Tag Archives: Japanese horror

Jigoku (1960)

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This week’s approximately 4 year-old-podcast movie was Japanese and 1960s, I am pretty sure? The latter is the slight uncertainty. Anyway, Jigoku is… not precisely weird, so much as foreign. So the first thing that happens[1] is a bright young college kid who is marrying the professor’s daughter and in all ways has the perfect future ahead of him, is a passenger in the car of his friend who is basically a total dick at every moment from his first scene to his last, our hero[2] I was saying is in the car with his friend Dickchan when the friend does a hit and run on a Yakuza guy.

Shiro is horrified and guilty and decides to go the the police, only on the way tragedy strikes in the form of a second car wreck for no apparent reason, and now he’s lost pretty much all of his bright future. So he goes home because his mom is sick and on the way out the door, only to discover a nest of small-town vipers, plus the Yakuza dude’s mom and girlfriend want revenge, and about two-thirds of the way through the movie, it goes full Hamlet and basically everyone you’ve seen since the first reel is now in hell and being punished, Japan-style.

So I said foreign earlier, and none of the above is what I mean. What I could not wrap my head around is why Shiro felt so guilty over all the terrible things that happened, basically none of which he had any control over or culpability in, to my Western sensibilities. And then on top of that, was he being punished in hell because of his guilty conscience, or did the movie agree with him that he was in fact terrible and deserving of all the things being promised to him by the omnipresent king of hell narrator guy? (And then there’s the girl in purgatory for the sin(?) of predeceasing her parents. I mean, yes, that’s a horrifying thing for a parent to imagine, but that should not be how the afterlife works.)

These ontological disconnects aside, I think I liked it. The tragic collapse-of-everything setpiece was engrossing, and the 65 years ago practical effects depicting the eight (or possibly sixteen) Japanese hells was a pretty solid dive into a genre with which I have very little experience, until it’s 40 years later and dominated by angry long-haired ghost girls.

I almost signed up for the 7 day free trial of Criterion for this one. They’re going to snag me, someday. I can see it coming, like a slow motion steamroller shot from 3-5 different camera angles.

[1] Not exactly a spoiler, as it’s all pretty much from the first five minutes, but if you want to check out a Criterion channel early Japanese horror flick unspoiled, hit the eject button now, as I don’t plan to be shy with laying things out.
[2] named Shiro, ha

Ringu

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MV5BMTIyMDEyMjY3MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTg3NDEzMQ@@._V1_A thing I had never gotten around to watching is the Japanese movie that inspired The Ring. I was pretty much saving it, maybe for a marathon? I don’t know. See, I’ve got this box filled with horror movies on DVD that I collected over the course of the Oughts, and for a good chunk of that time it sat in my car so I’d have it with me when I went places. Mostly the only person who would put up with the kinds of movies that went into the box was my oldest friend, Jeff. So, occasionally movies would be watched (Mulva: Zombie Ass-Kicker, anyone?) and removed from the box, only to be replaced by others. And then I managed to lose the box for most of a decade, as a consequence of a move in late 2006. (Or I lost it later than that in my garage of doom, because of all the other boxes that really did languish there for most of said decade? Either way.)

But I found it during last year’s move, hooray! Only, most of the time since then, Jeff was in and out of hospital rooms until, y’know, he stopped being in and out of hospitals, so the box has languished in a storage closet once again, Ringu and its many sequels (not to mention dozens of other, mostly worse movies) still unwatched. But for some reason, I thought of it after we watched As Above, So Below last weekend, and we made a double feature of it.

