Past Misdeeds: P.O.V. - A Cursed Film (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


During the shoot of the low rent idol show of Mirai Shida (playing herself) with special guest Haruna Kawaguchi (playing herself too), something disturbing happens. The show's gimmick of the week is to have the two teenagers watch ghost videos, but the videos that appear on screen aren't the ones the director and the girls’ manager have vetted beforehand.

In fact, these videos contain much better footage than this sort of video usually does, and they all seem to be shot at Haruna's former junior high school, which must be the most haunted school in Japan. Oh, and the videos continue playing when the DVD they are on isn't actually in its laptop anymore. Haruna, who spent some time at her junior high hunting but never finding exactly the ghostly apparitions she now sees on screen, is convinced she is cursed, an idea that does not become weaker once the crew films the reflection of a female ghost in one of the studio windows.

Clearly, this situation affords a fine possibility for the show to hire the world's most matter of fact psychic (who, we will learn, is psychic, not a mind reader) to help Haruna and finally get some really exciting footage. Alas, the psychic is sure that Haruna's little ghost problem can only be solved inside of the junior high. Of course, once the film crew is inside the place, they'll get to see more of the ghosts than they probably asked for.

It looks like the found footage/POV horror sub-genre is suddenly somewhat hot again in Japan. This does not come as much of a surprise seeing as how ideally the genre is suited to low budgets, with footage that is generally supposed to look cheap, no need for complicated camera set-ups or sets, scripts that tend to the simple, and hordes of idols willing to act in everything being churned out by the Japanese entertainment machine. Somewhat surprisingly going by the standard of the POV genre in the USA and Europe, a lot of the newer Japanese POV films I have seen are actually decent or even better, with Koji Shiraishi's Occult and this one being particular stand-outs that manage to fulfil all genre expectations yet also give the clichés they are working with small, effective twists.

POV and Occult invite some comparisons in other aspects than their respective quality, too. Both films are directed by men who have done good, sometimes great, work in the second row of Japanese horror directors. POV's Norio Tsuruta does not have anything quite as brilliant as Shiraishi's Noroi or A Slit-Mouthed Woman in his filmography, but his films clearly show him to be someone who understands the horror genre and is intelligent enough to know that the point of making genre movies isn't just giving people what they want from them but also surprising the audience with slight twists on and tweaks to a given formula.

POV is a perfect example of the latter. In its basic set-up, the film seems as generic as possible, with the usual non-characters going about their horror movie days, and the expected ghosts (though a lot more of them than you usually see in a film like this) doing the expected ghostly things. And what 's more generic than a middle part that mostly consists of people shaking their cameras, screaming, and running through a dark building? The film's plot, however, is decidedly more clever than it at first appears, using the comfortably familiar spook show elements in service of something more sinister and more creepy, leading into a semi-apocalyptic post-ending titles climax that is surprising and highly effective in its nature.

POV is also one of the few films of its sub-sub-genre that seems interested in using the discomfort the basics of Japanese idol culture can produce in a viewer who isn't a total idiot, presenting the low rent entertainment biz in a subtly bad light, possibly even suggesting this sort of entertainment and its unspoken greed would be the perfect in-road for actual evil (or, ironically, that certain ghosts would see idol culture as a nice way to finally become famous). POV does not explore this aspect all that deeply (which is not coming as much of a surprise from a film that by necessity is itself a part of perhaps dubious, always looked down upon, circles of pop culture), but that does also mean it's not getting preachy - and therefore annoyingly hypocritical - about it. It's just an element that's there to add more cultural resonance to the film.

Of course, all of POV's interesting subtext would be quite wasted if it did not also succeed at the bread and butter parts of a horror movie, the shocks, the moments of discomfort, and the all-purpose creepiness. Many of the film's fright scenes are based on sometimes imaginative variations of pretty traditional Japanese ghosts and traditional POV horror shocks. About half of them tend to the more carnivalesque jump scare mode, as well as grating on audience nerves by having the characters screech and shake their cameras, but there are also some exceedingly creepy scenes based on clever sound design, shadows, and my eternal favourite (that also turns a ghost story into something Weirder for me), scenes of time and space losing their usual consistence to threaten the characters. That last element is especially finely realized in the film's first major climax, a scene I find too delightful/disturbing/effectively tense to spoil by describing it. Let's just say it involves a disappearance, a camera, and a ghost moving towards the characters making rather disturbing noises (as Japanese ghosts are wont to, of course), and that it actually got to me.

