Nee How my fellow geeks! Harry here with the latest look at a bad ass Horror Film experience from Japan - or at least that's what I've been hearing. It has been said by ancient decrepit evil geniuses that Japanese Horror films don't play safe, they want to HURT YOU! Yup, and we like em that way. Hit me again baby! Bite my nipple off! Those damn Japanese horror, suspense and twisted cinema... well they just hurt so good, ya know? The sort of hurt you dream of and beg for, but instead you get FEARDOTCOM and GHOSTSHIP. Well... Keep your eyes out for JUON... Sounds like it is the real deal!
Hey Harry, Asian film nuts, and fellow espionage rejects. BUNTA here, still putting my head back together from a recent trip to Tokyo, the same one that took me deep inside Toho for a screening of GODZILLA VS. MECHA GODZILLA. I've got a ton of TAKASHI MIIKE news, including the word on where he's at with his long-awaited ZATOICHI movie and news of his latest endeavor GOKUDO JIHAD, but for now I'm going to spill the beans JU-ON: THE GRUDGE. Feels timely, don't it? After all, that tricky Quicktime preview is up, there's Talkback heresay of a re-make consideration screening next week at Dreamworks, and the Asian movie boards are buzzing with those four fateful letters J, U, O, and N.
Well, it just so happens that while I was in Tokyo last month, somewhere in-between busting into Godzilla-Central and having yakiniku with Miike and Tetsuro Tamba, I wound up at a press screening of the JU-ON: THE GRUDGE, and a few days, interviewing director Takashi Shimizu. What can I say? It was a good trip. All those years of worshipping giant monsters and investing heavily in die-cast robots finally paid out.
Anyway, the hype on the original JU-ON videos, both released in 2000, is that it the two tape saga makes for nothing less than “the scariest movie ever made.” While the words “ever made” always tend to bring out the killjoy in me (even ICEE’s assertion that it is “the coldest drink in town,” makes me raise an eyebrow) I have to say that, yeah, the straight to video JU-ON is about as scary as scary can be and still be considered comfortable. There is something unnerving about it’s lo-fi shot on video look, populated with ordinary people in everyday situations, that makes it that much more shocking when the shit hits, which it does often. I don’t know about the “scariest ever” (I nominate the Russian movie COME AND SEE, even though it’s not a proper supernatural horror flick), but the hype it can endure.
That’s partially because a lot of recent Japanese horror movies are fueled by atmosphere, tension, and ambiguity. So is JU-ON to a great degree. Synopsizing the story of the V-cinema version, and indeed the new theatrical version, in their entirely in blow by blow fashion would be on par with trying to explain THE END OF EVANGELION to your grandma or TWIN PEAKS to an Bushman who only understands tongue clicks. Vagueness and the unexplainable are hard wired into neo-Japanese horror.
But what sets JU-ON director Takashi Shimizu apart from his contemporaries and elders is that he isn't afraid to sucker punch an audience with tangible goodies like gore, and spectral apparitions a plenty. Like William Friedkin spraying our faces with partially digested pea soup, he understands the importance of a money shot in a horror movie. And this may eventually help endear him to a wider audience (i.e. a Western one) even more than guys like Kiyoshi Kurosawa (CURE, PULSE, and actually Shimizu’s old film teacher and the executive producer of THE GRUDGE … even though Shimizu swears that he didn’t do anything here) and Hideo Nakata (RING, CHAOS). JU-ON offers no existential insight into life in the internet-fed information age, or ruminations on how mass media can invade our nervous systems. It’s only a haunted house story. A really goddamn scary one.
But let’s look back on the past darkly for a bit … JU-ON 1 told the nuts and bolts story of how this epochal Bad Place, actually a house somewhere in the boring old Saitama Prefecture, got its start. Basically, there is was this crazy woman name Kaiyoko who was in love with her son Toshio’s teacher. She stalked him, which pissed off her husband to the point where he killed the teacher’s pregnant wife and Kaiyoko herself. Then he called up the teacher via. cell phone and told him that had to now take care of little Toshio. The teacher finds that Toshio has been possessed by his pet black cat and promptly goes insane. and the house where this all takes place is … (you guessed it) CURSED!!!!!!
