Ju-on, and on, and on
Round, like a circle in a spiral, goes this neverending tale of woe.
Just so you read this in the right J-horror context, this is NOT the one with the creepy ghost girl who crawls through your TV set into your living room.
Nor is it the one where the creepy ghost girl's hair comes out of your kitchen or bathroom tap.
And it's definitely not the quite imaginative Spiral, although there is a preoccupation with spirals here, too.
No, this is the franchise with the creepy ghost boy who frequently shows up right behind you (made you look!) and his creepy ghost mum who crawls up ceilings and down staircases while emitting ratchety sounds from her ... uh, crushed ghost throat.
(And it's also the one remade by Hollywood with Sarah Michelle Gellar as a victim-to-be in The Grudge.)
The premise of Ju-on is that when an individual dies a violent, horrible death, the incident leaves behind a lingering malignant curse of such great potency that anyone who comes in contact with it dies violently and horribly and spins off an LMC of his or her own.
The curse that keeps on cursing, you could call it.
And to justify that label, we have Ju-on 3: The Beginning Of The End which is actually – counting the direct-to-video efforts – the seventh in the series, or ninth if you include the two Hollywood versions.
It's also the first one without any involvement of series creator Takashi Shimizu.
This one serves both as a prequel and a relaunch of the franchise.
A prequel, because it actually gives you some relevant and eye-opening backstory about little ghost boy Toshio (Kai Kobayashi), and is the most effective part of the film.
A relaunch, I figure, because it brings us back to the Saeki murders which form the foundation of the curse (and telling us the foundation goes a little deeper than that) – where the last two Ju-on efforts, 2009'sWhite Ghost and Black Ghost, had not much of a connection.
Remember? The whole Ju-on thing initially revolved around those killings: Takeo Saeki murdered his wife Kayako (Misaki Saisho) and son Toshio (and Toshio's cat) over what he thought was her extramarital affair.
The luckless sap who gets drawn into the web of curses this time is schoolteacher Yui (Nozomi Sasaki, an actress-singer-model whose biography I found to be more unsettling than this movie, especially how she earned her nickname of "No Mercy"), who takes over a class at an elementary school and notices that one student, Toshio (cue ominous / creepy music), has been absent for some time.
And like all dutiful replacement teachers, she decides to find out what happened to him by ... paying the family a visit (turn up volume of ominous / creepy music to maximum).
Somewhere in the middle of all this, we get a quartet of mostly giggly schoolgirls deciding to poke around inside the haunted house too.
The only one who isn't giggling is nervous Nanami (Reina Triendl), so naturally the curse saves her for last.
And the rest is history, because it's stuff we've seen many times before: the creeping dread, the visions, the haunting and finally the execution.
So this latest effort starts out trying to tell us something new, but ultimately doesn't really give us anything significantly new.
It is chilling in parts, and it never fails to get the audience squealing in fear by clueing them in on an impending horrible on-screen demise ahead of the poor character who's scheduled to suffer one.
Director Masayuki Ochiai (Infection, Parasite Eve) knows how to set up all the customary jump shots, and does an effective job of evoking the increasing sense of isolation felt by all the victims-to-be as the curse tightens its grip around their lives.
Kudos, also, to the cast, notably the three central actresses – Nozomi, Misaki and Triendl – for such determined delivery of material that has already been served up by different actresses in previous films.
And that's the trouble with this prequel / relaunch / reboot / extension / whatever.
While it does its job as a spook story – a rather fatalistic one at that – it doesn't really give us anything different apart from that little nugget about Toshio.
For a change, the filmmakers might try to make the next one a horror-comedy about an exorcism agency that specialises in saving souls afflicted by curses like this.
It would be a welcome change to see these implacable and vengeful spirits being given a kick in the phantasmal teeth for once.
And now comes the news that Hollywood is thinking of rebooting The Grudge as well. A kick in the teeth would not be out of place here, either.
Source : http://www.thestar.com.my/Lifestyle/Entertainment/Movies/Reviews/2014/08/02/Juon
