General J-Horror Thread

[H-Man]

Jigoku (1960, dir: Nobuo Nakagawa) - Infamous Japanese horror film depicting the Buddhist Hell. The first two thirds is this really weird soap opera: Shiro Shimizu is a young man with a promising career as a scholar and who has just gotten engaged to Kyuhiko, the daughter of one of his professors. Unfortunately, he has a dark secret: he was involved in a hit-and-run (his "friend", Tamura, was driving) and Tamura seems to show up out of nowhere every time Shiro tries to turn himself in to the police. Meanwhile, the victim, a Yakuza leader, has a vengeful mother and his moll on Shiro's tail. The second act gets even more brazen, as Shiro goes to the countryside to visit his dying mother. His dad runs a 1960s Japanese equivalent of a retirement home, which is staffed and frequented by some of the worst people in existence. It looks like there are a lot of people who will have reservation in Hell.

That's where the last third comes in. We get a vision of Hell, which is pretty much as you might expect: people are mutilated, sawn asunder, flayed alive, and then put back together so they can go through it again. Some souls are forced to drink from pools of pus and bodily fluids while others are consigned to crawl across deserts where pools of water disappear once they come in reach. The movie ends ambiguously, with a smidgen of hope for a couple of characters. Come for stylish depiction of the suffering of the damned, stay for totally warped soap opera.

Black Cat Mansion (1958, dir: Nobuo Nakagawa) - Produced by Shintoho. In a premise similar to My Neighbor Totoro, a doctor moves out of Tokyo with his sick wife to the countryside of Kyushu so she can get away from the smog of the city and breathe some fresh air. And the mansion that they buy to change into his new clinic just happens to be haunted...or so the locals believe. Then an old lady whom only the wife can see starts stalking the place and attacking her. The rational-thinking husband finally visits the priest to learn the history of the place. Notable for having one of the earliest examples of the Spring-Loaded Cat. I like how the framing story is in black and white, but the flashback sequence is in color. There are elements to the story which would later find their way into contemporary J-Horror flicks like Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge.

The Snow Woman (1968, dir: Tokuzo Tanaka) - Produced by Daiei. Two woodcarvers--an old master and his apprentice--are in the forest one winter afternoon looking for the perfect tree to use in a sculpture of a goddess for their village's temple. Later that evening, an intense snow storm forces them to find refuge in a nearby barn. That night, they are visited by the legendary Snow Witch. She freezes the barn and kills the old man, but allows his apprentice, Yosuko, to live on account of his youth and handsome features. The catch is that he must swear to never reveal to anyone that he met her. The same story had also been told in the critically-acclaimed Kwaidan (1964), which was based on the works of Lafcadio Hearn, who spent the last 14 years of his life living in Japan and compiling folklore stories. This story is also the basis of the gargoyle segment of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990). Music by Akira Ifukube.

[MaxRebo320]

Those are all great choices! Nobuo Nakagawa is pretty underappreciated amongst genre fans. I take it you've seen his version of Ghost of Yotsuya/Yotsuya Kaidan? There are countless adaptations, but his is still widely regarded as the finest. Lady Vampire is a lot different from his other stuff, but is a pretty wild flick well worth your time.

I quite liked Daiei's Snow Woman, albeit the quality of my copy is piss-poor. Here's hoping Arrow puts it out on Blu in the future.

[H-Man]

Those are all great choices! Nobuo Nakagawa is pretty underappreciated amongst genre fans. I take it you've seen his version of Ghost of Yotsuya/Yotsuya Kaidan? There are countless adaptations, but his is still widely regarded as the finest. Lady Vampire is a lot different from his other stuff, but is a pretty wild flick well worth your time.

I quite liked Daiei's Snow Woman, albeit the quality of my copy is piss-poor. Here's hoping Arrow puts it out on Blu in the future.

I've long been ignorant of J-Horror on the whole, even though I've been a Godzilla fan for more than 30 years. I've mainly started investigating the genre in the past year, starting with whatever I can find on Youtube--in Brazil, only a handful of films have gotten a legitimate release and importing has become extremely expensive. I'll be on the lookout for Ghost of Yotsuya.

[JAGzilla]

Just got done with The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch . Noriaki Yuasa's imagination didn't disappoint, and the synopsis didn't exaggerate; this may have been a movie intended for kids, but it probably scarred a lot of them for life.

