Regarding my Yurei series

First off allow me to say this has been a wonderful Halloween. I've enjoyed doing research on and watching the movies that I have been writing about over the past week. Watching these movies is great, but it's writing about them that you really come to appreciate these works of art, I envy people who get to do it as a proffession.

However, I'd like to appologise now for failing to meet the expectations that I had for myself, and had promised to meet. I promised 7 movies, and had planned to deliver. However, as it got closer and closer to the deadline for these releases I found it increasingly difficult to cope. It's a combination of factors, some of which I'm to blame for, and others which were totally outwith my own control, that meant I fell short. I had started several of them too late, which wasn't helped by the fact I fell ill for several days the week before the series were due to start being published and didn't feel up to much but resting.

And then I had to start balancing work with other places, so at some points I was having to watch the movies and write the reviews, and then do my assignments for ICU-Subs at the same time in order to get it finished and not let down the people who are waiting to work on it when I'm finished my role down - which I'm still in the middle of.

In the end I ran out of time. The last one I published, Perfect Blue, was actually completed 3 hours later than I'd hoped to have it published. I had hoped to do two more, including the Ju-on movie featuring Kago Ai, over the last 2 days. But they remain incomplete. These may pop up later sometime in the future, but not having them done when I wanted them to be I'm rather dissapointed in myself.

However, now that the Halloween week is over, my priorities will return to the usual Idol-focused blogging. Keep an eye out for the two last Yurei reviews, but I'm afraid that it may be some time before I get around to completing them now that I don't have a schedule to try keep with them.

Thank you for reading the last five, assuming you did, however. I hope you enjoyed the ones I was able to put out.

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Yurei: Perfect Blue

Another movie that isn't actually a Yurei horror, this one is interesting because it is the first, and likely to be the only, animated movie in this series.

Good evening, and welcome to part four of Berryz Kyuuden's horror week, reviewing seven of some of the greatest horror flicks to come out of Japan in the last decade or so. This time we're taking a look into the  1997 psychological mess that is Perfect Blue, directed  by Satoshi Kon and based loosely on a novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi.

And when I say "psychological mess", I mean this is one terribly confusing movie. All of the movies I've done up til now have had fairly simple plotlines, even if alot of it remained unexplained to the viewer, this movie is intended to confuse the viewer in order to put them in a similiar situation as the main protagonist who begins to suffer from mental disorder and the movie gets progressively harder and harder to differentiate between what is reality and what is all inside the mind of our 'heroine'.

The movie is also the most relevant one in the series to what this blog is about, as our main character is a young idol named Mima, who is part of a 3-nin group known as CHAM! and decides to leave the group at the start of the movie in order to pursue a career as an actress. Sound familiar?

The movie opens with a CHAM! concert, at which Mima anounces that she will be graduating from the group after the concert, much to the fans dissapointment. However she does reveal that she is to take part in a direct-to-video drama series called "Double Bind". After leaving, she is given a fanletter which says "I'm always watching Mima's room. I put up a link to Mima's room." She gets confused by this, and clearly worried about someone stalking her, peeoping into her small apartment. This isn't helped when she soon recieves a silent call, which only the sound of breathing coming from the other end. Immediately afterwards she recieves an anonymous faxed letter calling her a traitor.

Later, while on set waiting to shoot her scene in her drama, she asks her manager Rumi about what the "Mima's room" fanletter meant, to which she is reassured that it's just a website. Just as the cameras are about to start rolling on her scene, however, one of her managers opens a letter that was intended for Mima which explodes in his hands, causing him injury - though not very severe.

A few days later Rumi pays Mima a visit in order to help her set up a computer and sign up to an ISP at Mima's request - something which Mima has no understanding of, being incredibly computer illiterate (to the point where she is confused by the term "double-click"). After several hours of Rumi teaching her how to use a computer she manages to type the url for Mima's Room into the address and brings up the webpage, and discovers it to be a blog which appears to be written by her, with an uncomoftably large amount of detail in there which is both slightly personal and correct. At first she laughs, but as she reads on she becomes more worried about the possibilty of a stalker.

