Tokyo Adrift

The Great J-Horrorthon: Part 2

Gakkô no kaidan G

Year: 1998

MPAA Rating: N/A

Alright, this is where things start to get weird. This is the Japanese TV horror anthology in which the Ju-On series got off to its sputtering start. There are 4 chapters to this film, two of which were directed by Takashi Shimizu and contain the nascent seed that would eventually birth a slew of incomprehensible continuations, remakes, sequels, and whatever the heck White Ghost/Black Ghost is. No, they are not good. Neither are the Ju-On movies though, so we can't really blame them for that.

Katasami (In a Corner)

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Cast: Ayako Omura, Kanna Kashima, Takako Fuji

Run Time: 3 minutes 24 seconds

Watch here

A young girl is haunted by the ghost of Kayako Saeki for some reason.

Two girls are taking care of one rabbit over summer because Japan. One girl hurts herself on a clipboard and mysteriously vanishes when her friend goes to find a bandage. Upon returning, she is attacked by the burping ghost. She seems pretty unimpressed and then it's over.

This is where our beloved tale begins, in a cruddy TV spot that would make even some of the blurrier forgotten slashers cringe, looking at the production value. But let us not try to ascribe Hollywood quality filmmaking to a short that was made for the price of a packet of ramen.

Honestly, the woman ghost still proves to be the most effective part of the franchise, even though her presence here (outside of the home where she died) makes no sense in context of either the story or the movies that would carry on its legacy. I'll hold off judgement until Ju-On: The Curse, which I've heard continues some of these oh so tension-fraught vignettes.

Rating: 2/10

4444444444 (444-444-4444)

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Cast: Kazushi Andô, Daiki Sawada

Run Time: 2 minutes 58 seconds

Watch here

A young man gets a mysterious phone call.

A kid rides up on a bike, hears a phone ringing, picks it up. The number displayed is a lot of 4's (as you may have guessed), and here's where it gets lost in translation. In Japan, the number 4 is associated with death. An English equivalent might be 1313131313. Or not. Whatever.

Anyway, he answers the phone and hears a cat mewling. He starts talking to whoever it is, jumping to major conclusions ("Are you here? Are you watching me?") and it turns out he's exactly right. Right next to him is twelve-year-old Toshio who is a cat (?).

This one was actually a little more chilling than the previous vignette, if only because it is so out of left field. I'm interested in seeing if the feature film continuation of these stories somehow makes the cat/not in the house thing make any sense.

My vote is no.

Rating: 3/10

Rasen (Spiral)

Year: 1998

Director: Jôji Iida

Cast: Kôichi Satô, Miki Nakatani, Hinako Saeki

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

The mystery of Sadako Yamamura's cursed videotape is solved in the stupidest way imaginable.

Proving that Ju-On isn't the only film series that can have a mind-boggling sequel timeline, here comes the inimatable Rasen. Produced and released simultaneously with Ringu, Rasen was the original sequel and, though it was based on the next book in the series, audiences hated the direction it took. In fact, the hatred was so intense, the producers decided to make Ringu 2 and pretend this film never even happened.

Just like the best of the best horror sequels (Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers), Ringu 2's title smacks of producer desperation. It's Ringu again! We promise! Love us again!

So you can imagine my excitement when my DVD of Rasen got in the mail. Eager to prove the audience wrong (or dreadfully right), I put on my movie-watching cap (not real) and called up my Sergio (real) and we plunked ourselves down in front of the TV.

Sergio fell asleep within minutes. I envy him.

For, you see, Japanese audiences are evidently more on the ball than American audiences (see box office for Transformers: Dark of the Moon). I will never again doubt that their derision is misplaced. Rasen was, to put it rather elegantly, a boring suckfest.

It begins with the autopsy of Ryûji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), the husband who died in the first film. He is being operated on by an old friend from med school who has a deep connection with him despite an early scene in which he couldn't remember who he was. And within the first five minutes, this movie has already retconned its predecessor to pieces.

Evidently, Ryûji died of a heart attack, not a ghost child crawling out of his TV. That would all be well and fine if that's just what the autopsy showed and the doctors were mistaken, but flashback footage shows us that is not the case. Evidently Sadako's curse is manifested via a virus that is transmitted optically into your eye, which copies the DNA patterns and recreates it inside you, and then you grow tumors on your blood vessels and have ulcers on your neck and have a heart attack and die seven days later and this is BS go away Rasen.

