"Is that you? The female ogre who sings a song?"Siren is a sleazy, low-budget Japanese flick about a group of criminals that fall under the deadly influence of a mythological siren. At least, a version of a siren that is invulnerable to bullets, can sing with its mouth closed, likes to lick its lips a lot, and looks just like a busty young Japanese chick.After successfully robbing a bank, five men kidnap a beautiful woman that happens along their path and take her to their hideout as part of their "celebration". But the woman is actually a supernatural creature that can kill with her voice, and she uses her beautiful exterior to alienate the greedy men and turn them against each other to bring about their deaths. Why does she have to have sex with the men before she kills them? Don't ask me. I'll be honest, there's not a lot of reasons to recommend this, even though it's not exactly awful. If you just want to ogle Sola Aoi, there are much more..."rewarding" sources available. The story is bare-bones (imagine a pedestrian, unimaginative riff on Reservoir Dogs with the addition of a hot manipulative woman who takes her clothes off every few minutes) and the acting is mediocre, even by the standards of this kind of movie. The short running time MIGHT make it worth checking out if you still find yourself overwhelmingly interested. Siren just barely sneaks across the line into "watchable" territory.

Aoi Sola is famous in her native Japan as an AV (adult video) starlet. AV is a very strange and very Japanese genre where the actors apparently have real sex, but they don't actually show the penetration (which is still illegal in Japan). I haven't seen any of her AV work (and I don't really see the point actually), but I have seen Sola in several simulated softcore "pink" films, one of which, "Raw Summer", is pretty good and actually approaches a genuine drama. This movie is also better than expected--it's a SOV (shot-on-video)"pink" movie, but it actually succeeds somewhat as a legitimate horror flick.A gang of men have just pulled off a daring bank robbery. They stop by the seaside to snatch up a young woman (Aoi Sola), partly because they think she might have seen something, but mostly to have some fun with her back at their hideout. This seems like a perfect set-up for a typical rape-and-bondage-happy "pink" movie, but it ends up going in a very different direction. The strange, mute girl is more than willing to have sex with each of the guys, but everyone that goes off alone with her winds up dead. At first, the paranoid gang-members suspect each other rather than the innocent-looking young girl, but eventually they figure out there is something strange about her. They hear eerie music when she is around. I won't give away her true nature, but if you look at the title and the opening scene (where she emerges naked right out of the sea), you can probably figure it out (at least, if you have any basic knowledge of Greek mythology).The male actors here are actually pretty good, although their characters are all rather annoyingly named after various cinematic serial killers--i.e. "Jason", "Lector", "Chucky", and "Jews"(?) (I'm still trying to figure out the last one). The scenes between them play like kind of a low-rent "Resevoir Dogs". Sola doesn't have to do much acting as her character is mostly mute, but she does a pretty good job of looking alternately sexy and sinister. And it's easy to forgive her just about anything when she takes clothes off--she has just about a perfect body (I don't think her breasts can possibly be real, but if that's the case, her plastic surgeon deserves some kind of award). Naturally, this very low-budget SOV effort is no masterpiece, but for what it is, it's pretty entertaining.

After a gang of criminals steal what is estimated to be a million and a half dollars (don't know how much that is in Yen), they're on their way to a safe house to lay low for a bit when they spot a sexy female hitch-hiker, whom they pick up planning to rape. But what these goons don't know is that this particular vixen is a demon drawn to greed like a moth to the flame. They'll be lucky to get through the two days alive.This film seemed a tad drawn out, yea Sola is a beauty to behold, but she's not naked nearly enough as she could have been and seems more content to play the money hungry idiots off of each other while she waits on the sidelines. The acting by all involved is pretty non- distinct and I just left the movie filling extremely unfulfilled. It's not a truly bad movie, per se just a highly forgettable one.Eye Candy: Aoi Sola gets topless a few times and shows her ass once (in a simulated sex scene late in the film)My Grade: D+DVD Extras: Merely trailers for "Cruel Restaurant", "Attack Girls Swim team Vs. the Undead" & "Female Prisoner Sigma"