Ju-On (2000)

-Do you have a boyfriend?
-No.
-Oh! How boring!

That's prime fucking character development right there.

Okay, it's almost like I can't rip on it too much. Ju-on is like the autistic kid on the playground who plays with spiders and shits in his pants, and you can't help but feel sorry for him. So you try to be nice and all, but he'd rather just keep on playing with spiders and shitting in his pants, so you just let him be.

The original two movies were made for television, so they're obviously low budget. Both Ju-On and Ju-On: The Grudge turned out to hit lower than my already low expectations. In Ju-On, characters are given very little exposition before they get killed. And that makes it pretty difficult to care about what happens to them.

If you've seen the American remake, you pretty much get the idea of the plot. There's a cursed house. Ghosts come out of the attic or down the stairs and make super scary croaking noises. Everybody who enters the house gets killed. No exceptions.

The remake, however, was based on the sequel to the J-horror film. I was told that the original was much better. Well, uh. J-horror's pretty cool and all, but like all horror film industries, not all ideas are good. Or worth watching. And I guess that's really all I can say about it.

My favorite part of the whole movie was close to the end, when a male character was being attacked by a moving trash bag with a corpse in it, and a resident of the neighborhood it was being filmed in began walking his dog. And although he could probably see the event occurring in front of him, he chose not to react or get out of the shot or do anything. Like trash bags attack people in Japan daily. But when a hungry trash bag starts coming after strangers on the street, the Japanese government seem to advise their citizens to do nothing about it and let nature take its course. It's obviously a problem that Takashi Shimizu smartly includes in his movie to provoke us. We should start helping one another, and maybe we can prevent unfortunate trash bag attacks.