Here baby, there mama, everywhere daddy daddy, HAIR!

"EXTE: Hair Extensions" (aka "Ekusute") (2007)

STARRING: Chiaki Kuriyama, Ren Osugi, Megumi Sato

PLOT: When a woman is murdered, the continuously-growing hair from her corpse is harvested and given to unwitting beauty salons as beautiful new hair extensions... Little do the patrons know that the extensions will enable a restless spirit to take revenge!

IN A WORD: SHAVE!

MY TAKE: This movie kicks ass. I rented it from NetFlix as a joke, thinking that it would at least deliver some cheesy gross-out effects, and at best be a lukewarm thriller. Haunted hair extensions?? I honestly didn't expect much. But you know what? My friends, this movie was fucking awesome. Pound for pound the most hair you will EVER see in one movie, possibly in all movies ever combined, and if you've never been scared to get your hair cut before, you'll definitely be a little wary the next time you go in for a trim. EXTE manages to take something benign and commonplace and make it terrifying, and it's always a delight to see a movie that can achieve this.

I am so glad I don't have any wigs in the house;
I'd be burning them right now if I did.

So... why hair? If you're observant, you'll notice that hair seems to take a prominent place in all sorts of Asian horror stories, fables, anime, movies, and music. From brides with white hair, to demons using threads of hair as lutes or weapons, to the freakshow ganguro gals on the streets of Shibuya, to Visual-K musicians with wildly colored hairdos of astronomical height -- it's all over the place. In EXTE -- a grisly ghost revenge flick from Japan -- hair itself is something to be feared. The evil hair we speak of comes from the scalp of a murdered woman, whose body was discovered stuffed and rotting in a harbor shipping crate full of hair extensions. The morgue-worker assigned to deal with her body just happens to be a hair-obsessed lunatic, and soon the woman's body mysteriously goes missing. To the weirdo's delight, her hair continues to grow... and grow, and grow! Soon he has to do something with all this fucking hair, so he decides to pawn it off on some local salons in the hopes they will like the samples and buy more. Sounds like a great plan! He's making money, the stores are making money, and every night he gets to come home to his perfect little doll...

Did I mention the hair kills people? Yeah, the hair kills people.

So, perhaps predictably, but ~deliciously~ so: everyone who receives the haunted hair extensions becomes possessed by the vengeful spirit of the woman and is either outright killed, or brainwashed into murdering other people and THEN killed. There is no escape! The hair extensions are ruthless, and when they decide on a victim, they don't fuck around. Hair doesn't sound so scary at first -- what can it do, choke you? Well, yes, it can. It can also get sucked up under your skin and slither through your eye sockets, over your eyeballs. Sound like fun? Or maybe it'll start pouring out of your mouth, suffocating you in unstoppable rivers of hair. Or it might shoot out from your head, each strand like a taut razor-sharp piano wire, eviscerating you and everyone else in the room. Oh, there's a lot it can do, and EXTE is endlessly creative in finding new ways to make your skin crawl.

The effects are fantastic, and the sound editing really makes you feel what's going on. Not entirely pleasant, but that's kind of the point. People who gross-out easily will probably want to steer clear of this flick. The scares are enormously effective, the black humor works surprisingly well, and the acting is great across the board. The two standout performances are little Miku Sato as Mami, an abused child whose performance is heartbreakingly real, and actress "Tsugumi" as Mami's sinister mother, a monster possibly even more terrifying than a whole room of possessed, bloodthirsty hair extensions... Chiaki Kuriyama of Battle Royale and Kill Bill fame plays the lead, a beautiful hairdresser named Yuko who must thwart not only the ghost and her hairy minions but her own evil sister as well. Can she do it?! EXTE is more than worth a rental to find out.

It's sick, it's gory, it's graphic -- but man. It's FUN.

ON A SCALE OF 1-10: Original, gross, and tons of fun! 9!

~ WATCH THE TRAILER ~