Schoolgirl Natsumi (Aimi Satsukawa) asks her friend Yuri (Mizuki Yamamoto) if she can transfer her parents' wedding video onto DVD; in order to do so, the girls buy an old VHS player in which they discover an old tape that turns out to be a fabled cursed video that, once watched, invokes deadly long haired spook Sadako (Elly Nanami), who materialises to kill her victims two days later.
After their initial attempts to break the curse fail, Natsumi and Yuri's only hope lies with spiritual medium Kyozo (Masanobu Andô) and his young assistant Tamao (Maiko Kikuchi), who decide to pit Sadako against grudge spirits Kayako (Runa Endo) and Toshio (Rintaro Shibamoto) in a battle for the girls' souls. Meanwhile, schoolgirl Suzuka (Tina Tamashiro) also finds herself cursed when she enters the haunted home of Kayako and her son Toshio — can Suzuka's life also be saved as a result of the supernatural battle?
Films featuring onryō (vengeful Japanese spooks) really do very little for me: I thought that Ringu (Ring) was mediocre and found The Grudge (Ju-on) incredibly boring. Director Kôji Shiraishi tries to inject a little life into the tired genre with this mash-up of these well known franchises, but all he succeeds in making is a film that, rather predictably, falls somewhere between mediocre and incredibly boring.
Following lots of talk and some not-at-all-scary scenes in which the spooks make brief appearances, the titular fight between the ghosts finally ensues, and it's extremely underwhelming, like two women having a pathetic cat-fight, with little kid Toshio sticking up for his mum. If you're an avid fan of Japanese ghost movies, you might get a kick out of seeing these legendary spirits scratch and claw at each other, but I'll never understand the appeal.
After their initial attempts to break the curse fail, Natsumi and Yuri's only hope lies with spiritual medium Kyozo (Masanobu Andô) and his young assistant Tamao (Maiko Kikuchi), who decide to pit Sadako against grudge spirits Kayako (Runa Endo) and Toshio (Rintaro Shibamoto) in a battle for the girls' souls. Meanwhile, schoolgirl Suzuka (Tina Tamashiro) also finds herself cursed when she enters the haunted home of Kayako and her son Toshio — can Suzuka's life also be saved as a result of the supernatural battle?
Films featuring onryō (vengeful Japanese spooks) really do very little for me: I thought that Ringu (Ring) was mediocre and found The Grudge (Ju-on) incredibly boring. Director Kôji Shiraishi tries to inject a little life into the tired genre with this mash-up of these well known franchises, but all he succeeds in making is a film that, rather predictably, falls somewhere between mediocre and incredibly boring.
Following lots of talk and some not-at-all-scary scenes in which the spooks make brief appearances, the titular fight between the ghosts finally ensues, and it's extremely underwhelming, like two women having a pathetic cat-fight, with little kid Toshio sticking up for his mum. If you're an avid fan of Japanese ghost movies, you might get a kick out of seeing these legendary spirits scratch and claw at each other, but I'll never understand the appeal.