Your intrepid author needs a break again this week.

We shall return next week with horror movie reviews for the spooky season.

I don't like skipping weeks, and I don't like that I've done it twice now, but I'm taking on a lot of subtitling projects and 100% of my energy is currently going into that, so I do not have time to do things such as sleep or watch movies and focus on them enough to have coherent thoughts that I can turn into a review.

May I offer a mediocre group portrait of the Ultra Q crew in compensation?

Ju-on: The Curse (2000)

directed by Takashi Shimizu

Japan

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

_____

As I mentioned last week, I've been reading David Kalat's J-Horror book, and his treatment of movies that I had seen before but was well overdue to give a second look to has been compelling me to go back and revisit some old favorites. In particular, I enjoy his enthusiasm for V-Cin, seeing it not as a wasteland full of trashy splatter flicks but a breeding ground for creative freedom that spawned some of the scariest and most original films in J-Horror.

Ju-on: The Curse is about the house. Shimizu himself has stated that if he had to posit a main character for this strange, free-floating, non-linear film, it would be the house wherein the horror unfolds. As Kalat says, this is a real house, not a constructed set, but the cinematography (Nobuhito Kitsugi) and the lighting (Hideo Oka) manage to transform a normal house into a Skinamarink-esque labyrinth of pain and misery. There's a shot early on in the film where one of the house's unwitting inhabitants starts hearing the tell-tale moans that signify her doom is close at hand, and when she runs out of the room she's in, the hallway outside is dark and she is framed in a classic Dutch angle - the house transformed, all of a sudden, the house itself conveying the ghosts to her, not content simply to let itself be haunted but insisting that it plays a hand in the horror continuously playing out within it. There's something oppressive about the interior of the house - we see characters throw open windows to daylight; look outside; enter and exit, but as long as they're physically inside the house, it could be as dark or as light as the house wants it to be.

It feels like there's too many stairs, too many angles. Not in an obtrusive way - just subtly. I kept catching scenes where the actors were framed inside doors or windows, boxed in by the house (perhaps, if I may be allowed to risk committing the sin of unforgivable pretentiousness, by the house). During that most famous scene at the end of the film I had a thought that somehow hadn't occurred to me before: "oh, wow, the house is giving birth to Kayako". Sliding down the stairs, wet and blood-matted, there's something disturbingly biological about the whole affair.

It kind of feels like one of those dreams where you're in a house that you used to live in, but something is not right about it.

The plot of Ju-on is deliberately told as a disjointed collection of scenes that aren't arranged in chronological order. When Kobayashi (the appropriately-named Yūrei Yanagi) discusses his missing student Toshio (Ryōta Kayama) with his pregnant wife Manami (Yue), the narrative flashes to a memory - whether it's of the past or of the future, we don't exactly know - that foretells the rest of the film. Kayako bows to him slowly, itself not an unusual action but disconcerting in the way it allows her long hair to fall in front of her face as she advances, out-of-focus, towards Kobayashi. It's not clear what the timeline is here: we see Toshio variously alive and dead at different points as the movie progresses. It's not that we never figure out what events set other events in motion - it's that everything seems to be happening at once.

Aside from how effective this movie is, what's also impressive is the influence it had. From the way Kalat describes it, the film garnered a reputation essentially through people spreading it around Ring cursed videotape style and telling all their friends "Have you seen this? It's the scariest thing I've ever watched". While it is not a perfect film and some aspects of it do still manage to feel superfluous despite its short running time, there's a core of pure, unrefined architectural horror goodness here that went on to have a ripple effect on horror as a whole down the line - much like the violent deaths of Kayako and Toshio Saeki would forever curse the space around where it happened, reaching out and touching any and all who come too close.

Long Dream (2000)

directed by Higuchinsky

Japan

58 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

I originally watched Long Dream a while ago but decided to give it another look since I'm in the middle of David Kalat's J-Horror book and it's making me nostalgic for movies I haven't seen in a decade. I have very fond memories of being in less-than-ideal situations during which I spent my free time reading volumes and volumes of Junji Ito - wasting an entire day reading Hellstar Remina in the spare room of my grandmother's apartment was a formative time for me. That being said, I don't remember Long Dream well enough to compare it to this film, so I'm going to leave that aside and focus on the movie alone.

