(2002)
Dir - Hideo Suzuki
Overall: MEH
A return to J-horror for director Hideo Suzuki after the one-two punch of the ridiculously successful Ringu and Ringu 2, Dark Water, (Honogurai mizu no soko kara), is unfortunately messy and formulaic. An adaptation of a Koji Suzuki short story of the same name, it is predictable from frame one and relies exclusively on illogical, "because horror movies" tropes for its scares. The film consistently poses the question as to why a ghost would behave the way that it does, (meaning that the supernatural forces here act exclusively in an arbitrary manner to stretch-out the running time), which does not even take into account things like characters standing completely still while scary shit slowly happens in front of them. Lazy by conventional means then, such a process can still wield entertaining results and on a surface level, there is a creepy enough ambiance here to please genre fans, but it is by-the-books to a fault.
(2004)
Dir - Kim Tae-gyeong
Overall: MEH
Turn of the century K-horror and J-horror adapted many of the same motifs and in this respect, Dead Friend, (Ryeong, The Ghost), sticks to the formula without being entirely pointless. Serving as the debut from South Korean writer/director Kim Tae-gyeong, it comes right out of the gate with a scenario that we have seen countless times before of a group of high school girls conducting a seance out of boredom, which naturally leads to a supernatural death. Things become more interesting once the timeline jumps ahead where one of them, (Kim Ha-neul), is now in college and has suffered an amnesia spell as well as having acquired a completely different personality in the process. This and various other hints are in place to set up the twist ending which is effectively done even if it seems obvious in hindsight, but the bulk of the film is delivered in a bog-standard manner for better or worse. The ghostly apparitions are of the "long black hair hanging in front of the face" variety, all of the scared are predictably broadcast, and the vengeful spirit plot has various characters getting picked off while the main protagonist tries to unlock the mystery and set things right before she suffers the same wrath as her friends.
Dir - Akio Jissoji/Atsushi Kaneko/Hisayasu Satō/Surguru Takeuchi
Overall: MEH
With four filmmakers teaming up, (including Ultraman director Akio Jissoji and manga artist Atsushi Kaneko), to each adapt a work by Japanese horror author Edogawa Ranpo, it is remarkable how terrible most of the result are. Over two hours in length, not one of the four stories is either comprehensible or engaging. The shortest segment "Mars Canal" that starts everything off is a pretentious art film with barely any sound and just features naked people doing things in slow motion. The other three seem like they each last a century and maintain the same lackadaisical approach. The stories are frustratingly vague, making it impossible to pick up any possible humor or dread in any of them, if any such things were even supposed to be there in the first place. Instead, everything comes off as needlessly indulgent and occasionally disgusting. Though the movie fails to work due to its treacherous pacing and impenetrable scripts, it is at least photographed excellently and has a unifying tone that unites each director's vision together seamlessly. It is just a shame that it is wasted on such a boring, boring movie that is in the arthouse vein for the mere sake of it.
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