This movie has become a medical drama (replete with soaring daytime soap music), and an excruciatingly slow one at that. It has even more of a procedural feel than the original, and has exactly one scene that even mildly chilled me.

Also Sadako doesn't use the tape or the TV anymore and can show up wherever she pleases.

Also Ryûji has psychic mind-reading powers.

Also a diary written about the events of the first film can transmit the virus.

Also Mai Tanaka, the girlfriend from Ringu, is infected with the virus despite not having watched the tape or read the diary, and gives birth to a Sadako-possessed version of herself.

Also Sadako (Hinako Saeki) is easily ten years older than the last film.

Also we see her face, which so isn't the point.

Also she has sex with a lot of people, replete with cheesy 70's porn music.

Also her womb has magic powers and can resurrect people to the age they were when they died.

Also they killed off my favorite child Yôichi pretty much immediately.

Also, Sadako's plan is to use the virus to spread fear and further human evolution.

F*ck you too, Rasen.

Rating: 1/10


Ringu 0: Bâsudei (Ring 0: Birthday)

Year: 2000

Director: Norio Tsuruta

Cast: Yukie Nakama, Seiichi Tanabe, Kumiko Asô

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

Sadako Yamamura is a young woman haunted by the ghost of herself as a child.

Does the little ghost girl from Ringu still haunt you? You're not alone. Nobody is safe, not even Sadako herself, apparently. 

Ringu 0 is a prequel revolving around Sadako Yamamura as a young woman struggling to make it in her theatre troupe, which would put this film in the same continuity as Rasen. That is a place we do NOT want to be but they put in a great effort to tie it in with Ringu and Ringu 2, and it almost makes sense. 

Which is forgivable, because it's the most sense any of these films have made so far.

Evidently, as a child, Sadako split into two beings, one evil and one good. Her father drugged the evil one so she would stay a child (quite logically, one would suppose. These things do happen.) and the other one grew into a beautiful young lady. Sometimes Sadako loses control of her actions and the little girl version of her takes over and she's moody and nobody understands her. It's basically a Japanese remake of Carrie

It's still more boring than creepy but it's a definite improvement on Rasen, and the final scene is actually pretty intense. Say what you will about the Ring movies, but they sure know how to end a plodding narrative on a high note.

Rating: 3/10


Ju-On: The Grudge 2

Year: 2003

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Cast: Noriko Sakai, Chiharu Niiyama, Kei Horie

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A Tokyo scream queen steps foot in the cursed house and her crew begins to die one by one.

The highly anticipated (sic) followup to Ju-On: The Grudge follows the apparent trend of J-Horror sequels, for it is better than both its immediate predecessor and its English remake. Takashi Shimizu returns for yet another round and I'd even say he'd hit his stride. Except for the fact that The Grudge came out a year after this one.

Ju-On: The Grudge 2 follows pregnant horror actress Kyôko Harase (Sakai) after she films an episode of a "Ghost Hunters" type show in the very house that spawned the Curse of the Burping Ghost. She and her boyfriend are driving down the highway when the ghost boy Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) hijacks the wheel and crashes the car. Her boyfriend goes into a coma and she miscarries, only to find out later that she is three and a half months pregnant.

This film wants to bank on its scary pregnancy body horror so Kyôko is actually a protagonist, appearing in every vignette.

Yes, this film is still episodic, but this time it follows a core cast of people - the crew of the ghost show. It does feature some timeline hopscotching and a mind-searingly long labyrinthine dream sequence, but because of all the vignettes being offshoots of one main storyline, it really does make sense, all in all. You know. For what it is.

Also, instead of the "oh god, another one" boredom of Ju-On, it is more of a "oh god, another one" one-two punch of something at least in the neighborhood of terror.

Because of its basic narrative coherence, the creative scare sequences - a staple of the Ju-On movies - have much more impact. Here we have a haunted copy machine, a haunted boom mike, a haunted camera, a haunted wig, and a terrifying spider web of hair. Yup, the Japanese are still wetting their pants over technology. You'd think they'd stop making it.

Anyway, is it not obvious that in the end a ghost crawls out of her womb? It does and it is terrifying.

I don't know what it is about these stringy-haired ghosts. Sadako Yamamura, Kayako Saeki... They look the same, move the same, but in each film they are still uniquely frightening. I guess Japan knows a good thing when they see one.