Anyway, it was pretty much exactly the same as my memory of The Ring, so there’s not a lot to say in terms of review. In case you don’t know, there’s a VHS tape that, when you watch it, you die seven days later. And nobody knows why! I could digress on the laughability of VHS being applicable to modern life, but a) I’ve done this before, b) the movie is nearly 20 years old, and mostly c) my heart’s just not in it. Too busy being sad about how full the horror movie box is, and how long it sat there, thinking it had all the time in the world.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

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I’ve played a lot of games this summer, you guys! And I’m seemingly not done yet, so, pretty cool. Anyway, this is a sequel to a game from back before the console revolution, F.E.A.R. The second entry, Project Origin covers the immediate aftermath of original game, from a new perspective and with some small degree of overlap. Basically, where the first game explored the mystery of how the creepy little girl was involved with Paxton Fettel and his army of psychically-controlled Replicant soldiers, the second game goes deeper into both the future and the past of the corporation that caused all of this to be as well as into the story of Alma herself, creepier than ever but no longer quite so little.

Of course, not much of the game by percentage follows that story, and what is revealed is on the whole unsatisfying by itself: this game has “middle of a trilogy” written all over it. And honestly I don’t think the enemy AI was as challenging as last time, though whether that says more about the game or me is impossible to determine. Luckily, it was still eminently playable and full of moody scares, which is really the number one reason I was here in the first place. At least as scary as I remember the first one being? So between that and the speed with which I breezed through it, I regret nothing and in fact still want to play the third (and final?) game in the series.

I should also admit that even though the whole game felt like a trap, the unavoidability of its execution reminded me quite a bit of a certain underwater allegory I played a few years ago, and I found the end of the game to be extremely satisfying. (The admission is due to my theory that most people won’t have cared for the ending, you see.)

Rinne

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Moving right along, then. The second film of the evening was Reincarnation, another in what is certain to be a long line of J-Hor hits that get remade into American versions in which petite blonde girls face almost certain doom and then re-appear in an American sequel which has no J-Hor analog, despite that Japanese sequels exist. (I couldn’t tell you which sequels end up better, although The Ring Two was an excellent movie.) Since J-Hor movies are actually more spooky than horror, I’ll forego the drive-in totals.

Reincarnation is about… well, I think you know, right? It’s a pretty well-known word, and all. Anyhow, a director has set his sights on making an emotions- rather than plot- based movie retelling the story of the 1970 mass murder of eleven people at the Oko Kanko hotel (or something like that) by a disturbed professor who subsequently committed suicide. Seems very artistic and well outside my usual tastes, but that’s the movie he’s making, not the one that I watched, so it’s okay. And considering that it reminded me a fair bit of The Shining, it’s only fair that the director character should make me think of Kubrick. And during casting, he immediately focusses on a soft-spoken young actress to be his lead, despite any tangible skills. (She didn’t even seem to audition at all, so much as just show up in the room.) Unfortunately for her, from the moment that filming begins, she has an inexplicable connection to the subject matter, which kicks into overdrive as soon as they start filming on location. In no time at all, it’s easy to imagine that she might be (admit it, you saw this coming) the reincarnation of one of the victims. But will she survive her return to the site of her tragic end?

Well, as to that… I have a theory.

F.E.A.R.

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The video game renaissance continues unabated. Earlier this week, I finished another shooter with the unlikely acronym expansion of First Encounter Assault Recon, a government organization called in whenever the military anticipates paranormal activity on a combat assignment. In this case, a psychic with control over a thousand clone troops has snapped, started eating people, and taken control of a military contractor’s facility. What’s a guy to do but strap on some guns and start hunting clones? Except, the little girl in the red dress who keeps incinerating the normal backup units is making things… complicated.

I was surprised by how good this game was. The AI thing is really starting to get a lot better, such that part of the strategy for surviving an encounter with an enemy squad is making sure there’re enough items around to heal you afterward, rather than the old restore from save if you get hurt any trick. On top of that, I never imagined playing through a Japanese horror film, but that’s what this was, despite the wholly Americanized plotline that encases it. Several genuinely scary moments in the dark room with those headphones on.

The really cool backgrounds and graphics were ruined for me by Condemned, though. I just finished playing it in huge screen HD glory before F.E.A.R., only to find myself in another game made by the same people, which meant that I’d seen a lot of the background items and some of the background buildings just before, but in almost infinitely better resolution. (It might be time to upgrade my video card, though I won’t. It’s definitely time to upgrade my CPU and maybe motherboard, though I doubt I’ll do that either. This is why consoles hold the market share. Much lower cost to maintain, as long as you were going to get a good TV for your monitor anyway.)