Spoiler:

Like, seriously, what the hell? Tamami wanting to eat her sister's hands, toads getting ripped in half, snakes getting thrown in vats of acid, kindly nuns getting knifed, Ms. Shige bashing Sayuri's bleeding fingers with a huge wooden post. Bunch of depraved stuff in this movie. So it was right in line with the Gamera series, pretty much. It really is a shame that Yuasa never directed anything else, because he had a really unique demented-yet-wholesome style to his films that I'd love to see more of.

Sayuri was a little bit of a mixed bag as a protagonist. She was generally likable and easy to root for, but was a little too calm and emotionless (mostly) to really be believable. Her bravery and determination were fine, but a little more visible fear would've helped sell the horror of her situation and make her look that much more heroic for forging through it.

Tamami's actress did a great job, though. She simultaneously played bullying older sister, bizarre monster, and desperate little girl with a tragic backstory, and managed to make them all work. She made for a very effective villain.

And I loved the low-budget effects. Halloween decoration-level spiders and snakes are always fun, and the random Tamami marionette in the dream sequences was a great balance between goofy and legitimately disturbing.

[H-Man]

Shrill Cries of Summer (2008) - aka When They Cry - Japanese title: Higurashi no naku koro ni - Live-action adaptation of the 2006 anime series "When They Cry", which itself is based on a popular series of visual novels in Japan. The premise is that there's a small village somewhere in Japan known as Hinamizawa, which in the late 70s was the site for the construction of the dam. The villagers revolted and, after the kidnapping of a government official's grandson, construction was halted and ultimately cancelled. Starting in 1979, every year at the village's annual Cotton Drifting Festival, a murder (or two) occcurs, with the victim being someone associated with the dam project. The story proper starts in the summer of 1983, with the arrival of a teenager named Maebara Keiichi in the village. The general premise is that while the backstory is more or less fixed, Keiichi's story is highly variable according to the player's decisions.

This film follows the first arc of the anime. Keiichi arrives in Hinamizawa and befriends a group of girls at the local school--there are only 15 kids in the village, so they all share the same classroom. There's Sonozaki Mion, the oldest of the bunch; Ryûgu Rena, who's Keiichi's age; and a pair of 13-year-olds, Hôjo Satoko and Furude Rika. Rika stands out in that she's the miko, or priestess, of the village. Keiichi learns about the village's religious beliefs, which revolve around a guardian deity named Oyashiro-sama. He also picks up hints of the village's dark history, which his friends are loathe to discuss whenever he brings them up. So what happens when Keiichi breaks the village's taboo and enters Oyashiro-sama's tool shrine during the Cotton Drifting Festival?

On one hand, I can understand them wanting adapt the first arc, as it's the most self-contained of the anime (I've seen so far) and the most overtly supernatural. That way, the characters' motivations as the mystery gains in intensity can easily be explained by "supernatural stuff is afoot." But some details included go completely unexplained, so that viewers unfamiliar with the source material will undoubtedly be scratching their heads (i.e. What's with the mysterious guys in the van?). And despite running almost 30 minutes longer than the same story in the anime version, a few scenes (like the cryptic apology scene) aren't even included. The film is unsettling, to be sure, and has some of the most squirm-inducing examples of neck violence that I've seen in a long time (I hate neck violence). But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't watched the anime yet.

[H-Man]

Shrill Cries: Reshuffle (2009) - aka When the Cry: Reshuffle - Japanese Title: Higurashi no naku koro ni: Chikai - This sequel to the 2008 film also follows the 2006 anime series, this time focusing on the show's sixth arc, "Atonement." This arc focuses on the character of Ryûgû Rena (Airi Matsuyama), who has a myriad of problems. Her backstory is that she was born in the mysterious village of Hinamizawa and then moved to another town. She had a violent psychotic episode at her high school after her mom revealed to her that she was leaving her dad after getting pregnant by a lover. The guardian deity of Hinamizawa, Oyashira-sama, convinced her to return to the village with her dad. Now, her suppressed psychotic tendencies are forced to the surface when she discovers that her dad's new girlfriend, Ritsuko (Miho Yabe), is a gold-digging whore and extortionist. Murder is soon afoot, and Rena's growing paranoia soon reaches epic proportions. Meanwhile, Maebura Keiichi (Gôki Maeda) is starting to have flashbacks to his actions from alternate universes (i.e. the first film).

This film more or less follows the anime arc to the letter, albeit with a much darker ending and a few references to the anime's third arc, too. I do think that the anime handled the subplot involving Keiichi's "memories" better than this movie did. The biggest difference is how the subplot involving Takano-san's scrapbook is handled. In the anime, Takano's conclusions about Oyashira-sama's curse offered a (relatively) realistic explanation for what we took be the supernatural explanation for the events of the first arc. It ultimately sought to turn the first arc on its head and refute our initial conclusions.