Rating: 6/10

The Grudge 2

Year: 2006

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Cast: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Amber Tamblyn, Arielle Kebbel

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

The rage curse begins to spread and Kayako and Toshio make their way across the pond.

Takashi Shimizu is a man with unparalleled levels of commitment. The Grudge 2 is his 8th and final Grudge feature. The film franchise comprises a good 25% of his entire working career. This is both admirable and extremely irritating because everything that made Ju-On and The Grudge so bad just won't go away. It's ineradicable.

Shimizu is no longer content shifting timelines between vignettes. Now he bounces back and forth between four timelines or so simultaneously across four different locales.

Buffy's sister (Tamblyn) is trying to uncover the mystery of the house in Tokyo, three schoolgirls are haunted at a Tokyo school (replete with lascivious butt shots in those Sailor Moon skirts they all have), a sick mother languishes in Pasadena, and a Chicago family is haunted by the ghosts next door.

Again, the scare sequences are too good for the surrounding film, and I really wish someone could just compile all the good parts of these movies and synthesize them into one behemoth of a J-Horror picture.  Although Toshio's presence is at a low ebb (the actor playing him was getting much too old at this point and he's viewed mostly blurry and from a distance), there are some really chilling moments and at one point my spine literally tingled, which has never happened to me before. I'm inclined to blame the temperature because this movie doesn't really deserve such a distinction but the fact is it happened.

So it's not a total waste of time.

Also thrown into the mix are a haunted payphone, another haunted cell, and a girl vomiting milk into  gallon jug and drinking it again.

Shimizu pulls out all the stops for his grand finale and it never quite lands (despite the film's extended run time, it never feels like any character is onscreen for an overall total of about ten minutes), but it revels in the coked out glory that is the Japanese ghost story.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 2069

Reviews In This Series
J-Horrorthon Part 1(June 15, 2013)
J-Horrorthon Part 2 (July 16, 2013)
J-Horrorthon Part 3 (August 15, 2013)
J-Horrorthon Part 4 (April 1, 2014)

I Think I'm Turning Japanese, I Really Think So

When I was growing up, for whatever reason I thought I was too wimpy to watch horror movies. Never mind the fact that I'd already watched The Exorcist, Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense, The Shining, It, and later Drag Me To Hell with my dad. Side note: My dad is awesome.

Also never mind the fact that I devoured horror literature, was Dean Koontz's biggest source of income in 2008, and at one point owned two copies of The Ruins. Whatever psychosis I was enduring is over now, but it left a glaring gap in my horror consciousness. Once I watched Scream, I discovered late 90's horror and 80's slasher movies, and I'd already seen most of the classics, but there was one genre with not a single entry on my List (this is a real list of movies that I've watched).

See, look!

That genre is J-Horror. Before this summer, I had not seen a single Japanese horror movie (or a single Japanese movie at that) nor had I seen any of the American remakes, due to my foolishness during the Great Dark Period of the mid-2000's.

My boyfriend Sergio, who is somewhat of a savant with these things (He could name each and every movie previewed on my Ring DVD within ten seconds), unwisely agreed to help me erase that gap in my horror knowledge and at the beginning of summer we set out on a grand movie watching spree. As I am wont to do, I discuss these movies to no end with him and, to give him a break, I'll be releasing mini reviews periodically as we go along.

The Great J-Horrorthon: Part 1

Before we begin, a brief history of J-Horror. The 2000's were a bleak time for horror films. By then the slasher genre had died thrice over (revived both times by Wes Craven with A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984 and Scream in 1996). Haunted houses and monster movies? Forget about it. Zombies were on a slow ascent in popularity thanks to the like of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later in 2002, but fan fervor wouldn't reach a fever pitch until late in the decade and on into the 2010's with The Walking Dead and the advent of zombie chic.

American horror filmmakers needed something to do, so they turned to the misty isle of Japan, which for some time now had been producing eerie, beautiful, and weird ghost stories for some time now. There was a lot of territory to be mined, and after The Ring tested the waters in 2002, it turned out there was a market for it. And thus a movement was born.

Of course the reason is money, right?

Ringu (Ring)

Year: 1998

Director: Hideo Nakata

Cast: Nanako Matsushima, Miki Nakatani, Yûko Takeuchi

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A young reporter struggles to solve the mystery of a cursed videotape that kills you seven days after you watch it.

I am one of the immensely lucky people who managed to see the original Japanese version of The Ring before watching the remake so I can have no shame in saying... it's really not as good. Don't get me wrong, it's a good movie. I just don't really see what all the fuss is about. 

