2

Language(s) English

Subtitles: English

Region: USA & territories, Canada

Chapters: Disc #1 -- Hair Extensions
1. Chapter 1 [5:32]
2. Chapter 2 [5:35]
3. Chapter 3 [8:47]
4. Chapter 4 [10:27]
5. Chapter 5 [11:26]
6. Chapter 6 [10:29]
7. Chapter 7 [3:23]
8. Chapter 8 [9:53]
9. Chapter 9 [8:32]
10. Chapter 10 [11:06]
11. Chapter 11 [9:02]
12. Chapter 12 [9:43]

Josh Ralske

Sion Sono's EXTE: Hair Extensions is a bizarre and delightfully comic freakout of a horror movie satire. Sono takes the J-horror trope of the female ghost with the long, black hair to its comic extreme that is equal parts disturbing, creepy, sad, funny, and just plain weird. Often it is all of those things simultaneously. Sono may be parodying the proliferation of hair-based horrors, but he also understands their power. He captures the beauty and the strangeness of human hair and his culture's obsession with it. While Ren Osugi, as dangerous hair fetishist Gunji Yamazaki, provides much of the film's weirdness quotient with a gleefully deranged, over-the-top performance featuring a musical tribute to his favorite hair-spewing corpse, Chiaki Kuriyama grounds the picture emotionally with a winning turn as Yuko, the bright-eyed young hairstylist. From the film's opening, as she playfully narrates her rather mundane daily life to an imaginary camera, Yuko is impossible not to root for. Sono captures such a vulnerability in Kuriyama, from her sweetly cheerful demeanor to her prominent proboscis, that makes the intrusions of her rotten sister Kiyomi (Tsugumi and the demented Yamazaki seem a true violation. The scares here are genuine. In one nearly unbearably tactile scene, a hairdresser wearing the Yamazaki's extensions is possessed by the spirit of the dead woman while cutting a customer's hair, scissors feinting again and again at the woman's vulnerable ears. In another scene, a hapless salon employee takes the extensions home and finds hair starting to flow from every orifice. This is the kind of uniquely visceral horror that lingers in one's memory, and the genuine miseries of child abuse, alienation, and obsession underlying Sono's film only add to its unusual resonance. ~ Josh Ralske, Rovi

Cast and Crew: Mirai Yamamoto  Actor 
Eri Machimoto  Actor 
Yuuna Natsio  Actor 
Mitsuru Kurosawa  Executive Producer 
Sion Sono  Director 
Sion Sono  Screenwriter 
Tomoki Hasegawa  Composer (Music Score) 
Shigeyuki Endo  Executive Producer 
Masanori Adachi  Screenwriter 
Tsuguo Hattori  Producer 
Makoto Okada  Producer 
Makoto Sanada  Screenwriter 
Chiaki Kuriyama  Actor 
Ren Osugi  Actor 
Tsugumi  Actor 
Miku Sato  Actor 
Megumi Sato  Actor 
Mayu Sakuma  Actor 
Ken Mitsuishi  Actor 

Country: Japan