Tsuruta - who also wrote the script - shows itself as a director very capable of using the more subtle parts of horror craft even in a context like POV horror that often doesn't seem all that interested in them, with a real gift for pacing the suspense scenes beyond the usual running and screaming.


Thanks to him, POV is a surprisingly excellent piece of filmmaking.

Three Films Make A Post: HALF MAN...HALF BEAST...He held them all in the grip of deadly terror...nothing could keep him from this woman he claimed as his own!

The Lost Coast Tapes (2012): I'm the first to agree that films - especially those concerning the weird, the horrific and the not quite naturally - really shouldn't and needn't explain everything, but a film still needs something to bind its part together - let's just call it "a point" -, be it in form of a thematic throughline, be it through a developed mythology the strange and the inexplicable follows in one way or the other. Otherwise, a film becomes just a way to throw random crap at an audience, which is pretty much where The Lost Coast Tapes comes in, for a point is what the film is lacking, like so many of the POV movies that ape parts of the structure of other POV movies without ever getting what makes the good ones work.

In this case, it's a bit of a shame, because on a technical level, this is a well-made movie that does not use the found footage format as an excuse to look bad. Alas, the point, it is lacking painfully.

A Haunted School aka Borei Gakkyu (1996): An early direct to video movie by Norio Tsuruta about a haunted school that contains all the typical school spook elements: worms, ghostly possession, ghosts in school uniforms and a haunted toilet. It's certainly not the most original or exciting piece of Japanese horror I've watched, tends to drag in places and is not exactly disturbing, but a curious and/or infuriatingly open ending and two or three quite effective scare sequences are enough to make it halfway worth watching. If you're interested in Tsuruta as a director, this'll also be interesting as a film featuring many scares Tsuruta would recycle in the later P.O.V., just with the difference that their execution in the later film is much more sure-handed and effective.

The Four (2012): I really wanted to like this one, for connecting wuxia and superheroics means putting two of my favourite things into one movie. Alas, this was directed by Gordon Chan, a man who has in the last few years proven that there's no amount of competent actors, costly effects and lavish sets large enough to save his movies - or his audience - from utter boredom. I'm perfectly alright with a film following blockbuster rules: you can use these rules, break and bend them when need be, put your heart in and get something like The Avengers or John Carter, but you can also end up with something like Green Lantern, a film focus groups but not an actual audience will enjoy. The Four is of course on the Green Lantern side of the equation, aping all the outward appearances of your typical Hollywood blockbuster movies, and missing the parts where you add the heart the good ones still have.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,chinese movies,norio tsuruta,gordon chan,horror,wuxia,in short

In short: King's Game (2011)

Original title: Ousama gemu

A Japanese high school class is suddenly drawn into a peculiar, supernatural game. Someone or something calling himself The King (no Elvis impersonation implied), is sending everybody in class emails containing tasks one or two of the kids are supposed to fulfil, lest a punishment will be issued. At first the tasks are silly school kids stuff the class finds fun enough to do, but after a short warm-up phase, they begin to take on a nasty edge that is clearly meant to drive the kids apart. So it doesn't take long until the first of them do not want to play anymore, and do not fulfil their tasks.

As a punishment, the perpetrators are erased from existence, with all their physical belongings and all memories of them people outside the class had disappearing; only their classmates remember them.

The kids attempt to find loopholes in the King's orders, but generally only make the situation worse whatever they try. Attempts at finding out the identity of the King (who may or may not be part of the class) are made, but will anything come from them before the class has turned into the smallest one in Japan?

