HATED THE REMAKE of Dark Water? Don't let one soggy suckfest keep you from sampling the pure, uncut genre films on tap at the ninth annual San Francisco Asian Film Festival (SFAFF) (www.sfaff.com). Four Star and Presidio Theatre owner Frank Lee's fest runs Aug 11-21, featuring movies from Hong Kong, mainland China, Korea, Japan, India, Mongolia, and the Philippines.

Gong Su-Chang's R-Point is maybe the best military-guys-meet-supernatural-evil flick since Dog Soldiers. A delightfully foulmouthed squad of Korean soldiers is sent on a rescue mission that turns très sinister the minute they set foot on the titular island. Sudden mists, mysterious gravestones, and a decrepit mansion where the men set up base camp provide plenty of atmospherics; it's not long before eerie transmissions begin filtering in over the radio, and the men start exponentially losing their shit.

Shortly before Takeshi Shimizu made The Grudge – a remake of his own Ju-On – he made Marebito, a low-budget nibble of weirdness starring director Shinya Tsukamoto (whose films Vital and A Snake in June also play the festival). A man's Peeping Tom-like obsession with filming terror leads him to a subterranean world below Tokyo, where he meets – not a woman, exactly, but a creature whose singular nutritional needs turn his dingy apartment into a little shop of horrors.

The must-see pick of the SFAFF is opening theatrically in October, but it's so recommendable you might as well see it now and later: Tetsuya Nakashima's Kamikaze Girls, about two high schoolers who form a highly unlikely friendship. One dresses like Bo Peep and worships the Rococo period ("Life then was like candy!"); the other rides with a tough all-girl biker gang. There's a lot going on here – animation, live action, musical interludes, giant pompadours, dream sequences, spitting, embroidery, fistfights – and every second of it is pure enjoyment. (Cheryl Eddy)