Mima finally succeeds in getting larger role in her drama, however the role she is given is that of a rape victim in a strip club. Rumi warns her that if she plays the part her reputation as an idol could be irreperably damaged, but she volunteers to play the part regardless - saying that she is now an actress and not an idol. However, the atmosphere and nature of the scene traumatises her when she films it. When she returns home she hallucinates that her fish died and has a breakdown, revealing that she didn't really want to do the scene but was too scared to let everyone down. She sees an image of herself in the mirror, still wearing her CHAM costume talking back to her, but when she throws a pillow at the mirror she comes back to reality and the fish are still alive.

From this point on she becomes progressively madder and madder, and can no longer tell the difference between her business life and her hallucinations. Her life is further complicated when some of the people who change her image to the new, dirty Mima are brutally murdered throughout the movie. Me-Mania, the owner of Mima's Room turns out to be incredibly disillusioned, and possibly insane himself. In fact, it seems to be a madness shared between both Mima and Me-Mania, as Mima's alternate personality, the one who is still a member of CHAM, goes to Me-Mania and convinces him that Mima is actually an imposter.

Mima soon discovers evidence that point to her being the one responsible for the murders, and as she becomes crazier and crazier she starts to doubt her own innocence, and begins to believe that she could be responsible for the murders and unaware of it because it was a different personality responsible.

Soon Me-Mania approaches and attacks Mima with a knife. He claims that she is the imposter and the real Mima has been emailing him telling him that the "imposter" is in the way. So he plans to kill her. But just as he is about to, presumably, rape her first, she grabs a hammer and hits him with it, causing him to collapse. But when Rumi finds her, Mima tells her what happened. However, when they return to where she was attacked, Me-Mania is nowhere to be found.

It then turns out that Rumi is the false diarist, the one running Mima's room who herself has gone totally insane and thinks that she is the real Mima. She attacks Mima for much the same reason that Me-Mania did - noting that he had failed her which coincides with a brief shot showing Me-Mania and Mima's manager both found dead together when she tries to call him. Mima gets stabbed by Rumi, but manages to escape by jumping off her balcony and running away through the city. Mima eventually escapes by pushing Rumi's wig off and she chases it inside a shop window, impaling herself on the glass in the process. She stumbles on to the road and is just about hit by a truck before Mima saves her life, pushing her out of the way.

Rumi is then institutionalised with dissociative personality disorder. Mima, on the other hand, managed so sort her life and goes back to her normal life, continuing as an actress.

I hope that all made sense to you, because I'm only just starting to come to terms with it all now. I've actually seen this movie once before, a couple years ago, this is the second time watching. And this is the kind of movie where much of it doesn't make sense until you see it for the second time. I guess having an understanding of what is happening and what happens later helps you come to terms with what is reality and what isn't. But much of the movie was written with the idea of keeping you confused in mind. The director wanted you too feel like you were the one suffering from this mental disorder, and if you haven't seen the movie before, I imagine you will feel as confused as I did the first time.

Now, to be honest I can't really comment on what the music was like in this movie. There is the concert scene at the start, to which the music sung was decent enough for an idol otaku like me watching, but for most of the movie I was paying more attention to the plot, becuase I was worried if I missed anything I might get totally lost. So if there was any good music, I probably missed it.

Of course, the movie is an 18, and the theme of rape was present, and indeed a pivotal point in the story. So there was the nudity and the rape themes. So the fact that this is an animated movie really paid off there, because I'm sure Japanese censorship laws would have been slightly less forgiving if this was a live action movie, also some of the special effects work really well as animation - cheaper too. But even so, keep in mind that if you plan to watch this movie this halloween, it's not a family movie. You probably shouldn't watch it with your kids or your little sister.

Be sure to chime in again for the next part in the series. It's drawing to a close. We've only two more nights to go, and to be honest with you, I've no idea what I will be watching. However, until next time, goodnight.

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Yurei: Uzumaki

Hello and welcome to night four of this serial review of some of the finest Japanese horror movies to grace our screen. This time we'll be looking at another artistic film in which symbolism features prominantly, the movie adaption of Junji Ito's Uzumaki, or Spiral.

