Director: Takashi Miike
Year: 2003
Country: Japan
Alternate Titles: Chakushin ari
Genre: Ghosts
Plot:
After her friends start mysteriously dying off, a young woman finds that her friends are being called on their cell-phones broadcasting their death screams from the future through a ghostly curse featuring a thought-dead girl coming back for revenge through technology and races to stop the curse that is wiping them all out.
Review:
There was some good stuff here when this one tried to. One of the best elements here is the fact brought up here involving the use of technology in modern society which is quite fun here. That the technological importance of the storyline, built around the common everyday use of cell-phones present in their culture with the near death-grip they have on their phones, pagers and other devices they feature, gives off a great sense of the atmosphere going on that then becomes perverted with the intrusion of the ghostly activity. Spreading the message of death they will eventually die through these devices and the ensuing fear it causes in them to panic and contemplates abandoning these devices tells a lot of the impact it has on them and builds the fear of the ghostly curse rather well. With the avoidance they display later on while being aware of what’s going on and the reluctance to know what’s going to happen to them, this striking fear of technology comes off as a potent use of the modern world turning against them.
On top of that, the film has a lot to like with the ghostly action and activity present. There's a good element in the film involving the television crew, especially once they're involved in the story due to the novel idea behind it but that it provides some really good stuff to come. One of the best is the outstanding live TV report done on the matter, which is just absolutely outstanding. The exorcism that opens it is really exciting and thrilling, and when the ghost appears the chaos of the situation, destruction of the studio in a blinding storm of debris, tossed furniture and general panic is a sight to behold. When the ghost does first appear, it slowly appears from around a corner only to the victim and through TV monitors, as others can't see it, before launching into one of the greatest visually-striking deaths in the genre that is just as brutal as can be in the situation without going over-the-top, and then to have the entire scenario broadcast to the world on live-television just makes the whole scene that much more unnerving. Beyond this, the rest of the ghostly action comes off fun and atmospheric which makes the film enjoyable.
There were a couple problems here with this one that holds it down. One of the main ones is that there's a relatively large portion of time in the middle segment where absolutely nothing at all happens. This is mostly the searching for the family that has been at the cause for it all, yet the fact that this doesn't at all provide much in the way of anything terribly interesting is what causes this one to come down. The fact that the ghost is missing from these scenes is incredibly apparent, hardly anything scary or interesting happens and it basically seems to become more of a police-procedural drama more than anything else, which is not all that bad since the mystery is at least given some more weight to than most others, but when it takes longer than the amount of screen-time given to it to fully get the idea across in a completely non-confusing matter is when it runs into trouble.
That leads to another problem here which is the overly-complicated plot. This here is a case of being over-explained, and in a sense feels like it's got about twenty different ideas crammed into it and then contrivance written into it in order to make it somewhat plausible for the events to be connected, and in the end, this whole section is a big loss. The other flaw to the film is that, because of the large number of ideas written into the story, it takes forever for the film to end and none of the events portrayed make any sense at all on their own. The events inside the trapped room are quite lame anyway, making no sense at all and that's before it allows the official ending to come into play, re-writing that and really doing anything to correct it either. This one is entirely confusing, and pretty much constitutes the flaws.
Overview: ***.5/5
While not the overall classic that many make it out to be, this is still a fairly engaging enough effort to be a worthwhile entry in the genre despite the few problems that inevitably arise from such a film. Give it a shot if you're into the Asian ghost genre, if you happen to enjoy a little mystery with your horror or are fans of the creative crew while those that aren't big on any of those aspects should heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment