Ju-rei: Gekijô-ban - Kuro-ju-rei

Just like a million ranch-house mommies think they can make food in their crock-pot that rivals that of real-life restaurants, Ju-Rie is an amateur, contrived thing that attempts to distill all the winning points of the films that obviously inspired it. Distill is a generous word, on second thought - this movie blatantly steals every device it uses from other successful J-Horror flicks, then proceeds to use those devices in shameful, uninspired ways. It's the movie equivalent of mugging someone and spending your stolen gains on cheap Mexican candy.

Still, it's got a moment or two. They make use (I won't say EXCELLENT use) of the placement of creepy images in the periphery of a shot. so that you may or may not even notice them on any given viewing (a technique that's truly chilling used by skilled directors), which is nice at times. And really, if you want a non-scary breakdown of J-Horror formula points, this thing watches like an instruction manual.

Three out of ten.

Chronically unoriginal and derivative Japanese horror could practically be guilty of plagiarism.

Ju-Rei (The Uncanny) is yet another in the conveyor belt of Oriental horror movies which lept on the Ring bandwagon of 1998. The vast majority of them have benefited from the fact that Eastern horror is still a relative unknown here in the west, and the tricks used in Asian film-making are still fairly new here too.

Indeed, fairly similar films like Dark Water and The Grudge have been blessed by the fact that they're still something of a novelty in this part of the word, because otherwise we'd see right through them much in the same way that teen slasher after teen slasher from Hollywood gets tiresome and repetitive.

However, there comes a time when even *novelty* becomes contrived, and Ju-Rei is a superb illustration of this.

The Uncanny (God knows what the name means) is a ghost story (Surprise surprise) where a shadowy female figure (*feigned shock*) appears and people die as a result (Where have we seen *that* before?).

So, no prizes for a fresh and interesting story line. However, the one direction the plot has taken to elevate it above its peers is the story's told in reverse. We start at Chapter 10, then work our way back to 1. Sure, Memento did this already, but nonetheless it's new for Japanese horror, to my knowledge.

The direction, though, lets this film down big time. Sure, the plot and narrative are totally unoriginal, but this could be countered by decent direction. Unfortunately, the mechanics of the movie are simply dire. Too often scenes' camera work is forcing the viewer, as opposed to the viewer feeling free. Good direction is subtle and when a scare or chill is threatening, it doesn't force you into submission. This should be a voluntary response, meaning you'll get more out of the upcoming shock. Add to this the number of times where something is laboured at a snail's pace, or a camera shot is held for a stupidly long period of time and you begin to get the feeling this one's being directed by an amateur.

Indeed, the budget appears to be substantially low, with some pretty poor attempts at acting compounding it. Being an English speaker I cannot obviously detect the subtlety of Japanese, but I can tell that the portrayals are universally struggled and decidedly unnatural.

As for the shocks, well there is one moment which I actually failed to see coming, so I got a little kick out of it, but otherwise this movie was a blatant copy of everything else which has been before.

This was a Japanese horror by the numbers.

Avoidable.

Seriously, this movie features an incredibly flawed concept, that is besides is also being incredibly simple and formulaic. Basically all this movie does it telling the same story over and over again, in 10 different chapters, involving different characters.

This is basically what happens in every chapter; person hears a noise, person checks it out, person sees a ghost, person dies. Really, this is what happens every time! And was every story supposed to be related? I don't know, or perhaps I should rather say; I just couldn't care about it and the movie didn't make enough effort to make this clear enough. It for some odd reason also gets told in refers order. So the movie starts at chapter 10 and ends at 1, with a prologue and an epilogue to it as well. Why? Just because they could I guess, since this approach doesn't really add anything to the overall movie.

From a movie featuring different chapters, with different stories and characters in them, you would expect some more variety but 3 chapters in makes you realize that this movie is going to do absolutely nothing original and will keep on repeating itself, till it's finally over. Guess everybody can make a movie that way. It doesn't require any originality or true effort.

Besides, every chapter is just a few minutes short. How is its tension supposed to get buildup that way? How are we supposed to care for characters we only see a few minutes? It all fails at it because of the reason that most chapters are such incredibly short ones. One is even about 30 seconds long, which perhaps was the weirdest moment of the movie.