Like many of these movies, Spiral soon went on to achieve cult status and garnered quite a following of both fans of the original manga and of film students who regularly analyse the movie's imagery and symbolism and ponder over what these mean. It's an incredible movie that I hadn't actually seen myself until it was suggested to me recently. I didn't really know what to expect, but what I found was incredible.

The movie is set in the small town of Kurozu, which seems to be inhabited by an array of unusual characters. But this only starts to be realised by our protagonist, a high school girl called Kirie, when she see's her boyfriend's father sitting in the street filming the shell of a snail with a video recorder, one of our first instances of the spiral that will later infest this movie like ants. This strange behaviour also seems to worry his son, as evidenced by the fact that he flatly asks her to elope with him, before dismissing the idea just as casually as he brought it up.

This uzumaki theme is fast continued when Kirie returns home that night to her own father, Goshima, who had just won an award for his pottery, and her boyfriend's father sitting discussing it. He ask Goshima to create a spiral-patterned platter for him, calling pottery the highest form of art and clearly fascinated by the rotation of the pottery wheel.

The next day at school Kirie is approached for the second time in two days by a male student who is stalking her, claiming that her boyfriend "is a drag" and that she should date him instead, because people would respect him more if he had a cute girlfriend. As she tries to escape from him, she proceeds onto the staircase - which, by no coincidence, I'm sure, happens to be a spiral - one student throws himself off of, killing himself. Suichi notes his father's obsession with spirals and theorises that the uzumaki was the reason the student died, and that it has taken over the entire town like a curse.

The degree of Suichi's father's obsession soon becomes evidenced when he climbs into a washing machine and is killed inside. His mother faints at the funeral when she notices whirling clouds in the sky which begin to spiral downwards, creating an effect not too dissimiliar from what a tornado looks like as it's forming. The "cyclone" spirals downwards until it hits Dragonfly Pond as Suichi's mother is being ambulanced to hospital.

While in the hospital waiting room Suichi once again tells Kirie that they need to escape the town before it's too late and the uzumaki curse gets to them. The two are then approached by Tamura Ichiro, a reporter who is curious as to why his father died. Suichi shows them the uzumaki tape that he was filming even as he died. But lots of things still remain unexplained, so he asks to keep the tape and continue to do research into the reason why the father killed himself.

The rest of the town all starts to go spiral mad. Suichi's mother develops an extreme phobia to anything uzumaki, as it reminds her of her husband and his odd obsession, and so she destroys any uzumaki she can find, including cutting her own finger tips because of the spiral-shaped fingerprints. When Tamura, who has been doing research on the case, calls them out to Dragonfly Pond to tell them his findings, they are interupted by Kirie's stalker who, distraught by the fact that she still chooses her boyfriend over him, claims "You will never forget me," and runs in front of Tamura's car, killing both in a horrific accident.

Following this Suichi's mother finally cracks when a large millipede sneaks into her room and tries to crawl into her ear and inhabit the spiral-shaped cochlea in the deepest part of the human ear. She then sees a hallucination of her husband who tells her to let him (the millipede) stay with her in that spiral part of the ear. Her spirophobia causes her to grab a shard of the smashed flower-vase, which she used to hit the millipede, and impale herself in the side of the head with it, effectively commiting suicide.

Finally the whole town succumbs to the uzumaki. The giant face of Suichi's father appears in the typhoon clouds, several of the students turn into giant snails and one self-obsessed girl's hair becomes a giant spiral pattern which extends out for several feet against gravity. And then Suichi himself, just as he and Kirie were about to escape, becomes an uzumaki, as his body begins to twist around, he then attacks Kirie and - we assume, killed her in some spiral-themed fashion.

The movie was strange and terrifying. The camera work is incredibly experimental, which obscure close up and angles, and camera motion which on multiple ocasions moves or rotates in a spiral. These all seem to be thrown in there for the sole purpose of making the viewer feel really incomfortable. There are alot of POV shots and alot of really random angles in there that really confuse you, it's not a natural style at all.