In this movie, however, Takano's theory is brought up, although given less attention than it was in the anime. However, the characters immediately argue that it's nothing but a crackpot idea. It's an ambiguous treatment of the material, as the explanation goes from "supernatural conspiracy theory" to "medical horror" to your more old-fashioned "paranoid psychosis." But then, that doesn't really explain the other mysterious deaths. So in that case, I prefer the anime to this film.

[H-Man]

Ashura (2005) - original title: Ashura-jô no hitomi - It's almost fitting that I watched this after I watched Demon Slayer the Movie, as this movie does revolve around a similar premise: in the Edo period, the Capital is infested with demons. There is a corps of sword-wielding warriors known as the Demon Wardens whose job is to exterminate them. One of them, Izumo (Somegoro Ichikawa, who played the same role in the 2015 adaptation of the same material), retires from the force after a traumatic incident during araid. Izumo becomes a popular Kabuki actor, whose writer, Naboku Tsuruya IV (Fumiyo Kohinata, Dark Water and Beyond Outrage), is desperate for some new inspiration. Izumo meets a travelling acrobat, Tsubaki (Rie Miyazawa, of The Twilight Samurai). Tsubaki is destined to be the vessel through which the demon queen, Ashura, is reborn. Izumo falls for Tsubaki as he tries to protect her from the machinations of the evil nun Bizan (Casshern's Kanako Higuchi) and her lover, former demon slayer Jaku (TV actor Atsuro Watabe).

The film is based off of a play, although I don't know if its a modern play or a kabuki play. The film is mainly a love story, which permeates the proceedings right up to the final sword fight and its conclusion. The demons are very similar to those in "Demon Slayer," in which they look like normal humans until it's time to feast on blood. In this case, they have neon green eyes and green CGI blood. There is a fair amount of action in the film, although it's choreographed more like a traditional chanbara film than in Hong Kong style, as many of its contemporaries (like Death Trance) were. The climax has our hero fighting of scores of ogres in an upside-down castle, with the camera moving in vertical circles around our hero, followed by a series of one-on-one duels. There are some good sets and costumes, plus lots of of Godzilla-style miniatures during the destruction of Edo sequence. With the exception to some just-ok CGI, the film looks pretty good.

Rie Miyazawa is very cute; she looks like a Japanese Michelle Yeoh from some angles. Apparently, she was a girl-next-door actress until she did a film called Erotic Liaisons and released a nude photo book, which was hugely successful. She had some personal problems in the late 90s and dated a Sumo wrestler, but was able to put her career back together in the 2000s. Somegoro Ichikawa makes for a convincing romantic hero, with a dollop of playful arrogance to complement his sword-fighting scenes. I guess that makes sense, as he was also in The Samurai I Loved.

Strangest thing about the movie: a cover of "My Funny Valentine" sung by Sting(!) plays over the closing credits.

[H-Man]

The Neighbor No. 13 (2005, d: Yasuo Inoue) - original title: Rinjin 13-gô - I became familiar with Shun Oguri through the recent Godzilla vs. Kong, but the man has 129 credits on the IMDB right now. The man is as prolific as heck; if he keeps it up, he'll beat James Hong's record some day. He plays Juzo Murasaki, a quiet young man with some severe psychological scarring due to being bullied as a child. The family who has moved into the apartment upstairs--a man, his wife, and their mute(?) son--triggers Juzo. Turns out that the patriarch, a bully-turned-Yakuza-turned-construction-worker named Toru Akai, was Juzo's bully. And he's Juzo's supervisor at his new construction job. By Juzo carries a secret: a second personality (Shido Nakamura of Fearless and Red Cliff) who's a complete psychopath. People soon start dying. The film is slow-moving and quite disturbing at times, with some great imagery in the beginning. After watching the film, I visited the IMDB to see what others thought. Most people were confused at the ending, although one guy seemed to get it. If his interpretation is right, than it is a very original take on the revenge theme.

Spoiler:

The viewer suggests that most of the movie shows us what might have happened with Juzo later in life had he not eventually fought his bully, which is shown at the very end of the movie. By beating down Toru as a kid, he kept No. 13 (his other personality) from being created.