JU-ON 2 follows the fun and adventure when a new family moves into the house, finds it haunted by a virus-like curse that turns the afflicted into zombie-like ghosts (some of them wet and rotting) of Kaiyoko and Toshio. Naturally, the clan decides to call in an exorcist and the sparks, scares, and lingering questions multiply in earnest.
JU-ON: THE GRUDGE has much more ambition than its V-Cinema forebears. No, it's not a scathing critique of the Japanese tax system or anything like that. Althougn it does boast a very perplexing and skewered chronology, spanning decades with occasional detours into time travel, winding up demanding MEMENTO like replays and speculation to make sense of it all. Even then, there is just enough crucial information left out to keep it from all making perfect sense.
The film, which is a direct sequel to JU-ON 2, follows several characters and story lines, but presents then fiendishly out of order. This, to the best of my abilities, is how it works out. Prepared to be confused all the same. The first, and maybe the best, segment is about a social worker who visits her elderly charge only to find The House a post-spectral disaster area. It is chronologically the second event in the story. The first is actually the second segment, about the third family to live (somewhat unsuccessfully it should be noted) in the House. The third bit takes place 10 years in the future when the daughter of a policeman who disappeared investigating the House, travels back in time and watches her school chums get a taste of that there curse. The fourth segment returns to our social worker heroine at the beginning of the story for a “shock ending that will surprise you” or maybe not depending on how many Japanese horror films you’ve seen.
Like the video version, Shimizu tells the story episodically, breaking it down into 5 to 10 min. segments that go from whisper to scream and then fade to black. Unlike the video, the look is now quite glossy and the house is populated by super hot starlet chicks (there at the behest of producer Takashi Ichise, who as producer of the original Ring, is basically the neo Japanese horror). The first half is especially nail-biting intense. Shimizu never allows you to let down you guard. You bring much of your own fear into JU-ON: THE GRUDGE. If only from crap to download Quicktime trailers, you know something bad is going to happen from frame one, and you pray it won’t hurt too much when it does.
The bad news is that Shimizu’s episodic style gets predictable and tiring by the final reels, even more so if you’ve already seen the videos. It is like watching a hand wind up the same set of chattering toy teeth over and over, and wondering where that initial thrill went once the spring uncoils. Plus, in keeping with the show-all spirit of the originals, Toshio and Kaiyoko get plenty of screen time, but are beginning to wear ala Freddy, Jason, and Sadako.
But I don’t want to be a total killjoy. The first half is a parade of disturbing imagery that may be even more nail biting and intense than anything in the video version and several instances were clearly observed of jaded Japanese film critics jumping out of the seats. Shimizu remains a master of misdirection, leading your eyes and expectations one way, and then flying drop kicking you from where you least expect it. Spoiling his scares now would not be cool. Rest assured they are there and they find you when good and ready.
Time for a shout out to important people at Dreamworks: not like there’s anything wrong with releasing an uncut subtitled version of the original (is *everybody* happy?) but there’s no reason why an American re-make also wouldn’t work out just fine. After all, an over-familiarity with Toshio (the little kid in the trailers), Kaiyoko, and all things JU-ON is hardly a problem in our star spangled backyard. Shimizu’s “cursed house as virus” premise is still minty fresh and ripe for plunder. There’s nothing so intrinsically Japanese or “foreign” going on here that couldn’t make the transition. Even the ambiguous turns of atmosphere and plot could be kept intact since even Joe Average and Mike Multiplex seemed to be able to get their heads wrapped around The Ring.
Still, if I had to take only one JU-ON with me to a desert island, it would probably be JU-ON 2, crappy shot-on-video Dr. Who look and all. But for many, JU-ON: THE GRUDGE will be their first introduction to Takashi Shimizu and his arsenal of dirty tricks. And a fine one it will be, at least until heads hit pillows, light go out, and Toshio and Kaiyoko pay their bedside respects with cold hands and soul searing stares.
So until then, read my book TokyoScope, track down bootleg tapes of JU-ON 1 & 2, and look for more posts as the pertain to Takashi Miike and more Japanese movie madness sometime vaguely soon.
BUNTA sez “sayonara baby.”