The acting is also a little forced and unnatural. Some characters like Suichi is incredibly flat and emotionless, while his father is at the opposite side of the spectrum and acts really weird and exxagerated. The only character in the movie who really comes close to acting naturally is Kirie, and ever she sometimes felt a little unusual. Nothing in this movie seems right or normal, and it's all that which comes together to create this strange, twisted movie - if you'll excuse the pun.

The movie also benefits from the fact that nothing was really explained. We know that the town is becomming obsessed with the uzumaki, and that the "uzumaki curse" is taking over, causing all manner of strange things to happen, but there is no logic or reason involved at all. It's possible that it's all happening in the mind of one of our characters, as the whole thing is certainly nightmare-ish, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

There are a lot of creepy sound effects involved as well. Particularly in the millipede scene. I've got my fair share of phobias when it comes to bugs and insects, so that scene was scary enough without the sound, but when they added that indescribably sound of the creature moving on top, it creeped the hell out of me.

Anyway, another night another movie. Be sure to check back again tommorow night for part five. Until next time, good night.

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Yurei: Ringu

Good evening and welcome to part three of Berryz Kyuuden's horrific tales and reviews. Tonight I'll be watching Hideo Nakata's 1998 adaption of the novel Ringu.  The movie was so powerful and well-recieved across the world that not only did it spawn it's own anthology of sequels, but the 2002 US remake was also well recieved enough to spawn it's own sequels, seperate from the original Japanese stories they are based on. It proved so influential that many movies made since in the J-Horror genre it helped to re-define can claim some sort of inspiration from it, either in the way the story was told, the psychological breed of horror, or the mechanics such as camera that make a movie interesting.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to review this movie. I'd be foolish to ignore it, after all, it is regarded to be one of the best horror movies ever created. But at the same time this movie has been reviewed time and time again, every Halloween for the last decade people have sat down and enjoyed this movie, reviewed it, and generated one of the biggest cult followings a horror franchise has ever had. But I decided to go beyond the cliché barrier and review it anyway, because it's one of my personal favourite films - perhaps helped in part by the fact that it was my first ever horror movie. Perhaps.

I'm still pretty young. A 90's kid. I was born in 1991, and by the time this movie was released in Japan I was only 6.  Well, it didn't come here to the west til a little later and didn't become hugely known until the US remake. But I grew up not watching horror movies. I was always more of a comedy kinda guy. It wasn't til a couple years ago that I got really interested in Ringu  from the things I'd heard people say about it. And so I watched it, and it suddenly became clear to me why people enjoy Japanese horror movies so much. Western film makers don't understand horror, but Ringu was different from all those. It was genuinely scary.

What made it so scary? Let's take a look!

The movie opens with two girls, Masami and Tomoko, discussing a rumor which has been going around about a cursed video tape, and that everyone who watched the tape died a week later. Tomoko reveals that she and some friends had spent the night at a house in Izu where they saw a strange video tape recieving a mysterious phone call immediately afterwards - events which parallel the rumors of the curse tape. At the end of the scene Tomoko is attacked by something off-camera and dies, with Masami seeing the whole thing.

Several days later, Asakawa Reiko, our movie's protagonist and a reporter who has been investigating the cursed video rumors and what the teenagers who are talking about it think learns that her niece, who happens to be Tomoko, and her friends all died at the exact same time in different locations with the same fearful expressions on their  faces. She also learns that Masami, who saw Tomoko die, was admitted to a mental hospital after going insane, noting that "she is terrified to be in the same room as a TV".

She does a little research and learns, as we were told in the opening scene, that the four victims had all stayed in a rental cabin in the Izu peninsula. Reiko then pays a visit to the cabin and finds a video cassette in the reception room, she takes the tape and goes in to Cabin B4, the same room that Tomoko and her friends had stayed in, where she watches the tape. As soon as the tape ends, the cabin phone starts to ring and Reiko realises that she too is now cursed, assuming she has a week left to live.

She goes to her ex-husband, Ryuji Takayama, for help and he, curious about the curse, decides to watch the tape himself. Reiko creates a copy for the two to study closely, and when they do they find a hidden messege in the tape written in a particular dialect from an island off the coast of Izu. The two set sail for there and learn about Shizuko Yamamura, an incredible psychic who was ridiculed by sceptics.

