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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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