Hamster Rating:
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, William Mapother, Ted Raimi, Bill Pullman, Ryo Ishibashi, Yoko Maki, Yuya Ozeki
Synopsis: An American college student (Sarah Michelle Gellar) takes over the care of a sick woman in Japan after the original nurse disappears. A curse is in the house and tries to kill all who enter.
"EYE-YI-YI-YI-YI!"
Review: At first, I was terribly confused by this film. In the opening scene, Bill Pullman’s character commits suicide. I repeat—THE OPENING SCENE. This led me to believe that it was going to be one of those films that liked to backtrack a lot. (Meaning, it will show you the events leading up to this event, and then continue forward to present time). However, the time hopping continued through the whole movie. One minute, it is present day and all is well and good and understandable. The next, you are thrust back in time again but don’t realize that until they switch back to present day… leaving you going, “Umm… ok so that wasn’t present time… dang. I guess I should have been paying attention.” It took forever for Bill Pullman’s character to pop up again. But by then the story was so disjointed that I found it an inconvenience to have to concentrate on his part again. Once I sort of knew the general sequence of time, I tried to concentrate on the plot… again… no easy task.
Instead, I found it amusing to look for all the horror movie cliches sprinkled throughout this film. In particular, there was one room in the “haunted house” that everyone kept going into, upon hearing some strange noise, despite the fact that everyone who entered was promptly scared beyond all reason by some weirdness. Speaking of weirdness, there was some strange burping noise that kept erupting every now and again, as well as a creepy, little Japanese boy with a cat – or he ate the cat, or was the cat… I still don’t know what all that was about. Piece after piece slowly started emerging amongst strange sights and a lot of dead, blue faces. I will say that the end doesn’t leave you very confused… but it doesn’t necessarily END. I could definitely see a sequel resulting from this sort of ending.
So what did I think? Well, the company with which I saw this film made it very hard to be “scared”… which I was not. There were constant jokes being cracked and one of the guys I was with said that the “burping sound” the dead ghostly things made was the same sound catfish make when being gutted. This resulted in laughter each time that sound popped up. Though I personally wasn’t scared, the movie is creepy. I guess it just depends on your susceptibility to the usual horror film antics. The special effects are extremely good. All the weird ghostly events and creative ways of killing people were really neat, too. So, all things considered, it was a good way to spend the evening with friends, but not much more.
Favorite Scene(s): My favorite scenes are when Sarah Michelle Gellar sees a creepy face in the bus window and another sequence when she has a blue hand coming out of her head in the shower. They look totally real!
Suggested Drinking Game: Chug whenever Sarah Michelle Gellar gets this expression on her face:
Sarah discovers fire.