The two come to the assumption that her daughter, Sadako, must have created the video tape and the two return to the cabin in Izu with the intent to put her vengeful spirit to rest by finding her body. Under the cabin they find a well, which was the same well that appears at the end of the cursed tape. Racing against the clock the two try to empty the well and find her body before Reiko is killed by the curse. They find the body and Reiko survuves. They assume that the curse is lifted. However, the following day when at home Ryuji's TV turns on by itself and the ghost of Sadako climbs out from the TV, killing him the same way that all the other curse victims had died before. When Reiko tries to think of why she survived and Ryuji didn't, she remembers that she created a copy of the tape and showed it to him, something which he didn't repeat, and so she realises that the only way to survive is to "copy and paste" the curse on to someone else.

I can still remember the first time I watched this movie. I was  a little confused by how unscary it was. I was still new to the whole genre, but I felt a little on edge by the fact that the horror wasn't quite as in-your-face as I'd imagined. In fact, most of the movie nothing scary is happening at all, and then there are scenes like the well scene where there's a really tense scary atmosphere and then nothing happens. In fact, even though nothing happened that scene is one of the scariest I've ever seen in a movie. That scene was even scarier than the ending, which is more famous. It's probably more famous because it was unexpected and has since made it's way into pop culture with references all over.

Personally when I first saw this movie I loved it, but I was a little dissapointed that I felt it didn't live up to the hype. I saw it knowing that it was regarded to be one of the greatest horror movies ever made, and that ruined it a little. But my own non-understanding of the genre was also at fault there.

The curse itself in this movie has become fairly standard. A supernatural curse which causes people to die of fright after being attacked 7 days later by a vengeful spirit. But the sequels do go into greater detail and explain that the curse is actually a paranormal "Ring virus", which was telepathically transmited by Sadako when watching the tape, or something. I've said it before but I'm not much in to sequels, Ringu or not. The idea in the sequel curse is much more creative - and truer to the original novel, but perhaps explains a little too much about the mysterious curse. Especially since the movie is more about investigating what's on the tape than how the tape causes people to die.

All in all an excellent film and, while I originally felt the hype let it down a bit, one of my favourite movies of all time. Be sure to check in tommorow night for the fourth part of my Yurei horror series where I'll hopefully review a slightly less cliché movie. Until next time, good night.

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Yurei: Kairo

Hello, and welcome to night two of Berryz Kyuuden's trail of Japanese horror. This time we'll be delving into the movie Kairo, or Pulse, by another Japanese cinema legend, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The movie was released in 2001, and served to provoke thoughts as to wether or not the digital revolution, which was well underway by this point, was really bringing the world closer together.

This movie has been reccomended to me by several people since I announced plans to write these reviews, and so I was intrigued. I'd never seen the movie before, and only heard of it by name before. I went into this movie not knowing what to expect. But whatever preconceptions I had before were very different from what this movie turned into.

This movie isn't a traditional ghost story, while the plot undoubtadly places it in that genre. The focus, rather than creating a conventional horror movie, seemed to be more on using thematic and symbolic elements to create a point. It was as much an artistic movie as it was a horror movie. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, for now, let's discuss the plot.

The movie follows two parralel, yet contrasting story lines for most of the movie. On the first hand we have the story of Kudo Michi, a young woman working for a small company growing and selling plants in Tokyo city. One of her co-workers, Taguchi, hasn't been coming to work for several days and when she investigates by visiting his apartment she discovers him physically sound, but slightly distracted. However, when she turns her back for a moment and follows him into the next room, she discovers he has hung himself.

Then on the other hand we have the story of Kawashima Ryosuke, a student who knows nothing about computers who decides to get access to the internet "because everyone else is doing it". His computer somehow connects on it's own to a series of webcam feeds showing depressed people sitting in dark rooms. And then the words "Do you want to meet a ghost?" appear on screen. He quickly turns the browser off. But while he sleeps, the computer by his bedside randomly starts dialing-up on it's own

These two characters continue on their own paths, each fulfilling the narrative yin to the other's yang, although for most of the movie neither paths cross. Michi and her colleagues think over Taguchi's death, and how odd it was. And Kawashima seeks help from a young woman in the computer sciences department who appears to be very interested in his 'ghostly encounter'.

