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Yesterday it was announced that manga artist Tatsuya Egawa (Golden Boy, Tokyo Daigaku Monogatari) has completed work on his second live-action film as a director and that it will be released this summer. Unlike his last film, 2006’s “Tokyo University Story”, this is not based on one of his manga, but an entirely original story.

Takuya Ishida (The Chasing World) and Sei Ashina (Nanase Futatabi: The Movie) star as two of 10 people gathered together in a room to play a mysterious game. In fact, they’ve each been brought there under a secret contract, and are not allowed to reveal any details about their true identities to each other. The film is said to highlight dark aspects of the human psyche, illustrating people’s potential for lust and violence when trapped somewhere and controlled.

Other cast members include Shunsuke Kubozuka, Ai Maeda, Keisuke Horibe, Hiroshi Yamamoto, Nana Natsume, Jai West,...

Shinji Higuchi (44), known as the “Heisei special effects king” for his work on the Heisei era Gamera trilogy, is supervising the production of his first TV drama. The show is called MM9 (Monster Magnitude 9) and is set in an alternate version of modern-day Japan in which monster attacks are the norm and are treated as another form of natural disaster. The show is based on a story by sci-fi writer Hiroshi Yamamoto which was originally serialized in Tokyo Sogensha’s “Mysteries!” from 2005-2006 and published as a book in 2007.

The project was first hinted at through an April Fools joke which presented it as a “sci-fi epic” called XX9. Higuchi released a photo of the cast dressed up in traditional sci-fi outfits and wielding futuristic rifles.

The show centers around a special “living creatures” division of the Japan Meteorological Agency which predicts the appearance of monsters. When an attack does occur,...