Lazy Saturday
Jan. 14th, 2006 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sailorhathorI'm going to type up all my funeral memories and post them sometime soon. This is just my nice, lazy Saturday & there's not a lot of it left, so I'm going to spend it enjoying myself. God I hate going back to work after my days off.
Give me a spooky Asian girl with long hair that either covers her face or grabs at people and I'm usually a pretty happy camper. So, I've been trying to find as much Asian horror as I can through Netflix. Many screenwriters and directors in Japan and Korea still know how to make a really scary horror movie, or at least really cool ones. They are still coming up with some interesting ideas, unlike most of American horror, which is pretty disappointing to me these days. I do enjoy the "let's remake every Japanese horror movie in English" trend since "The Ring" was so good. Not every Asian horror film I've seen has been mind-blowing or even good, but I think if they decided to take everything that rocked about "Ju-on," "Dark Water," "Phone," "Audition," etc, and put it all into one mega-awesome Asian horror combo-scare-o-rama, I wouldn't sleep for a week and I'd be HAPPY about it!
Today, I watched this thing called, "Tales of Terror from Tokyo." It's a collection of shorts and they're all, for the most part, ghost stories. All very simple, but effective. All the stories are very urban legend-like. While a few of the stories were lame, some were very cool and others chilled the crap out of me! My favorite hands down was I believe called, "The School Excursion." Leave it to the Japanese to take something as ridiculous as a haunted bathroom and make it kickass scary. I AM ABOUT TO SPOIL A FEW OF THE STORIES FOR YOU IF YOU READ ON. I really put myself in the position of the poor girl who had to go back for her "lip cream" (what is that anyway?) and found the bathroom dark. Then the door to one stall keeps opening on its own... and she goes to close the door... and a HAND prevents her from closing the door. That whole thing totally tapped into my inner bratling and had her going, "Turn it off, I'm scaaaared!" Any movie that can make a grown woman shudder in fear in the middle of the afternoon is cool.
My second favorite was called, I think, "Video Tape" or something like that. It was just cool how the woman kept seeing clues of that strange man wandering around, then sees him enter her sister's apartment, and when she enters, his shoes are there (incase you live under a rock and you're not aware, the Japanese take their shoes off near the front door when they enter a home). The best part was when she turned on the video, the screen was mostly black because there were credits rolling, and she saw the man standing behind her in the reflection of the TV. The most wonderful chill went all up my back. ^_^
The last story was the best for revenge wrought by women. I thought the idea was pretty cool. A woman is about to get married to some guy whose name I can't really remember right now, but it started with an F, so we'll call him Fuji. She is packing her things, I guess because she's going to go live with Fuji. She finds an old notebook she wrote in when she was a little girl and starts reading it. Eventually she comes to a passage where she's talking about who she will marry when she grows up, and it says, "But..." When she turns the page, in big letters there is written, "NOT FUJI!" She checks an old list of her classmates. No Fuji. Isn't that curious... then the next short continues it. Here we see Fuji, and he's obviously cheating on his fiance, the lech. He calls some woman to ask her if they can get together that night. There's a little girl standing behind him, acting sad and spooky. Something about her makes Fuji follow her. He keeps hearing her voice saying, "Over here!" (spooky spooky spooky) So he follows her around for a while until finally, she starts laughing at him and waving the notebook around. We see that she looks a lot like a child version of the fiance. OOH FACE. I liked that.
OH, and I also enjoyed the one about the abandoned hospital. The one chick went into a trance and started taking off her clothes, saying, "The doctor is going to examine me." Her boyfriend thinks she's nuts. She keeps going back there, alone, so he goes to the hospital to rescue her from whatever's making her go, and finds her being given the high hard one by an invisible lover! The "doctor." Dude runs out and doesn't see her again for some long, undetermined amount of time. Later, he sees her on the street and they chat politely like nothing happened. When they part company, she leaves him with the chilling comment, "I still go to the hospital." I BET YOU DO.
The frustrating thing about how these shorts were done, though, is that they don't give you any background information. Some of the stories are left off in such an abrupt manner that you are left to fill in the endings for yourself. That's all well and good for people who may've heard these stories before, but I'm not very familiar with Japanese urban legends, being from America. I wanna know what the hell's going on! Hey, I've got an imagination; I'd love to finish some of these stories, and fill in missing info. But at the same time, it'd be really interesting to see Japanese urban legends acted out since I've never heard most of these stories before. I mean, WHY do you wind up with your clothes on backward when you walk down one particular street? Where the hell did THAT come from? What the hell was the deal with the girl who went for the job interview and found the place empty? That whole story was WTF? There's nothing online to explain any of this, that I've found. I had to search for hours to find the small amount of info I found on legends that explained Sadako and why her hair over her face was significant. What do you even use for search terms in cases like these? "Suit on backward"? "Weird job interview story with drop of blood where nothing happened"? I want to read these stories, damn it!