Michi's colleague Yabe, later that night recieves a call fromt he deceased Taguchi and just hears his voice repeating, "Help me" over and over. And so Yabe goes to pay a visit to the deceased's apartment. On the wall in the appartment in the exact spot where Taguchi had killed himself is a dark figure - reminiscent, perhaps, of the shadows burned into the ground and the walls of people vaporised in the atomic bombing at Hiroshima. When Yabe goes to leave his attention is caught by a door which has been sealed off with red tape - the so called "Forbidden Room". Curiosity gets the better of him, and he removes the tape and enters, where he is attacked by a ghostly woman.

Meanwhile, Kawashima at home experiences the same phenomena that he had before, and the computer dials up on it's own, and accesses the same webcam stream. This time he follows the advice of Harue, the girl he met in the computer lab, and makes sure to record the address of the page with a useful click of the Print Screen key. However, he quickly turns the computer off in terror after he witnesses the images of a man sitting with a black bag over his head with the words "help me" scrawled all over the walls behind him.

Following his experience in the room, Yabe becomes incredibly down and distracted. And when Michi inquires as to what happened to him, he only warns her not to enter the room with the red tape before suffering an emotional breakdown. She later recieves a call from him, with the words "help me" once again being repeated over and over, but when she arrives at his apartment in response to the call he is nowhere to be found - only leaving a mysterious black-stain figure on the wall in much the same way that Taguchi did.

Throughout most of this movie we are offered little explanation as to what is happening or why, but when Kawashima reports back to Harue, he learns that she is as stumped as he, and instead tells him to speak to another student who theorizes that the spirit world has filled to capacity with the ghosts of people from thoughout the ages, and are now spilling over into the physical world. This idea is then continued later when Harue suggests that the ghosts wouldn't want to make more ghosts, but would instead work to make mankind invisable by trapping them inside their own loneliness.

By this point red-taped doors are appearing throughout the city, and more and more people are vanishing, including Michi's boss. Her last colleague, Junko, finds herself wandering into one of them and she too is attacked by a ghostly spectre, before being rescued by Michi. But Junko also starts to feel trapped and lonely, and she too dissapears leaving only the dark figure.

As Tokyo becomes gradually more and more empty, Michi decides to run away, everyone she knows having vanished themselves. It's then she runs into Kawashima, who had been wandering the empty city searching for Harue who had gone missing. Kawashima repairs her car, and the two decide to search for Harue together, in the hopes of finding other people who have survived. When they do run in to her in an abandoned factory near her apartment, she removes a black bag from her head, like the man in the webcam feed, and shoots herself.

Kawashima then wanders into a red-taped room himself, and he is attacked by a ghostly figure who claims "Death was eternal loneliness" and pleads "help me". Michi tries to take him away, to escape and find any survivors, but Kawashima too soon fades away leaving Michi, and the Captain of the boat they escaped on, the only two survivors.

So, now that that's over with, what exactly was it that made this movie so interesting? Well, it plays heavily on the theme of loneliness and isolation to the point where I would say that is what the movie is about. The whole horror story is just a vehicle for Kurosawa to fill with these themes. And the fact that nothing is explained to the viewer, other than that which helps to create that theme, throughout the movie. When Taguchi died, Kurosawa made no attempt to explain why this character had killed himself. It just happened, no warning, no explanation. That helped to create a strange feeling of horror about the whole situation. If the character had been psychotic and gone around stabbing our main characters, that wouldn't have been nearly as frightening as how random and mysterious Taguchi's death was.

Then there's the ghosts. Our characters don't try to investigate what is happening, they don't try to stop it from happening, they are regular people trying to survive alone in an emptying city. And because we only see these characters we have no idea of the scale of what is actually happening, until the end of the movie when they drive through the streets of Tokyo and not a single soul is around. That is uncomfortable, because you start to realise just how alone the characters actually are, and just how global this phenomena has actually become - rather than just a local ghost haunting. Even after the movie is over we have no idea just how widespread the effects have become - although we're given a clue when a military plane flies overhead and crashes into the city, explosion and all - the pilots having apparently faded into loneliness and isolation with the rest of humanity.

