Box set now available from Arrow Video
Touted as a set of 7 of the genre’s “most distinctive titles”, this new box set from Arrow Video is one that is uneven in story and film quality, but one where most Japanese horror fans should find at least a few titles they love.
Shikoku (1999)
A young woman goes back to the village she grew up in where two of her school friends are seemingly stuck with their past where a third friend died tragically. This film approaches the classic Japanese ghost with a bit of folk tale navigating themes of death, guilt, legacy, and grief. The acting here good, the story is decent, there is a typical tonal shift that feels par for the course for late 1990s Japanese horror, but it plays with its themes rather well and does keep one guessing, so it’s a worthwhile watch (or rewatch). This is not one everyone will be into, but those who will love this type of film should love this one. One last point, the cinematography here is beautiful.
Isola (2000)
A bit lower on the goodness scale for J-Horror, Isola still has some interesting points in it. The story here follows a girl with multiple personalities as she encounters a woman who can read minds. Soon they find themselves entangled and trying to resolve what happened to one of her personalities when she goes rogue. The film here is less scary and more suspense, giving the viewer an interesting idea of having a mind-reader cross paths with someone who has multiple personalities living in one mind. The film does some interesting things with this, and the acting is decent. It however loses steam after a while and loses the interest unless one is really into the idea of multiple personalities, haunted minds, and those who can read them like open books without a summary. This is not the strongest film of the bunch, but it’s entertaining.
Inugami (2001)
Possibly the strongest film of the bunch, this one deals with themes of familial piety, family bonds and inner turmoil, legacy, and incest, so much incest. This is an odd one and some of it is really off-putting, but the writing, direction, acting, and cinematography are the best of set here. It follows a family who live in a sort of compound in the forest and they are trying to keep whatever control they have on their money and their legacy. One woman is likely to cause all of this to derail when she connects with a younger man who happens to come through the village. There is an odd sort of poetry to the film and the images bring viewers into a quiet, beautiful, yet somewhat creepy world before letting the film unleash its madness. Not for this everyone, this one deals with a lot and makes it all work within a tale of family, folklore, and legacy, a bit of a theme for the box set here.
St. John’s Worth (2001)
A video game designer takes his girlfriend to the countryside to what turns out to be her ancestral home. This film is meant to play with the themes of legacy, family, and connection, but ends up being a giant mess and utterly unwatchable. The image quality is terrible and the cinematography tries way too hard to mix video game aesthetics of the late 1990s with found footage films. Honestly, if you have a sensitivity to strobe effects and quick cuts or unstable images, this is one to avoid. For this viewer, it had to be not-paid-attention-to in order to avoid a migraine.
Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007)
One of the more recent films in this set, this one is based on a well-known tale, that of the Slit-Mouthed Woman who haunts folks and takes children, asking if they think she is pretty. Given that the “Do you think I’m pretty?” is a massive part of the tale normally, the way the film uses this and somehow it gets lost in translation (quite literally according to a Japanese-speaking friend) is something greatly frustrating. This film here also deals with death, loss, grief, and legacy but in a rather clunky way. It’s not entirely terrible, but it’s not great either. A bit of issues with the subtitles and their translation of the spoken words really kill the film near the end though. On the upside, the kids’ acting is good here, showing fear to a point that almost makes one wonder how the director got those performances out of them.
Persona (2000)
A student shows up to school wearing a porcelain mask, claiming it is good for him and his helps with the bullying he is a victim of. Soon, other students join in at his school and outside of school. The trend is taking on a life of its own, worrying the adults, and leading to mysterious death. This is one here that is more entertaining while taking on themes of bullying, death, grief, imposed legacy, what is expected of someone, and what it means to belong. The film makes a decent attempt at exploring these themes and does so while being decently entertaining. The writing is decent here and the performance work even with the masks. It’s a very teen-angst film so it may not resonate with many adults. It’s a film about finding yourself, being yourself, and belonging. It’s decently entertaining and moves possibly the fastest of the seven films in this set.
Noroi (2005)
Another found footage film, this one is more straightforward in terms of being found footage and it makes use of small cameras, television shows, stable cameras, and the dreaded shaky cam that is still so pervasive in found footage films. This one follows a man who is investigating a serial killer and who gets too close to his subject. Unfortunately, the story is mostly boring and the format does nothing to help it with bits and pieces distracting from the story so much, it’s a wonder why they were included. The cast here does decent work, but given the lack of interest in the story, they are pretty much wasted here. The cinematography is horrifically bad and migraine-inducing. The film as a whole may have been interesting in the early days of found footage, but at this point, it feels like yet another of the same.
In terms of a box set, J-Horror Rising is one that has some strength and some severe weaknesses. The content is of a good quality image and sound-wise, the films are in decent condition and the high definition looks pretty good. There is a ton of extras on here with so many, it becomes almost hard to watch them all. Each film has its own and of course the ones for the more interesting films are more interesting themselves. The big ones for horror fans here are all the commentaries, the J-Horror discussion, the archival interviews, and the occasional on-set footage featurettes.