There were previews of other movies on the DVD that looked fairly decent, too. I Netflixed 'em. Very inventive ideas.
Give me a spooky Asian girl with long hair that either covers her face or grabs at people and I'm usually a pretty happy camper. So, I've been trying to find as much Asian horror as I can through Netflix. Many screenwriters and directors in Japan and Korea still know how to make a really scary horror movie, or at least really cool ones. They are still coming up with some interesting ideas, unlike most of American horror, which is pretty disappointing to me these days. I do enjoy the "let's remake every Japanese horror movie in English" trend since "The Ring" was so good. Not every Asian horror film I've seen has been mind-blowing or even good, but I think if they decided to take everything that rocked about "Ju-on," "Dark Water," "Phone," "Audition," etc, and put it all into one mega-awesome Asian horror combo-scare-o-rama, I wouldn't sleep for a week and I'd be HAPPY about it!
Today, I watched this thing called, "Tales of Terror from Tokyo." It's a collection of shorts and they're all, for the most part, ghost stories. All very simple, but effective. All the stories are very urban legend-like. While a few of the stories were lame, some were very cool and others chilled the crap out of me! My favorite hands down was I believe called, "The School Excursion." Leave it to the Japanese to take something as ridiculous as a haunted bathroom and make it kickass scary. I AM ABOUT TO SPOIL A FEW OF THE STORIES FOR YOU IF YOU READ ON. I really put myself in the position of the poor girl who had to go back for her "lip cream" (what is that anyway?) and found the bathroom dark. Then the door to one stall keeps opening on its own... and she goes to close the door... and a HAND prevents her from closing the door. That whole thing totally tapped into my inner bratling and had her going, "Turn it off, I'm scaaaared!" Any movie that can make a grown woman shudder in fear in the middle of the afternoon is cool.
My second favorite was called, I think, "Video Tape" or something like that. It was just cool how the woman kept seeing clues of that strange man wandering around, then sees him enter her sister's apartment, and when she enters, his shoes are there (incase you live under a rock and you're not aware, the Japanese take their shoes off near the front door when they enter a home). The best part was when she turned on the video, the screen was mostly black because there were credits rolling, and she saw the man standing behind her in the reflection of the TV. The most wonderful chill went all up my back. ^_^
The last story was the best for revenge wrought by women. I thought the idea was pretty cool. A woman is about to get married to some guy whose name I can't really remember right now, but it started with an F, so we'll call him Fuji. She is packing her things, I guess because she's going to go live with Fuji. She finds an old notebook she wrote in when she was a little girl and starts reading it. Eventually she comes to a passage where she's talking about who she will marry when she grows up, and it says, "But..." When she turns the page, in big letters there is written, "NOT FUJI!" She checks an old list of her classmates. No Fuji. Isn't that curious... then the next short continues it. Here we see Fuji, and he's obviously cheating on his fiance, the lech. He calls some woman to ask her if they can get together that night. There's a little girl standing behind him, acting sad and spooky. Something about her makes Fuji follow her. He keeps hearing her voice saying, "Over here!" (spooky spooky spooky) So he follows her around for a while until finally, she starts laughing at him and waving the notebook around. We see that she looks a lot like a child version of the fiance. OOH FACE. I liked that.
OH, and I also enjoyed the one about the abandoned hospital. The one chick went into a trance and started taking off her clothes, saying, "The doctor is going to examine me." Her boyfriend thinks she's nuts. She keeps going back there, alone, so he goes to the hospital to rescue her from whatever's making her go, and finds her being given the high hard one by an invisible lover! The "doctor." Dude runs out and doesn't see her again for some long, undetermined amount of time. Later, he sees her on the street and they chat politely like nothing happened. When they part company, she leaves him with the chilling comment, "I still go to the hospital." I BET YOU DO.
The frustrating thing about how these shorts were done, though, is that they don't give you any background information. Some of the stories are left off in such an abrupt manner that you are left to fill in the endings for yourself. That's all well and good for people who may've heard these stories before, but I'm not very familiar with Japanese urban legends, being from America. I wanna know what the hell's going on! Hey, I've got an imagination; I'd love to finish some of these stories, and fill in missing info. But at the same time, it'd be really interesting to see Japanese urban legends acted out since I've never heard most of these stories before. I mean, WHY do you wind up with your clothes on backward when you walk down one particular street? Where the hell did THAT come from? What the hell was the deal with the girl who went for the job interview and found the place empty? That whole story was WTF? There's nothing online to explain any of this, that I've found. I had to search for hours to find the small amount of info I found on legends that explained Sadako and why her hair over her face was significant. What do you even use for search terms in cases like these? "Suit on backward"? "Weird job interview story with drop of blood where nothing happened"? I want to read these stories, damn it!
There were previews of other movies on the DVD that looked fairly decent, too. I Netflixed 'em. Very inventive ideas.