The soundtrack for the movie is also incredible. It's just as empty as the streets. Very little of the movie has any background music whatsoever, and the silence is eery.

In fact, everything about this movie was more artistic than anything else. The camera work, with the ghosts being purposely blurred and out of focus, as though not quite there. Even some angles and styles that many conventional directors might not make use of, including masking shots and one scene where the camera is unfixed turns between Harue and a computer screen, rather than cutting directly to each shot, it shows the transition.

The movie is artistic and thematic, which makes it interesting and a good movie I'd reccomend, because it's through these themes that it becomes scary. But even as far as Japanese horror movies go it's unusual. Something which you wouldn't expect to be scary is because the acting - which might I add wasn't too great; characters seemed a little unresponsive at times - and the diricting, writing and editing all came together to create a style that was chillingly minimalist.

Anyway, be sure to check again tommorow for the third part of this series. Until next time, goodnight.

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Yurei: Chakushin Ari

Here we are, about to embark on a 7-day Japanese horror marathon to celebrate the horror season, brought to you by yours truly. I'll be watching a total of seven Japanese horror movies, some of the most famous and highly-regarded ever made. 7-days, 7 movies, 7 reviews. This is Berryz Kyuuden's Yurei.

Now obviously I'm limited to what I can do, there are many great movies out there and only doing seven will mean that many great ones will be missed out. The list of movies I review is in no particular order nor intended to be a "Top 7" list, it's merely the movies I watched this halloween.

So, let's get this review down!

Today, I'm starting things off with an incredibly scary movie. Chakushin Ari, or One Missed Call, a fairly recent addition to the hall of fear. One Missed Call was released in cinemas in 2004, having been directed by Japanese cinema legend Takashi Miike. So, with that in mind I went into this with decent expectations. It should be said, however, that I'm not a big fan of horror movies. In fact, I've typically avoided them in the past. It's only in the past year or so that I've taken a passing interest in Japanese horror. There are some directors, though, whose reputation preceeds them.

So, any movie is only as good as the idea that gives way to it. The plot for this movie is, as with most horror films, pleasently simple. People mysteriously start receiving voicemail messages from their future selves, in the form of the sound of them reacting to their own violent deaths, along with the exact date and time of their future death. Yumi, our story's protagonist, with the help of Yamashita, whose sister had fallen victim to the 'curse' some 6 months prior, search for the answers to the stange happenings.

The plot sounds simple, and it is. As the story progresses, however, the story gets progressively more complex. At no point does the story ever reach the point where you should be confused by it, however. The story was linear enough that it's easy to follow.

Allow me to breifly sum up the story for you, if you don't like spoilers than it might be wise to watch the movie before reading the next paragraph, or to skip ahead.

When two of Yumi's friend's are killed, both of them having recieved the mysterious phone calls, she gets progressively more and more worried. The police had the deaths down as suicide, but she, naturally, has difficulty believing it - especially after she see's one of them killed in front of her own eyes. Kenji, who was pulled down an elevator shaft to his death by an invisable force. When she and her friend Natsumi spend the night together - clearly still shaken up about the earlier two deaths. Natsumi phone rings. The same ringtone that all previous victims have heard when the fateful phonecall comes. This time not just a voicemail was included, but a video message showing her own horrific death.

She is quickly approached by TV crews who attend to broadcast a live show as her hour nears. Including a live debate between experts on paranormal activity and sceptics. Then an exorcism. However, the exorcism fails and the studio descends into chaos as Natsumi's death prediction comes to light in what is, perhaps, the most horrific scene in the entire movie.

