Pale, hairy and slow

Problem child

Takashi Shimizu presents... a classic film about a haunted house, ghosts and murder most foul... that's straight from the Japanese warehouse of weird... "JU-ON"!

Or rather, here's "Ju-on" (2002), a lame little Japanese fright flick that made some waves upon its release but is devoid of tangible threat or sustained tension, and led to an equally lame American remake starring Buffy. There's murder, and ghosts, and a haunted house, but it's all much ado about nothing. Shimizu, who gave the world the original "Ringu" a few years earlier, borrows from that superior film in "Ju-on's" most suspenseful scenes, of which there are few. The films starts with a whimper and ends in a snore; in between we sit through scene after scene of people who should often know better than going places they (and we) know they shouldn't.  If a door is literally taped shut, you don't go peeling away the tape. If there's a noise in the cupboard, you leave the room carefully - you do not slowly open the cupboard door with the look of constipated apprehension on your face.

"Ju-on" is narratively structured around a single evil event. The occurrences that follow, often shown non-chronologically, all relate back to that one event. See, a ju-on is a curse born in anger, and, like most resilient movie curses, sustains itself by appropriating victims left, right and center. Somehow, if people enter the site of the original evil event, they inevitably fall victim to pale ghosts with dark eyes whose appearance is often accompanied by odd noises resembling the sound of a frog dying in a clogged drain. So one after the other, a social worker, a former policeman, a friend of the social worker and many others are consumed by the curse. And by "consumed", I mean I don't really know what happens except that the frog is dying in the clogged drain and that people are somehow killed by the curse and its representatives.

I am rather fond of horror movies, but I distanced myself from the genre around eight years ago with the emergence of torture porn and generally increasing excessive, gratuitous brutality. When an interesting horror arrives and it's not gratuitous and Eli Roth is not involved, I'm inclined to give it a shot for old times' sake. More often than not, I am left with the familiar feeling of disappointment as filmmakers fail to construct tense narratives around plausible events. I had high hopes for "Ju-on", since it's a Japanese original and J-horror has delivered the goods in the past (this goes for both versions of "Dark Water"). Sadly, "Ju-on" is is a silly movie that relies on sound cues and long black hair (and in one instance a dozen cat statues) too much. To make things worse, the film suffers from slow antagonists, which we've seen a hundred times before. Those consumed by the curse move at a snail's pace, giving the victims a lot of time to escape. This being a lame horror movie, the victims don't run away but sit instead awaiting certain death, screaming and averting their eyes as the viewer attempts to make some sense of it all.

Missed "Ju-on"? You're not missing anything unless you're a J-horror completist or have a hair fetish. One day I'd like to see a movie about a curse born not out of anger but out of intelligence, where the evil makes sense and I end up peering at the screen from under my duvet.