And because of it that the movie is basically the same thing over and over again, it totally looses its power. It ruins the tension and almost completely destroys its horror because you already know what is going to happen in each chapter. Perhaps lovers of Japanese horror can still mildly enjoy it. I mean, it's some very typical stuff all and in all honesty it's not the worst thing you could watch.

Totally lacks originality and keeps on repeating itself! There are still far more worse movies to watch out there but there is no reason either why you should ever go watch this one.

5/10

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If you're unacquainted with Japanese horror films, and JU REI: THE UNCANNY is your first outing, you may actually enjoy it and find it worthwhile. If not, then, unfortunately, there is not much to recommend. JU REI: THE UNCANNY so faithfully covers all the bases of the genre that there is nothing that isn't predictable and stale.

The film has all the slow moving, crawling, from out of nowhere ghoulish figures that have been presented much better in films like JU ON, and, of course, RINGU. So, any viewer whose seen those film, and especially viewers who are fans of the genre will, most likely be bored with JU REI.

My impression is that JU REI is part of the Japanese V-Cinema industry. I don't know this for a fact; it's just my impression. This industry is the same one that gave Takashi Maaike such a following, amongst others. Of course, V-Cinema is a perfectly respectable industry in Japan. Put simply, films made for V-Cinema go direct to video and do not get released to theaters. Whereas, in the United States, direct to video might imply poor quality or a failure, in Japan it is a respected medium However, JU REI has more of the US style direct to video feel then the higher quality Japanese V-Cinema one. And, that, of course, is not a compliment. It feels like the filmmakers were trying to cash in on the popularity of RINGU and JU ON and came up with a rather formulaic, by the numbers horror flick. It also appears to me to be shot on digital video, also a hallmark of the low budget, quick buck American direct to video market. And while the film seems to have been competently shot and acted, it really has no sense of identity.

JU REI clocks in at a mere 77 minutes and is organized in 10 chapters. The film opens with chapter 10 and works it's way back to the 1st chapter and then a prelude. In chapter 10 we see some Japanese schoolgirls dancing to a boom box in an alleyway late at night. Suffice it to say that things don't go so well from there. Bad for them and bad for us since it's the first indication that JU REI is on the low rent side of things. By this I mean, their demise is pretty silly and consists of arms reaching up from out of frame and grabbing them. The film then cuts to the next chapter. We learn, as the film works it's way to the prelude sequence, that there is a mysterious hooded figure that curses people by contact. These cursed individuals will then, ultimately, forward the curse to the next victim. So, connecting the chapters are the victims in the earlier chapters killing/cursing the victims in the subsequent later chapters. Sort of a perverse "pay it forward" set up.

I don't have a problem with this scenario even given that is so typical of Japanese horror; it's the execution that brings it down. As I mentioned, the film is decently acted and competently shot, it's just not inventive in any way and lacks tension in most of the chapters. The ghoulish victims aren't very menacing and each chapter ends just as the victim is being cursed/killed.

I will say, however, there were two shorts moments in JU REI that were quite compelling. One in which, a young schoolboy is waiting at school to be picked up by his mother. In the sequence, the boy thinks his mother is waiting for him at the top of a staircase, and goes towards the figure. Well, it wasn't mom. This small moment worked very well and actually, disturbed me a little. The second moment was a scene in which an elderly woman is confined to a bed in a nursing home. The poor woman is trapped and terrified as one of the mysterious figures slowly comes to get her. The moment was drawn out and worked quite well. Both scenes were similar in the sense that two relatively helpless characters, a child and an elderly woman, were menaced and, ultimately, consumed by this evil. It was rather unnerving. Unfortunately, these two moments only took about four minutes of screen time and were definitely the exception as far as genuine scares go.

So, like a lot of American direct to video films, and unlike many of their Japanese counterparts, JU REI fails to deliver and only manages a few creepy moments. Asian horror fans might find some aspects of the film interesting, considering it is such a pastiche of more successful films, but viewers new to the genre would be better served starting off with RINGU or any number of other Japanese films in this genre.

Even for 2004 the special effects are 20 to 30 years behind. The "scary" noise gets annoying after a while. The hauntings aren't scary, the plot is minimal, the dialog and acting are bland and generic.

This was the most boring and plain horror movie I've seen that wasn't trying to be a deep art house type movie. This doesn't even qualify for b movie status.