Yumi is the next to recieve the call. When Yamashita tells her to return back to her family, she refuses out of fear of her abusive mother. She continues to help Yamashita uncover the truth of the mysterious phone calls. And, following up on a few leads, visit the old house of Marie Mizunuma, who has been missing for 6 months. Who they believe to be the ghost responsible for the murders. This eventually leads them to the old hospital, where Marie's body is found, charred and burnt, with her cellphone close by. But the corpse attacks Yumi, and when Yamashita tries to help he is locked out of the room. Yumi see's her own abusive mother in the corpse of Marie and swears to not run away any more.


Anyway, that's most of the plot. There is another 15 or so minutes to the movie, but I shan't post spoilers to the ending here.

The film itself starts off pretty weak, but gets gradually scarier as it goes on. The horror, though, acts very typically when it comes to J-Horror in that it comes and goes in an eb-and-flow fashion. You'll get one scary scene, then 10 minutes with nothing scary, then another one. Each time getting progressively scarier until peaking at the climax of the film.

Unfortunately the climax of this movie was a little juxtapositioned. Ordinarily you'd expect the climax and then the ending. But in this movie the climax came at the hospital, after which we're meant to believe the movie is wrapping up. But the writers had one last scare for us in store with a plot twist that was clever - however anti-climactic for a scene that just followed some 20 minutes of film that was already significantly scarier and felt like an ending in and of itself.

If they had left it there, it would have worked fine, but what they did do is bring something new and interesting to the plot, which is certainly welcome. But made it difficult to feel any great sense of fear, which the scene would have benifited from. Some may say that it could have been intentional - to help create a greater feeling of unease around an already unusual scene. But I just think it was a disaster.

Then again, there aren't many movies out there which have satisfying endings. The middle of the movie is always the best part, and once you start to slow down to close the movie the audience can tell it's nearly over and start to switch off.

Of course, no horror atmosphere would be complete without a great soundtrack. Unless you are going for a minimalist approach where the lack of music creates a scarier atmosphere than having music. Which kind of movie was this? Well, it had music, but most of it was pretty forgettable. Maybe this was because it was so well used and effective that it drew you in and just don't really notice it's there. It would be pretty annoying if you are trying to get into the movie and the music keeps bringing you out of it and reminding you that you are indeed watching a movie.

But there was one piece of music that was unforgettable - in fact, perhaps that was the reason the rest failed to attract my attention, it was all overshadowed by this simple tune. The ringtone. It was used to great effect in the movie, whenever a person would recieve their "death call", their cellphone would always ring with the same tune. By the end of the movie you feel traumatised enough that just hearing the tune will take you back and remind you of the movie.





And now, most important for any ghost movie, is the ghost that haunts the protagonists. Was she scary? Well, for most of the movie you don't actually see the spirit. It is just that. A spirit. Totally invisable, and manipulates objects (such as one shot where we see the buttons on  a cellphone being pressed by some invisable force) and people, like the various deaths in the movie, with 'hands' that aren't really there.

It isn't till the hospital scene that we finally get a glimpse of our ghost in, what I personally found to be the scariest moment in the whole movie, where Yumi is alone in the dark, deserted hospital with the spirit. And down the corridor you see a jar being pushed into view from around the corner, and then again in various places around her and one is finally placed right in front of Yumi. I'm not sure what the jars contained, but for me that just made the whole thing even creepier. Not to mention the only sound heard was the sound of that jar being dragged across the floor. But it was here that we glimpse the hands of our spirit. I've not the most fearless person in the world, but it certainly gave me the chills. Shortly after we see the whole creature, which was pretty terrifying too, but without that mystery of who or what those hands belonged to, or the dread of having to find out, I felt that a whole layer of fear towards this 'creature' had been eliminated. But it was the next stage in the horror, and definately gave off it's own feeling of dread and dispair.

This movie was so well recieved that it was enough to spawn, not one, but two sequels. Now horror sequels are something I don't generally like. With the preassure on it to improve on the first film which, if it was good enough to warrent sequel movies, isn't an easy task then it will usually fail to live up to the expectations created by the first. And I haven't seen either of the sequel Chakushin Ari movies yet, but I have heard that the second movie was even better than the first. Maybe I should add it to my "to watch" list.

Either way, tune in tommorow night for another Japanese horror review. Until next time, goodnight.

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