An inventive and possibly shocking pastiche of J-horror that mines one its central motifs for all it’s worth?  I’m there… At least, that’s how my thoughts ran initially.  In fact, my expectations had been building for a while, as Hair Extensions (2006) has consistently been earning positive reviews since it began playing the U.S. festival circuit last year.

Add to this the fact that the film was directed by Sion Sono, whose earlier efforts include the intense and fascinating Suicide Club (2002) and the even more intense and fascinating Strange Circus (2005).  And it’s not as if Sono’s talent isn’t on display here early and often, starting with the creepy opening scene set amidst cargo containers.  Then we get a nicely contrasting title sequence with lead Chiaki Kuriyama, so memorable in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Battle Royale (2000), as she cheerfully pedals her way to the hair salon where she works as an apprentice.  But as Hair Extensions progresses, it settles into a groove that, while not quite predictable, provides very few substantial surprises in either story or visuals.  I kept waiting for the giggling-while-hiding-my-eyes moments to come, but in the end I rarely cracked a smile and certainly wasn’t scared.  While others seem to have reacted to the film as if it represents the best of both worlds—a wink to those weary of earnest J-horror but still full of “disturbing” content—my experience is that it’s neither fish nor fowl.  An intelligent exercise but never really a gripping one, Hair Extensions is a fairly standard treatment of its own wild premise that tries to make up for its shortcomings with large dollops of “cool.”  Did I mention that the salon where Kuriyama’s character Yuko works is named after Gilles de Rais?  Pretty funny and edgy, isn’t it—off-hand references to serial child killers?

Yes, some of the effects are quite clever—but that’s the problem with them.  I should be able to watch rogue hair sprouting from the various body parts of victims and get the don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cringe reaction.  Instead, my response was more like, “Hair running over the surface of an eyeball—okay, check.”  Basically Hair Extensions never becomes the gross-out exercise in, or parody of, full-on body horror that it gestures towards.  For a while it remains credible as a family drama or as an oblique commentary on male/capitalist domination through the concept of "beauty," but that’s about it.  And if you think I’m going too far with that last bit, consider that the movie makes an explicit association between buying/using hair extensions and illegally harvested organs—the latter being removed in such a way that the connotations of gang rape are unmistakable.

The problem is that there’s no central dramatic arch to hold all these zinging ideas together.   Not that I’m the biggest cheerleader for the traditional three-act structure, but Hair Extensions flirts with such a structure and then seems to say it doesn’t really need it on the strength of these ideas and its borderline campy-creepy imagery.  To put it simply, the two main characters, styling apprentice and abused little girl (Miku Sato) aren’t even aware that there is a looming danger until they themselves are in peril practically at the end of the movie.  Early on we’re given a terrifically nasty character in the person of Yuko’s sister (Tsugumi), and certainly there are a couple of scenes with her that crackle with believable menace but she doesn’t even really appear for the last 30-40 minutes.  Nor is her presence missed by the other characters, so you end up wondering what all the build-up was about.  As if to shore up the lack of a strong protagonist-antagonist storyline, the screenwriters have included a tepid murder-mystery investigation which I’m guessing was supposed to be a subplot.  However, the two featured detectives hardly have any screen time, are presented as disposable clichés, and don’t really impact any of the proceedings.