Ju-on (V-cinema) review

Ju-on: The Curse 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 real title is actually just “Ju-On” but it was so widely bootlegged with “The Curse” appended to it that it’s become an accepted way to distinguish them. The success of these films 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. It may not be quite as thought-provoking or complex as some of the other Japanese horror films of the past few years such as Kairo, Dark Water, or Suicide Club but what it lacks in artistic merit or depth of story it makes up for by being truly creepy and having the potential to linger with you for a few days afterward.

Ju-on is broken up into chapters spanning an indeterminate amount of time, all revolving around the residents of a house with a particularly grisly history. We begin at some point in the past with a school teacher, Kobayashi (Yurei Yanagi), talking to his pregnant wife Manami (Yue) about a student in his class named Toshio (Ryota Koyama). Toshio hasn’t shown up to school yet and Kobayashi can’t seem to get a hold of his parents. While checking Toshio’s student record he recognizes the name of his mother, Kayako Saeki (Takako Fuji). Both he and his wife vaguely knew Kayako (then known as Kayako Kawamata) in college and from what Manami recalls she was a pretty creepy person.

Kobayashi decides to pay Toshio’s parents a visit to find out what’s going on with Toshio’s recent absences but when he arrives he finds Toshio all alone in their cluttered house, completely covered with cuts and bruises and unwilling to speak. Thinking something may be awry Kobayashi decides to hang around and wait for Toshio’s parents to come home. In a particularly unnerving scene in contrast to what was completely tame up to this point Kobayashi peers out the window and hears a cat’s wail. We see that Toshio is now standing up behind him with his mouth open wide, apparently making the cat noises himself. As we get an outside view of Kobayashi looking out the window we see a creepy female figure walk out of one of the rooms upstairs very briefly before the scene suddenly goes to black. It’s brief enough that you may miss it, but somehow that makes it even creepier if you don’t.

The film flashes forward at this point to a time in the future where a new family, the Murakami’s, are now residing in that very same house. Incidentally, if you’ve seen Takashi Shimizu’s short films from the 1998 horror compilation Gakko no Kaidan G (at the time of this writing both are available on YouTube), there’s an interesting tie-in with the Murakamis that fills in the gaps of these next few chapters. Kanna Murakami (Asumi Miwa) is studying with her friend Yuki (Hitomi Miwa - her real life older sister) when her mother (Yumi Yoshiyuki) has to go out for a while. Kanna suddenly remembers she was supposed to feed the rabbits at school. She’s forced to leave Yuki alone in her room, but not before ribbing her brother Tsuyoshi (Kazushi Ando) about having a new girlfriend. Yuki, who was already unnerved by odd noises earlier, starts to hear even creepier noises in Kanna’s bedroom and eventually she discovers what was causing them. Needless to say, she was right to be unnerved.

Meanwhile, Tsuyoshi’s aforementioned girlfriend, Mizuho (Chiaki Kuriyama), is waiting for him at school where they were supposed to meet but only finds his bike parked there and a cell phone on the ground (one of the holes filled by the Gakko no Kaidan G short, ”4444444444”). She’s spotted by an exceptionally suspicious teacher (Yoriko Douguchi) and told to wait in the office while she looks for Tsuyoshi. While Mizuho waits odd things begin happening and that phone she picked up earlier begins to ring incessantly, all while we see two little white legs scampering around the room and shaking the desk she is now hiding under. Suddenly the scampering and shaking both stop and Mizuho has a moment to consider her options. She finally decides to answer the phone, which turns out to be a pretty awful decision.

Simultaneous to the previous chapter we see Noriko Murakami come home to find her house completely empty. While she’s on the phone someone slips in the door and begins plodding up the stairs. She thinks it’s Kanna at first but then notices a trail of blood on the stairs. She calls out to the person and after a few extremely tense moments she’s confronted in what becomes one of the two major scenes in Ju-on: The Curse that make it a j-horror classic.

Now that we’ve witnessed some of the horrors that will eventually occur in that house things shift back to the original chapter with Kobayashi and Toshio. Kobayashi hears Toshio speaking to someone upstairs so he decides to investigate. All he finds is Toshio scribbling pictures of cats which are strewn all across his disheveled bedroom floor. He thinks he hears a female voice calling his name from the room across the hall, where he discovers Kayako’s rather disturbing journal. Apparently she had a little thing for Kobayashi during their college days, and more disturbingly, her obsession seems to have continued on after their college days. Confused and a little disturbed by the journal he begins to leave when he hears a weird buzzing noise coming from the closet. He checks it out and the horrifying sight he witnesses in there leads to a frenetic few minutes of horror that first cemented Takako Fuji’s status as one of the creepiest movie ghosts of all time and serves to wrap up the past storyline in a very disturbing fashion.

The final chapter is pretty much just a preview of Ju-on 2: The Curse in which a real estate agent (Makoto Ashikawa) trying to sell the cursed house enlists the help of his psychically-gifted sister, Kyoko (Yuko Daike), to figure out what exactly can be done to eliminate the negative energy in there. Apparently the answer is “nothing” because after just a few minutes inside she runs out in horror. She returns later to find that he’s sold the house to a woman who doesn’t look like she’s particularly happy in her new residence.

It’s a shame Ju-on: The Curse is so hard to find now because in a franchise that’s produced so many similar films, this is the one that really sticks out as unique and is terrifying in a way you can’t quite put your finger on. I think its low budget aided in its creepiness in ways that probably weren’t even intended. The general lack of camera movement throughout really gives you the feeling that something’s not quite copasetic. At some points the camera remains so static it feels like you’re watching surveillance footage. Another creepy detail probably brought on by technical limitations is the fact that most of the film takes place in broad daylight. There’s an added element of anxiety when you know that the characters can meet their ghastly demise regardless of what time of day it is or who else is around.

Sound is really important to Ju-on even though there isn’t a lot of it. It really only kicks in when something scary is happening. All the sounds we’re familiar with from the later Grudge movies are prevalent here, from Kayako’s uvula-rattling death gurgle to the escalating violin screech. They really serve to ramp up the tension at the appropriate moments.

The acting throughout the entire movie is nothing short of outstanding due to a unique mix of established veteran actors and young actors who went on to have great success afterward, the obvious example being Chiaki Kuriyama. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this cast was the best of any Ju-on movie since, including (or especially) the big-budget Hollywood adaptations. For that reason it’s really disappointing that there hasn’t been much of a push to re-release the original V-Cinema films on DVD in the west, where the Grudge movies continue to draw large audiences of people who would probably enjoy them.

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