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I was discussing Ju-On with a Japanese friend the other day, and she told me that movies like that and Ringu completely freaked her out and kept her up at night. Alas, I had the exact opposite problem - staying awake through Ju-On's second act became almost as challenging as remembering how all of the characters were related to each other, or piecing together the fractured timeline of events. And while there are plenty of creepy sounds and images in Ju-On (my favorite involving a female reporter's image on a television set that suddenly warps into a distorted, screeching nightmare), it begins to feel like sound and thunder signifying not a whole hell of a lot. The other problem Ju-On contends with is the unshakeable air of staleness and familiarity about it that seems to be becoming par for the course in Asian horror movies these days. Ever since Ringu and its American remake The Ring broke into the western pop-culture consciousness a couple of years back, just about every Asian horror movie I've seen since has been a little too familiar. And since Hollywood is snatching up the rights to every semi-popular spookshow to come out of Tokyo or Hong Kong these days (Apparently we can't produce enough mediocrity in the horror genre on our own, so we have to "borrow" it from other cultures), expect a continued insurgence of remakes, most of which will probably add little value.

What we have in Ju-On is your basic haunted house story, with timeline and character arcs that jump all over the place to try and mask the fact that there really isn't a whole lot going on - besides the ghosts killing people left and right, that is. When a young social worker named Rika (Megumi Okina) is sent to a house to check up on an elderly woman because the woman's family has not been answering phone calls, she finds the place a mess, the old woman in a catatonic stupor, and the upstairs inhabited by a creepy-looking dead kid. And it's not long before that archetype of Asian horror folklore, the vengeful or tormented female spirit with long hair covering her face, makes its appearance. I'm really surprised they're still making horror movies that center around this figure over there, since they're becoming about as pedestrian and un-scary as the "Lady in White" or "La Llorona" chestnuts in our culture.

After Rika survives her initial encounter with the evil spirit, the story begins to jump around to various other characters, including one of Rika's friends, the missing family of the house, a couple of police officers, and a troubled teenage girl (I thought about looking up all of their names - but really, most of them will be dead soon after their introduction anyway, so why bother?). Anyone who comes into contact with the house pretty much ends up dead there, and if not, then the evil tends to follow them home and finish the job anyway. All of this, it is revealed, stems from a grisly slew of murders in the house years earlier in which an enraged husband and father, convinced that his wife had cheated on him and that his child was the fruit of her indiscretion, killed them both and was later found dead beside a nearby highway.

Really, that's all you need to know, and that's about all you will still know by the time the closing credits roll. In addition to being derivative of its Japanese predecessors, it also seems to borrow nuances from American classics as well. At one point, the dead kid starts talking with a vocal inflection so similar to that of the kid from The Shining that I half-expected him to start talking with his index finger and saying things like Danny ima kono ni arimasen, Mrs. Torrance-san.

So, perhaps for the easily unsettled or those uninitiated into the world of Asian horror movies, JU-ON might deliver a satisfactory ammount of scares and jumpiness. Otherwise, expect a few really creepy moments sprinkled over an hour and a half of dreadfully familiar territory. Since I recognized most of the scenes from this film in the trailer for the upcoming Sarah Michelle Gellar remake THE GRUDGE, I expect it to be as pointless as Gus Van Sant's remake of PSYCHO. You may want to keep an eye out for the inevitable porno spinoff, however, which will likely go by the same title, save for the additional appendage of "-FUCK"

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originally posted: 09/13/04 11:55:49
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