Dark Water (2005)

mv5botcymdq3mjetnjzkos00zdq0lwe1ywmtytnknmnizju0mzhhxkeyxkfqcgdeqxvymtqxnzmzndi-_v1_There’s nothing about doing a job search via the internet that really sucks up a lot of your time, assuming you have a pre-made résumé just waiting to go. And I do. Which leaves me with no good excuse for going most of a week with two more movies under my belt, and yet, here I am. If I hadn’t conveniently lost my out of print Brust novel, I’d be a book behind by now, too.

In any case, the J-horror invasion continues, this time menacing Jennifer Connelly with some Dark Water, which is worse than it sounds because, seriously, said water looked very, very gross. As usual, the dread builds up pretty well over time, and also as usual, the Eastern plotting style never quite gels with my Western expectations. There’s a whole plot wrapped up around Jennifer having issues with being late, dating to her childhood, and then halfway through the movie, it’s dropped completely. More damning, though, is that she didn’t spend half as much time soaked as I was expecting from the title and previews. So much for my predictions about ‘the role she was born to play’. Don’t despair, though. Tim Roth’s lawyer is worth the price of admission, if perhaps not the amount of time it takes to get him on the screen. (Note: he doesn’t spend any time soaked, so that’s not why.)

I’m starting to wonder what the deal is with the Japanese psyche that so much of its fear elements are wrapped up in motherhood issues. Not every single movie I’ve seen in this particular horror genre hits the topic, but it’s holding steady at 75 percent. I bet there’s a paper in this that I would be forced to write if I were in film school, and I’d pass because of how it’s a foreign film thing, even though otherwise I’d fail because it’s horror and that’s not real film-making. Or perhaps I’m unnecessarily bitter.

Chakushin Ari

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I have a sense that I’m occasionally going to have to plan trips to Austin solely for the movie-watching opportunities. You know, after I move. Right now, all the planning it takes is remembering to walk out the door a touch over an hour before the movie starts. Which is sufficiently non-trivial that I skip out on lots of stuff I’d love to see, already. So, yeah, that whole going to Austin thing is gonna suck. Perhaps I’ll plan weekends around it, based on cool-movie density. Until then, though, I get to review randomly awesome movies that nobody else has ever heard of.

Such as the one I saw last night, One Missed Call. Yet another Japanese horror movie (as you could probably already tell by the confluence of the imdb-transliterated entry title and my well-documented movie tastes), and it’s getting to the point where there are definitely tropes for the genre. A couple of obvious ones are that the scary avenging spirit must have bad, face-concealing hair and that mirrors are more trustworthy windows on reality than unaided eyes. Plus, there’s the thing where technology has a terrifying dark side. I think that’s what keeps me coming back, and why American horror can’t compete. There’s nothing that terrifies us as a people united, the way that Japan was terrified by the atom bomb in 1945. Without that cultural consciousness to lend gravity to generations of authors and film-makers, we’ve just got people throwing darts and then duplicating the things that work, over and over again, without any solid idea of why they worked. Thus endeth my sojourn into the comparative anatomy of 25 years of US horror movies vs. 10 years of Japanese horror movies.

As far as the movie at hand: It was longer than I’m used to a horror movie being, because it was trying to be a lot of things. “They’ll kill us through our cellphones” is one of them, and it worked now as well as Ringu must have in 1998, because everyone has a cellphone / everyone had a VCR, so immediately your audience is going to identify with what makes it fundamentally scary. So, that was successful. It was also trying to be “The media does not care if it destroys your soul in the quest for ratings”, and that one also worked. That particular sequence makes me think that someone will want to remake this for American audiences, because of how well we can understand what the film-maker was going for. In point of fact, I wonder if it was a jab at the American media specifically, or if Japan has it as bad as we do.

