Let me start by saying Ju-on 2 isn’t so much a true sequel of Ju-on as it is a fairly short final act to show the aftermath of everything that happened. In fact even though the movie is accurately listed at 70 minutes long, 30 minutes of that is cut right out of the end of the first movie. And since I wouldn’t recommend ever watching the second one before the first this feature is utterly pointless. Just think of this a 40 minute epilogue to the first one. That brings the total time of both halves combined to about 100 minutes, a perfectly reasonable running time for a feature film. So why is it split into two separate releases? I guess greed would be the obvious answer.

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Ju-on was the first of two V-Cinema releases directed by Takashi Shimizu centering around a haunted house and a couple of vengeful ghosts that were killed in such a horrific way they cause anyone that enters that house to drop dead in various creative ways. The success of these releases eventually led to two theatrical versions and two highly-successful Hollywood adaptations to date. Oddly enough, this little straight-to-video release shot on DV and now nearly impossible to find may have been the scariest of the bunch.

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I know the whole “suitcase full of cash”, double-cross caper flick has been done to death over the years—especially in Japanese cinema. It’s sort of a mainstay and at times these films can get so formulaic and tiring that they run the risk of turning people off to the genre forever. 30 Lies or So definitely falls into the formulaic category, but it’s done so well that it more than makes up for that one sin. Featuring an all-star cast and a truly clever script, this is probably the one caper flick of the past few years I would suggest above all others I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a whole lot of ‘em).

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One has to think that when you’re a member of the Hello! Project, the umbrella name given to all the pop groups managed by the UP-FRONT Agency and produced by Tsunku, you’re probably going to get a whole lot of movie deals. To actually accept one of these offers it’s safe to assume the project would have to be high-quality, time-efficient, and (perhaps most importantly) fairly innocuous so as not to sully the carefully cultivated image each member is expected to maintain. 17sai Tabidachi no Futari is no exception. This film is pretty much exactly the type of drama you would expect from Miki Fujimoto and Rika Ishikawa, the two most outwardly-melancholy members of Hello! Project (although in recent years Ishikawa has stepped up her peppy-factor quite a bit). It’s a basic-as-it-gets coming of age drama engineered to make you feel kinda bad, then kinda good, and then kinda bad again—but never too far in either direction. That mixed with a completely unrealistic dose of teenage innocence is the tried and true recipe for these types of dramas and “Seventeen” doesn’t stray from it whatsoever.

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For fans of Ryuhei Kitamura‘s work who see the DVD cover art for The Spear of Longinus and upon reading its description (particularly the part about vampires being involved) you think this is going to be a movie where some badass vampire hunter spends the duration of the film whooping up on vampires with a spear I’m sorry to say that your assessment is almost completely wrong. You’re not alone though - I thought the same thing. What it turns out to be is a far more thoughtful story about humanity’s propensity for violence and how we consistently use any power we acquire to destroy ourselves. Because of that there’s far more talking than action so as not to detract from the overall message.

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