GROSS AND GROSSER.(The Talk of the Town)(Grady Hendrix helped found the New York Asian Film Festival, in order to screen the latest 'J-horror' films, among others, at Anthology Film Archives, in East Greenwich Village)

Fans of Japanese horror films appear to be related to those mysterious people who like to get out of their cars to inspect roadkill, or those who watch bypass surgery on public television--except that they are devotees of a much darker and weirder phenomenon. Grady Hendrix, a thirty-one-year-old former receptionist of conservative appearance, for example, doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would enjoy watching a man bite through his arm while masturbating inside a burlap sack, but he is. Hendrix, who lives in Spanish Harlem, imports the most repellent, vile movies from Asia as a hobby, and the depth of his demented knowledge is impressive. If you wanted to see, say, a naked man suspended from hooks so that his skin stretches, while someone pours boiling oil all over him and sticks needles through his cheeks, well, he knows just the movie for you.

For the past three years, Hendrix has helped put together the New York Asian Film Festival, which screens the latest "J-horror" sensations (as well as more conventional fare) at Anthology Film Archives, in the East Village. This year, he really wanted to show Takashi Miike's "Gozu," in which a gangster turns into a woman and then gives birth to a fully grown male during intercourse, but Miike has already acquired a legitimate U.S. distributor. Instead, Hendrix had to settle for "Marronnier," directed by Hideyuki Kobayashi, which is about a shut-in puppeteer who turns women into dolls that kill people. (The movie played twice in San Francisco, and a good portion of the audience walked out each time.) Hendrix isn't worried about its New York reception, however, because, he says, "the people in San Francisco are generally weak-willed sissies."

Hendrix, like many film buffs in New York, can trace his passion to Kim's Video, a store whose employees are notoriously smug about their esoteric tastes. He fell under the influence of a Kim's clerk named Barry Long, who told him about the Music Palace, a theatre in Chinatown that showed Asian films. Hendrix, who was then a student at New York University, went downtown, bought a six-dollar ticket for a double feature, and entered a strange world. "You'd look around and there'd be a family of nine behind you eating lunch and arguing over who gets the last dim sum," he says. "There'd be people sitting next to you working their way through their second pack of cigarettes. There was the cat man, who had nine cats tied to ...