[H-Man]

The Ghost of Kasane Swamp (1957, d: Nobuo Nakagawa) - aka: The Depths - original title: Kaidan Kasani-ga-fuchi - A blind masseuse (who doesn't carry a cane sword) visits a samurai client whom owes him money. The samurai can't even give him a little bit of what he owes, so he kills the masseuse and has his body dumped in the local swamp. The samurai goes mad, kills his wife, and then disappears into the swamp. His baby son is taken to Edo and is raised by another family. Twenty years later, the son, Shinkichi, is the servant to a young Miss Hisa, who is in an arranged marriage to a young lord named Saetoro. Miss Hisa is learning music from Miss Rui, the daughter of the murdered masseuse. Both are in love with Shinkichi, but the villainous machinations of the wicked samurai Omuri (Tetsuro Tanba) will guarantee that everybody has a tragic ending.

The movie starts out well, getting straight to the murder and subsequent haunting. It then veers into soap opera territory with a complicated love rectangle/pentagon before finally eeking out some atmosphere in the final few minutes. The best I can say is that the lead actresses, Norika Kitazawa (Miss Hisa) and Katsuko Wakasugi (Miss Rui), are very beautiful women. And the film is only 65 minutes long.

[H-Man]

Don't Look Up (1996, d: Hideo Nakata) - Orig. title: Joyû rei - Interesting pre-Ringu film from Hideo Nakata features a long-haired adolescent girl girl dressed in white, albeit less creepy than Sadako. There's film crew shooting a low-budget period drama at an old studio. The director, Murai (Yûrei Yanagi, who was the first two Ringu films as Reiko's coworker), starts having visions of a ghostly girl wandering about the studio, sometimes in the rafters (hence the title). There is some connection between the visions and some made-for-TV horror show that Murai saw as a kid decades earlier, although the story never really explains it. Honestly, the supernatural goings on are treated almost as a secondary plot, with the bulk of the movie focusing on the filming experience itself, which was kinda interesting. I can kinda see how Hideo Nakata got hired for Ringu, even though this film on the whole is unremarkable.

[H-Man]

Sweet Home (1989, d: Kiyoshi Kurosawa) - Horror movie that was produced and released alongside a Famicon video game of the same name. Said video game became the first survival horror game and a precursor to Resident Evil--both were made by Capcom. This is one of director Kurosawa's earlier directorial efforts, before he became the horror great that he is recognized as now. It's not bad, but if you saw the title and thought that this might be the next Hausu, you'd be better off re-watching that one instead.

A team of documentarians manage to obtain permission to enter the notorious Mamiya Mansion, which is said to be cursed. I'm guessing this place is located in the Tottori Prefecture, as the film opens with the characters in the middle of a sandstorm while the Producer, Kazuo (Shingo Yamashiro), haggles with the local authorities. The rest of the crew consists of the director, Akiko (Nobuko Miyamoto); the cameraman, Taguchi (Ichiro Furutachi); the reporter/art expert, Asuka (Fukumi Kuroda); and Kazuo's daughter, Emi (Nokko). The purpose of the documentary is to explore the mansion and search for lost art that its previous owner, a great artist named Mamiya, might have left behind. Nothing overtly supernatural happens at first. But then Taguchi knocks over a stone totem/altar, which, if you have seen Avalanche Sharks or GMK, is a big no-no...

The movie takes a little while to get going, but the second half is pretty crazy. There are some very gory deaths on display, which are really neat. When people die, they. Die. Hard. The final scenes are almost so happy as to belong in a less intense horror movie, and the solution to the hauntings is almost so simple as to make one wonder, "Why didn't anyone ever try that before?"

[H-Man]

Tomie (1998, d: Ataru Oikawa) - First film in a franchise of eight movies based on a manga by Junji Ito. The premise revolves around a girl, Tomie, who is both enchantingly beautiful and immortal, and whose mere presence (not to mention flirtatious manner) drives men to murder and madness. In this first film, we follow a college girl, Tsukiko, who is taking a photography class during her summer vacation. Tsukiko has some selected amnesia revolving an unexplained accident a few years before, and is seeing a psychiatrist in hopes of reviving her memories. Meanwhile, the new tenant in her apartment building is taking care of what appears to be a severed human head...

Whatever this film's pedigrees are, it's not a particularly well-constructed or even spooky movie. There are several parallel plot strands, most of which never come together in any meaningful way. This is especially true for the subplot involving Tsukiko's boyfriend Yuiichi having an affair with her best friend, Kaori. Detective-Inspector Exposition hangs around just to do that: spout off exposition, but never actually contributes to what's going on in the present. At first it looks like the Psychiatrist is going to do some investigating of her own, but in the end, she's just a non-entity. At no point before the climax does Tsukiko ever realize that she's in any kind of danger, so there's no gradual feeling of dread there. Lots of disturbing stuff happens offscreen and/or is completely unexplained: Just how did Kaori end up in Tomie's apartment? At what point did Tomie bewitch the landlord? What exactly were the circumstances involving the deaths of Yuiichi's co-workers? And where is Tsukiko's mother, whom she is always talking about?