Sadly, the rest of the things it was trying to be (“Look out for the psycho-killer”, “Stop abusing me, mommy”, “A glimpse of the afterlife”) were less effective. Not because any of them are uninteresting themes, but because they kept being crowded out by the primary two and by each other. The way it worked out in the end was that I found the imagery sufficiently disturbing for the cheap thrills part of my brain, and the themes scary enough for the analytical part, that I was completely satisfied by the horror movie experience. Despite that, I had a couple of niggling questions, things that I wish I had understood better and wonder if I would have, coming at it from the Japanese mindset instead of my tragically self-involved Western one.

If you have a way to rent it or see it somewhere and you liked the Ring, you should catch it. A bonus spot for me was that I could tell the people apart. This makes me feel less bad about myself over the Ju-on thing where I couldn’t. Instead of blaming it on my cultural insensitivity, I can now blame it on either the out-of-order narrative or the casting director for actually picking people who did all look alike. Another bonus spot: unexpected boobies. I didn’t think they did that in Japanese horror. Unless you are me, probably you should watch it only for the first reason, and not based on the bonus spots.

The Ring Two

MV5BMTY2ODc2NTQ2OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNzA4OTU3._V1_I finally got out to a movie again, which is nice, because I was starting to feel bad about how few I’ve seen this year. (Barely more than one per month!) Despite the overcrowded and subsequently hot theater, I went for the one I wanted to see the most out of my available choices, The Ring Two. The title really bothers me, and I don’t know why. Is it because it’s too short or monosyllabic to have the number appended? Is it because it’s written out instead of numeralized? Maybe it’s just because the posters with Two written out and the o matches the Ring imagery from the original movie is so brilliant that any other vision of the title pales by comparison. Seriously, good poster. I kinda wish I collected movie posters. Perhaps once I have a bigger house I’ll make a poster room, and spend a lot of unnecessary money on eBay.

So, yeah, there’s this movie. The first one was really scary, despite the ridiculous premise that people are still watching anything on videotape. As the movie opened, and I know it’s only supposed to be six months later by plot, but it’s been several years in real life, and also the kid is the same actor, so he looks several years older, and my point here is even if I could handle it in 2002, no way am I going to buy into the videotape thing in 2005, and as the movie opened I was already rolling my eyes. (Also: I was starting to think that opening night is a bad time to see a horror movie, because too many people were too amused, but that faded at the same time my eye-rolling did, so I instead take this as proof that the rest of America agrees with me on the ridiculousness of anyone watching a videotape, or probably even owning a VCR.) Luckily, the people making the movie seemed to get that, and the plot unleashed the scary drowned spider girl into a different, somewhat less scary[1] but more emotionally resonant and symbolism-filled world.

Symbolism and to spare. Lots of iconic ring and related images to be found all over the place. (I can’t go into detail there without spoiling the first movie.) Lots of water imagery. A distorted reflection of the maternal themes in Aliens, which now that I think about it was also less scary but more emotionally resonant than the movie it was a sequel to. I like this thing where horror movies are deep, but still manage to get in the scary cinematography, oppresive musical score, and sure, occasional cheap thrill. It’s kind of like science fiction in the literary world, in that there’s room to explore pretty much anything you can imagine, yet it’s all lumped together in one critically dismissed (although increasingly less so, in both cases) category based strictly on a setting that everyone assumes isn’t adult enough to care about.

Scary? Sure. Good plot? For the most part, although I still don’t really get what it is that Samara actually does to her victims. I think this is a Japanese horror trope, the idea that you can be scared to death without worrying about what was so scary, so I’m willing to let it go. It is creepily effective, so it’s easy to not mind. Extras for people who just want to see boobies and cameos? Naomi Watts is the star of a movie filled with water-related events, so you do the math there. Also, Bingo Bob has an amusing turn as a real estate agent. (And gets fourth or so billing out of basically a cameo-sized appearance, which surprised me; but the cast is small and therefore more personal, which is a good thing for the story as written.)

[1] With the exception of Halloween 2, all horror movie sequels are less scary. And it’s only as scary, because no horror sequels are more scary than the original. Can’t be done.