The haunted videotape concept is killer, but it's less of a horror movie than a mystery procedural. It has a lot of focus on local and family history, which is a very Japanese mindset so I don't blame them, but it feels like it would be better as a book, which, in fact, it is. The Ring series is based on a series of four books by Kōji Suzuki and it very much plays off as an adaptation. 

And one small complaint: Early on in the movie, it is established that you will be told that you are going to die in seven days if you watch the tape. It is somewhat unclear if the woman in the video says it or it is relayed to you by the telephone call you inevitably receive after watching it, and the reason I'm still not sure is because it is never actually said in the film. Nobody tells them they will die in seven days. It just kind of happens.

High point: The little boy Yôichi is the most well-adapted child in the universe. He dresses himself, stays on top of his mother, and he even has a briefcase.

Also the way you are pronouncing the title is wrong. I looked it up, and it's pronounced with emphasis on the first syllable like "REENG-uh". I'm disappointed too.

Rating: 5/10

The Ring

Year: 2002

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A young reporter struggles to solve the mystery of a cursed videotape that kills you seven days after you watch it, but this time in America.

I've said this already and I'm still ashamed to admit it, but this version of The Ring is marginally better. The concept of the tape is explored a lot more, whereas in the original it is limited to basically just one scene. While it's still mainly about a couple solving the mystery of the tape, there's more of a sense of urgency as things get worse and worse for the main characters as the story progresses.

This film also had the advantage of coming out after the release of the original's sequel, and it combined scenes from the two movies to greater effect, further fleshing out the story of the devious Samara Morgan (née Sadako Yamamura) and sprucing it up with some darkly beautiful imagery. While this film still isn't fantastic, it is easy to see how it made a splash in the bland horror landscape of 2002.

Rating: 6/10

Ringu 2 (Ring 2)

Year: 1999

Director: Hideo Nakata

Cast: Miki Nakatani, Hitomi Satô, Kyôko Fukada

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

The girlfriend of the dead professor from the first film seeks the truth from his ex-wife and is haunted by Sadako, the girl from the tape.

First things first, this movie isn't technically the original sequel to Ringu. Ringu was released in tandem with its sequel Rasen (Spiral), which was based on the next book in Suzuki's series. However, the sci-fi direction it took did not fly with fans of the original and they demanded something else. So the producers decided to pretend Rasen never existed and brought back Hideo Nakata to helm a direct sequel incorporating the original characters. [Rasen is coming up on my marathon list, so you'll be hearing more on that soon]

Evidently that wasn't enough. Every single review of Ringu 2 that I've read since watching it has panned it, and it got a 0% of Rotten Tomatoes. And who am I to question the great gods of movie wisdom? How dare I question years of scorn and derision? Who am I to do such a thing?

Alright, I kind of loved this movie.

I'll readily concede that maybe it was context that made me enjoy it so much more than its predecessor. During Ringu, Sergio was doing his utmost to distract me from the film so I would pay attention to him, but during Ringu 2 he was sleeping peacefully by my side.

In my defense though, there was a much higher frequency of truly bone-chilling scenes, including a couple that gave me Stage 3 Heebie Jeebies. It has that on Ringu, but it also has this: it's freaking insane. I'm talking Crazy Go Nuts University here. Truly barmy stuff that only the Japanese could have come up with that the movie all takes in stride.

Yôichi has psychic mind powers? Yeah, OK.

Major plot points received out of nowhere through hallucinations in a train station? More please.

Sadako is a manifestation of angry energy that can only be defeated by turning her into a swimming pool? How is this not already your favorite movie?

Seacrest out.

Rating: 7/10

The Ring Two

Year: 2005

Director: Hideo Nakata

Cast: Naomi Watts, Simon Baker, David Dorfman
Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Rachel and Aidan have moved to a small town, but Samara Morgan is after them once more.

Water pouring out from somewhere it shouldn't is kinda scary. Water pouring out from somewhere it shouldn't 19 times in two hours is just exhausting.

And there is no better word to describe this film. A two hour slog that really doesn't revolve around the cursed videotape which was basically the only compelling draw to the film in the first place. The original Japanese director returns for his least effective Ring film yet.

