On Christmas Eve, a cake shop worker arrives at the Isobe household, only to find the family dead – the result of an uncle who went crazy after failing his law exams & after being caught molesting his niece & who went to the forest to hang himself – and their ghosts already haunting the house. The worker is then surprised by the family's grandmother, herself a ghost too & holding a basketball. The film then follows the fate of several people who had contact with the doomed family in the final days before they died.
The Ju-On film series was one of Japan's great horror franchises – a worthy contender to the likes of the RING cycle & PULSE, as well as giving Western horror fans something new to contend with after they had worn out their VHS copies of the Shinya Tsukamoto classic TETSUO: THE IRON MAN into the ground. Director Takashi Shimizu had created what is effectively the Friday the 13th of ghost stories – a killer ghost going around passing on a lethal curse to anyone who she comes into contact with. Not much in the way of character development, plot exposition or even a cohesive narrative – the films pass between victims with no logical connections to the point that trying to decipher the story is like sorting spaghetti. In 2009, nearly a decade after the original Ju-On films came out, two DTV features came out in order to celebrate the series.
Of the two spinoffs, Ju-On: Old Lady in White is the better of the two. While this one might not quite match the major unease of the original films, it does try to make a reasonable ghost story. Newcomer director Ryuta Miyake manages to put in a few interestingly weird moments – everything from a severed head in a bag to a supernaturally resilient audio cassette & the rather silly but still weird image of the old lady ghost holding a basketball, as well as the film's highlight in weirdness with the uncle possessed by the house's evil spirits that leave his reflection still in the mirror while his body goes walkabouts – but like I mentioned above, the story is so murky that the plot threads are mixed together like your favourite Italian restaurant's finest spaghetti. Passable at best.
The Ju-On film series was one of Japan's great horror franchises – a worthy contender to the likes of the RING cycle & PULSE, as well as giving Western horror fans something new to contend with after they had worn out their VHS copies of the Shinya Tsukamoto classic TETSUO: THE IRON MAN into the ground. Director Takashi Shimizu had created what is effectively the Friday the 13th of ghost stories – a killer ghost going around passing on a lethal curse to anyone who she comes into contact with. Not much in the way of character development, plot exposition or even a cohesive narrative – the films pass between victims with no logical connections to the point that trying to decipher the story is like sorting spaghetti. In 2009, nearly a decade after the original Ju-On films came out, two DTV features came out in order to celebrate the series.
Of the two spinoffs, Ju-On: Old Lady in White is the better of the two. While this one might not quite match the major unease of the original films, it does try to make a reasonable ghost story. Newcomer director Ryuta Miyake manages to put in a few interestingly weird moments – everything from a severed head in a bag to a supernaturally resilient audio cassette & the rather silly but still weird image of the old lady ghost holding a basketball, as well as the film's highlight in weirdness with the uncle possessed by the house's evil spirits that leave his reflection still in the mirror while his body goes walkabouts – but like I mentioned above, the story is so murky that the plot threads are mixed together like your favourite Italian restaurant's finest spaghetti. Passable at best.