Review: Ever since Ringu came onto the Japanese horror scene, everybody's been cashing in on the same formula with mixed results. So here we have yet another Japanese horror movie with a pissed off female ghost sitting on a shelf along with a slew of other Japanese horror movies in my local video store. My thoughts? Ju-Rei: The Uncanny bored the hell out of me.
This movie is painfully low-budget, but not in the good way. It could've at least had some atmosphere if it had used a gritty low-budget camera, but no, we get this TV-movie crap. It really took me out of the movie since it looked like some Japanese soap opera. Everything's just so damned bright, how the hell am I supposed to be remotely scared? If you're gonna make a horror movie, give it some atmosphere at least.
The TV-movie style didn't help out when it came to the ghost sequences. Nothing at all to be creeped out about, just somebody painted chalk white. Can somebody come up with a new ghost already? Haven't they ripped-off the Ringu ghost enough? Maybe the ghost could've had some visual impact if they hadn't put her in every fucking scene, but they did anyway. There's no surprise or suspense, she's in just about every scene.
Ju-Rei tries to do something different by working the story backwards. It starts at chapter ten and ends at chapter one, slowly showing us the relationships between the characters (dead meat). This would be great and all except every character is barely tied to the others. I can't even remember any of their names, they were just that forgettable and stupid to boot. One of them tries to hide from the ghost by pulling a blanket over their head.
Hands down, worst idea ever. You'd be better off hiding your face behind a plunger. Everybody gets killed in this movie for no goddamn reason. I can semi-understand the kids getting iced because they were related to the school, but the rest doesn't make any sense. The woman at the barber shop, Norika's dad, and the rest of the dance troupe died for no reason. The only thing that seems to tie the characters together is they run into each other.
One of the girls pops into the barber shop. The barber shop owner dies and later so does the girl. Wow, great way to tie in the story. The background on the ghost is equally lame (it's the longest and most tedious explanation ever in a horror movie courtesy of the school's principle). She's basically pissed because...she was killed somehow. Who cares?
The directing style is just as annoying. Every scene lingers on for another minute or two, dragging out the movie even longer than it should be. In the end, Ju-Rei is one of the lamest Japanese ghost movie rip-offs I've seen yet. Boring ghost, characters, and pretty much every other aspect of the movie. You'd be all the more better off by missing this one.