[H-Man]

Tomie Replay (2000, d: Fujiro Mitsuishi) - The second follow-up--following a 3-part anthology series that was packaged and released to theaters--to Tomie is more of a horror movie than the first and fifth entries, beginning with a horrific opening scene of a medical team trying to remove a tumor from the stomach of a young girl, only to discover that said tumor is the living head of our titular character (played this time by Hôshô Mai)! In the following days (or weeks), the surgical team goes crazy and the head surgeon/hospital director disappears. From there on out, the director's daughter, Yumi (Sayaka Yamaguchi) investigates her father's disappearance with the help of Fumihito (Yosuke Kubozuka), whose friend went insane after brings a fully-grown Tomie back to his pad

The first film was a badly-structured mix of mystery and teen drama, with Tomie's face being obscured until her seduction of an important male character in the third act. There isn't much mystery about who Tomie is or why she's dangerous, so new director Fujiro Mitsuishi plays up the horror elements (and interestingly enough, plays down the sexual ones) this time. There is a bit of a mystery in terms of what exactly happened to Yumi's father, which leads to a number of creepy moments. The film suggests that Tomie is the J-horror equivalent of Drexler's Grey Goo, although I don't think that angle will be explored until later installments. But it does explain how this movie could be set in the same universe as Tomie while having nothing to do with the events from that one. IMDB reviews suggest that this is the best entry in the franchise.

[H-Man]

Tomie Re-birth (2001, d: Takashi Shimizu) - The fourth entry in the series is interesting in which it jettisons all elements of mystery from the story and features a more-focused plot that can best be described as a "Vengeful ex-girlfriend" story, but with horrific overtones. The film opens with a talented artist, Hideo (Shugo Oshinari), painting a picture of Tomie (Miki Sakai), our resident narcissistic Lorelei (filtered through Reptilicus). She destroys the painting when he finishes, prompting him to slit her throat with a painter's knife in a fit of anger. With the help of his two friends, Shunichi (Masaya Kikawada) and Takumi (Satoshi Tsumabuki), Hideo disposes of Tomie's body...albeit not for long. She shows up a few days later at a party and drives Hideo to suicide, and then exacts her revenge against the other two by inserting herself their lives and turning them upside-down.

Notable for being Takashi Shimizu's directorial effort immediately preceding Ju-On: The Grudge, his entry is just as violent as the other ones, but decidedly less creepy than the previous Tomie Replay. Miki Sakai plays her Tomie less as the seductress from the first film or the cynical man-hater from Tomie Replay, but more as a master manipulator hidden behind a thick veneer of kawaii. The movie doesn't do much to further the Tomie lore, except that it posits that Tomie is less Reptilicus and more John Carpenter's The Thing, in that exposure to just a few of her cells (or strands of hair) can infect and possess someone.

[H-Man]

Tomie: Another Face (1999, d: Toshiro Inomata) - Second entry in the franchise is actually three episodes from a TV anthology series edited into a single film. In the first story, Tomie (the gorgeous Runa Nagai) shows up at school after having been found dead by authorities some days before. She tries to get back together with her former boyfriend, but his ex-girlfriend stands in her way... In the second story, a photographer who's in a creative funk meets Tomie, who's working as a go-go dancer of sorts at a bar. She reminds me him of a girl he was infatuated with years before. She agrees to be his muse, but when the photos are developed... Finally, a businessman is about to ask his girlfriend, Tomie, to marry him. But then a mysterious man, a former autopsy doctor, shows up and tells him the truth about his love...

Most people dismiss this on account of its production values and acting. As beautiful as Runa Nagai is--especially when she dons a yipao in the second episode (yowza!)--her voice is high pitched and kinda annoying. Like a parody of the stereotypical child-like Japanese girl voice. My main problem is that the finale of the third episode, which is framed as a huge twist, goes against the "rules" for Tomie as established in the other films and Junji Ito's manga. And if you consider it for more than a few seconds, you'd have to assume that she would have Grey Goo'd the world decades earlier. I do like that it establishes Tomie as being the personification of narcissism, as if Pandora had opened her box and the demon of narcissistic behavior took the form of a hot Asian girl with a mole below her left eye.