The film opens with some nails-on-a-chalkboard forced exposition: "We're here in a house in Oregon, Aidan. Isn't it sad that your dad is dead?" and goes downhill from there. I'm just gonna leave a list of the succeeding scenes without commentary and let you judge for yourself:

• Aidan gets gum on his hand, so he goes to wash it off... in the toilet. Which then attacks him.
• Their car is attacked by horrible looking CGI deer.
• Naomi Watts can't seem to pronounce her son's name. "Aidon! Where are you?!"
• Naomi Watts' onscreen driving wouldn't pass muster in a 30's film. Leftrightleftrightleftright.
• Aidan gets backed into a corner... by water on the floor.
• Two words: Haunted Toaster
• Somehow the visual effects are worse than they were three years ago.

Rating: 2/10

Ju-On: The Grudge (Click here for our Scream 101 episode about this film.)

Year: 2002

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Cast: Megumi Okina, Misaki Itô, Misa Uehara
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A rage curse kills anybody who steps inside a house where Kayako Saeki and her son Toshio were killed.

This film has an alarmingly perplexing pedigree. To my knowledge and understanding, this film and its sequel (Ju-On: The Grudge 2) are remakes of two direct to video movies from 2000 (Ju-On and Ju-On 2) that are only available in Japan, Germany, and Scandinavia. I'm doing my best to find a way to access them for my marathon. 

But not only this: Apparently the original Ju-On is a sequel to what seems to be two short films presented in a Japanese television anthology movie in 1998 (Gakkō no kaidan G), Katasumi and 4444444444. I haven't been able to find a lot of information on these, so they could be anywhere between 2 minutes and 19 hours long for all I know.

Almost as annoyingly confusing as its history is the film itself. No, it's not confusing in a "I just don't understand those Japanese" way, nor is it confusing in a "This movie is far too complex for me" way. It's a continuity-busting, timeline-jumping, total mess of a film that cares far too little about making any sort of narrative sense. Just about the only coherent plot point is that at one point, the man who lived in the house in which the film takes place went insane and murdered his wife and son before commiting suicide, and their rage spirits have been imprinted on the building.

Yes, that is the only part that makes sense.

The plot is episodic: Character enters house. Character is stalked, scared, and eventually killed by ghost. New character is introduced.

This isn't done for any sort of meaning to be drawn from the parallel story lines, but merely as a way to set up even more scare scenes. In this way it is reminiscent of my beloved slasher films' body count padding, but it just kinda gets boring after a while.

It's a real shame, because the scare sequences it sets up when it gets around to it are very good, even great. In fact one scene near the finale of the film affected me so much I shook Sergio awake (he's not as devoted to the whole marathon thing as I am) and replayed it for him, then replayed it for my friends Henri and Shannon next time I saw them.

On top of all that lies the film's biggest problem: There are no rules governing the ghost's behavior. Sometimes it is confined within the house, sometimes it stalks people to their offices or apartments. Sometimes it kills you, sometimes you go insane. Sometimes it's the mom, sometimes the son, sometimes the dad, and one time a trio of zombie schoolgirls. It's a bloody mess is what it is, and I hope against hope that some film along this movie's tangled family line is capable of correcting these mistakes.

That said, I do love the burping ghost.

Rating: 3/10

The Grudge

Year: 2005

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Cast: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, William Mapother
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Buffy Summers is an exchange student in Tokyo who is haunted by the ghosts of Kayako and Toshio Saeki.

Wow, I tore right into Ju-On, didn't I? I'm a bit too fatigued from that travesty to really muster much anger against its American counterpart.

Directed by the same man, with the same actors playing the haunted family, and taking place in Japan, this movie shares many of the flaws of the original with the added wrinkle of trying to make sense of the "every main character is white" angle in a Japanese setting. 

However, this film is much more coherent, if only because they wanted to keep Sarah Michelle Gellar onscreen for as much as possible so they dropped the whole episodic thing and had mostly all of it happen to her. 

Rating: 4/10

It's been a fun ride so far, I can't wait to see what's in store. I leave you with an observation. These films contain a haunted videotape, a haunted landline, a haunted cell phone, a haunted apartment buzzer, and a haunted security camera. Next week's crop features a haunted answering machine and a haunted camera.

The Japanese are freaking terrified of technology.

And little boys.

Word Count: 2219

Reviews In This Series

J-Horrorthon Part 1 (June 15, 2013)

J-Horrorthon Part 2 (July 16, 2013)
J-Horrorthon Part 3 (August 15, 2013)
J-Horrorthon Part 4 (April 1, 2014)