Conceptually - and this is where it does owe a debt to the original Ito manga, of course - you can't really get more unsettling than this. The idea of people having "long dreams" where they live enormous chunks of time somewhere outside of physical reality while their bodies appear asleep to outside observers is downright horrifying. It starts with relatively small spans - a week, a month, a year - but then devolves into scenarios of unimaginable torture. Spending eight years of objective time searching for a bathroom. Experiencing every second of a dream in which you're a soldier hiding out in the jungle forced to auto-cannibalize to stay alive. And all the while gradually mutating into some other form of humanity the further into the future you go, becoming unrecognizable, a thing from another time, another place, alienated from everyone you may once have known.

While Long Dream does get the point of this scenario's implications across quite well, I think it fumbles a bit in trying to stretch out the manga to even the short length of the film. Dr. Kuroda's (weird-ass) personal life isn't a part of the original manga, although his questionable medical ethics were, and while it does provide more depth to the story and a slightly disquieting sense that the "long dreams" cannot be contained to one person, it's also just kinda your run-of-the-mill Dead Wife Backstory that I didn't feel particularly engaged with, capped off with an ending that in anything else would have been an unforgivable cliche but actually kind of works here.

But isn't it spooky? The little details are where the movie really gets you. If I may be allowed to get into the weeds a bit here, I think the reason why watching Mukouda slowly mutate as he experiences jaunts further and further into the future is the same reason why séances and Victorian spirit mediums were so effective (setting aside the overwhelming need people felt to contact their deceased loved ones). You, an outsider (Mukouda's medical team), are witnessing a medium (Mukouda) engage not bodily but mentally with another place or another plane of existence that is forbidden to you, and the only testament to what that place is like is the medium's reaction. Us normal people cannot go there, but we can watch someone else go there. But because Mukouda's mental state eventually begins to deteriorate, we don't really even get clear testimony of where he's going, and that makes it scarier. All we can tell is that it's someplace where humans have become very, very different from what they are now.

After this, I think Uzumaki is due for a rewatch and possibly a re-read as well, although based on other people's accounts, the anime adaptation was so profoundly disappointing that it will not be part of my Uzumaki experience going forward.

Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan (1987)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

47 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

____

The last movie I watched before this one was Hideo Gosha's Goyokin. Only real cinema for me, thank you.

It's easy to put on Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan and just think "oh, this is bad". I admit I thought that at the start. This is compounded by the fact that I still haven't quite figured Minoru Kawasaki out, despite how many of his films I've watched; I'm never entirely sure when he intends for us to laugh at something and when we're meant to be laughing with it. But the further Iko-chan goes, the clearer things become: Kawasaki understands tokusatsu intimately. I don't think - and I could be wrong here, because I still haven't read any statements from the director himself - any of this is intended in a mean-spirited way. Tokusatsu is the kind of thing where even though us fans love it dearly and defend its genuine artistic merit wholeheartedly, we are, at least every once in a while, guilty of laughing at it a little when it's not trying to be funny.

The protagonist of the film is Iko Kawai, a schoolgirl of no particular importance until she chances upon an alien who gives her a magical pink headset that can give her special powers and grant wishes. Iko, being possessed of a pure heart, uses the headset to stop a rampaging kaiju by communicating with it and finding out that it's not really mad or hateful, it just doesn't like living in a monstrous body that it never asked to be born in. (So right off the bat there's your transgender subtext.) She shrinks it down to a smaller size and it eventually repays the favor later on in the film. From there, as a matter of course, Iko finds herself drawn to the obligatory vaguely useless defense team, which counts among their members a very useless kyodai hero. Tension ramps up when Iko helps out two wounded Martians who tell her that their planet has been taken over by an evil dictator who plans on deploying a bomb that kills all humans but leaves everything else untouched.

If this sounds goofy, it's because it is. And it's meant to be. Akiko Isozaki, who plays Iko, is very obviously not a great actress, but she does feel like she's trying, and that authentically amateur performance accounts for a lot of Iko's charm. The kaiju suits and puppets are inordinately good for something this low-budget (I genuinely thought they'd managed to commandeer a Baragon suit for a few seconds) and the acting behind them is also top-notch - god, those Martians, the puppeteers really knew how to get emotion out of a face that has about as much expression as Kermit the Frog when someone's hand is up him. This movie is silly but it isn't cynical. It's exactly what the people who made it wanted it to be.

I can't really put my finger on exactly what it is about this movie that makes it so good, but it is So Good. I'm going to quote from its current top review on Letterboxd by the eloquent and well-stated "PeepeeDoodooBitch ?" to make up for my lack of insight: "[...]pure and unadulterated passion that manifests in the form of over ambitious props and special effects, fast little story lines carefully crafted to utilize all of the film’s minuscule budget, and gloriously weird moments and plots that are absent of studio interference. "