I was just praising director Norio Tsuruta's newest movie POV a few weeks ago, so I was pretty optimistic going into King's Game (by the way a movie that is, like all Japanese movies and anime of the last few years, based on a light novel; and no, I still haven't heard of heavy novel adaptations). The film's basic set-up sure carries promise too. While it does have the overt artificiality of all that rules-based fiction contemporary Japanese pop culture has been obsessed with for about a decade now, it also seems a good fit to explore the dark sides of the inner lives of high school kids, and the pains of growing up in a dramatic manner.

Unfortunately, King's Game's script rarely uses the opportunity to dig deep into the depths of its characters' psyches, and instead opts for stock character types (would you believe the intellectuals are wearing glasses and the preppie queen a tiara?) that never stray even a millimetre from the expected actions and reactions. This not only heavily impacts the film's emotional weight (as in, it has none), but also just makes the mystery at its core much less exciting. Why, after all, should an audience care about stock characters that never do anything to surprise? On the other hand, the acting quality is at a level that makes it doubtful the young actors would actually have been able to do anything deeper than the film asks of them; most of them are already quite stretching their abilities with stock characters and stock emotions.

Tsuruta's direction here is not strong enough to make up for the failures of his script. The film is well enough paced to never become boring, but there's little visual imagination or conscious mood-building on display, which comes as quite a surprise from a director whose POV showed many of these traits on an equally low budget and in an even more codified sub-genre.

As it stands, King's Game is an okay enough way to while away eighty minutes (I'm pretty thankful for it not being any longer), but it's also deeply disappointing when one thinks about the possibilities inherent in the material.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,in short,norio tsuruta,yurina kumai,airi suzuki,horror

On WTF: P.O.V. - A Cursed Film (2012)

Either there is a minor renaissance of decent POV horror movies happening in Japan these last few years, or I've just been very lucky with examples of the genre.
Be that as it may, today's example is Norio Tsuruta's POV, a film that turns out to be much better, and clearly more intelligent, than it sounds. My column on WTF-Film goes into more detail.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,horror,reviews,norio tsuruta,haruna kawaguchi,mirai shida,other places

In short: Yogen aka Premonition (2004)

Ayaka Satomi (Noriko Sakai) and her husband Hideki (Hiroshi Mikami) are driving through the Japanese countryside with their little daughter Nana (Hana Inoue). When they stop so that Hideki can use a phone booth to transfer some files to his employer, the man finds a ripped apart, dirty sheet of newspaper right in front of his eyes. The headline that catches his eye reports the death of a child named Nana Satomi, hit by an oncoming truck while out with her parents, complete with a photo of his daughter. Hideki is puzzled and disturbed, but before he can anything, a truck does in fact hit the car with his daughter in it.

Three years later, Ayaka and Hideki's feelings of guilt for the death of Nana have driven them to divorce. Ayaka is working in parapsychology now, searching for answers to questions she isn't willing to ask loudly, while Hideki has become the kind of teacher who never looks at his students. It doesn't look like he is willing to risk having a life outside the classroom anymore either.

The state of fugue the ex-couple is in is broken when both of them are independently experiencing some very strange things. Especially Hideki is haunted by strange lapses of time and reality, as well as further premonitions of doom brought by appearances of the newspaper.

I found Yogen to be a much better film than I had expected after reading the usual lukewarm reviews (lukewarm reviews for good movies and good reviews for utter tosh seem to be a theme for me in the last few weeks). Its director Norio Tsuruta is also responsible for the very interesting Kakashi.

Yogen belongs to the decidedly non-naturalistic school of Japanese horror (think Takashi Shimizu with a deeper interest in people). If you need detailed explanations for supernatural events or more logical than emotional coherence in your films, this is probably not made for you. Tsuruta never bothers to explain anything about the newspaper, he seems much more interested in using the weird as a metaphor for the state of mind his characters are in after losing their daughter, quite effectively so, at that.

Although creeping the viewer out obviously isn't the film's main goal (and really, the couple losing their daughter is rather more touching than another spring-loaded cat), there are still some moments that are profoundly disturbing, less through shock value than through a quality of weirdness the better Japanese horror films often strive for.

Again, Yogen is a film better experienced than rationalized - if you are willing to accept it on its on terms.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,norio tsuruta,horror,in short