Tomie: Revenge (2005, d: Ataru Oikawa) - Seventh entry in the franchise is a DTV film and generally considered the weakest of the bunch. A doctor at a small mountain village hospital runs into a naked girl (Anri Ban) in the forest. The girl is unhurt and the doctor follows her to an isolated cottage inhabited by some of Tomie's male admirers and an unconscious girl. The girl is taken back to civilization, but is missing her memory of how she ended up at the cottage. The doctor, a single lady, takes a liking to her and even considers adopting her...until one evening Tomie's goons show up at the hospital.

Tomie doesn't really show up until the end, where she starts making (to quote an IMDB reviewer) SCUM Manifesto speeches. Although the Tomie in Tomie Replay was also a man-hater, this one feels false and forced, mainly because we haven't seen her interact with anyone up to that point. Moreover, the most we'd seen of her was through a camcorder tape showing her ordering her male admirers to kill an innocent young woman, so WTF? Also, the climax involves neither the rescued girl or the female doctor, but hinges on the sudden revelation that one of the male cast members has actually been holding a torch for Tomie, despite there being NO SCENE to establish that he'd even had any contact with her in the first place...and all this seconds after the revelation that there's a second Tomie who's feeding off the entrails of one of the male followers, zombie-style. These two events are happening within a few feet of each other, but the script focuses on the former and COMPLETEY FORGETS about the latter. WTF? And the final scenes are so completely random that I can't help but think that the entire script was cobbled together from ideas at a stage 1 brainstorming session.

One Missed Call (2003, d: Takashi Miike) - Takashi Miike's entry in the "long-haired, vengeful female ghost" genre following the success of Ringu is considered a parody by many, mainly because it slavishly copies the tropes so thoroughly that nobody thinks he was really taking it seriously. People receive phone messages dated in the future, with the message being their own horrible deaths. It starts as The Ring meets Final Destination, and then off the rails in the last 30 minutes or so. The final twist was eventually stolen for the Ouija movie. The film runs a good 20 minutes too long, with the police characters being unnecessary and the TV show subplot, while interesting in showing the effect of such a curse on popular culture, is completely forgot about in the third act. I would have liked to have seen the fallout of Natsumi's death on camera to the TV station.

[H-Man]

Ju-On: The Grudge (2002, d: Takashi Shimizu) - The third film (and first theatrically-released one) in the franchise is what inspired Hollywood to remake it (with Shimizu himself at the helm) in 2004. Much like the previous Ju-On: The Curse films, this is little more than a series of vignettes about the horrible fates of those who have moved into the former Saeki residence. This one focuses on a single family and the employees of a Social Services company who regularly check in on the husband's aging mother.

For the first hour, you'll find that little has changed between this one and The Grudge. The last half hour or so takes on a different turn. Whereas The Grudge focuses on the Sarah Michelle Gellar narrative and supplements the set pieces with ones cribbed from Ju-On: The Curse, the original version actually jumps a decade or so into the future. We learn that the final set piece of Ju On: The Curse 2 was also set years after the events of that movie and this film finally gives a bit more meat to that segment. The non-linear nature of these scenes make the final moments a bit confusing, and the impetus for Rika to revisit the Saeki house after so many years is just stupid. There is also no explanation of why Kayako treated Rika different than all the other women who'd ever entered the house.


Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003, d: Takashi Shimizu) - Although this one continues to be played out as a series of non-linear vignettes with intertitles that tell us who'll probably be dead by the end of the segment, this one has more of an actual plot thant he previous entries. Long story short, a sensationalist TV program wants to shoot an episode at the Saeki residence, with the gimmick being that horror movie queen Kyoko Harase (singer Noriko Sakai) will be in attendance. After the episode, members of the cast crew either die under mysterious circumstances or simply disappear. Kyoko seems to be spared, but Kayako has something else in store for her.

The fact that the narrative is a bit more focused (albeit still presented out of order) made this a better watch than the Ju-On: The Grudge. I still wish that the rules of Ju-On were better explained, since people die that had never stepped into the house in the first place.

Spoiler:

The film climaxes (ha!) with an adult Kayako emerging from Kyoko's vagina in a hospital and scaring a team of nurses and obstetricians to death. The last scene, however, begs the question: "If you go through all that trouble to get yourself reborn, can't you do so without being infected with all the hate and anger from your previous life? Apparently, not."

[Tyrant_Lizard_King]

Ringu is coming to 4K disc from Arrow video.