Sadako and Kayako do end up in a Yuri situation with each other at the end if you think about it.

This novel consistently delivers on providing truly baffling adaptational choices. From a ghost story about Franz Ferdinand’s car, to daring the reader to find and visit its fictional locations, to Kayako keeping her diary updated after her death or her hatred being compared directly to 9/11 this book had me shouting utterly incredulously at its pages at least once a chapter.

I bought this from a German listing with no photos of the inside of the book. The cover was in English though so I took the risk and hoped it would be in English rather than in German. It was not. I ended up reading it using machine translations with my phone.

Interesting adaptation of the Ju-On: The Curse that eschews the nonlinear structure and ties the characters together more than the original; Mizuho is now the daughter of the realtors who sold the house to the Murakami and Kyoko is her aunt (and also looks very cool). It has a bit more gruesome violence than the movie was able to do with real actors. The gaps in the original film where the events of 4444444444 and In a Corner happen are filled in here with different, bloodier, ends to the characters. Kanna’s jaw getting ripped off, left to the viewer’s imagination in The Curse, here gets shown as Ma commanding stray cats to ram themselves down her throat until it gives way, which means that the Saeki family cat finally gets a kill of its own.

It also, despite the violence she is inflicting, shows Kayako as a more sorrowful character, wanting to end people’s suffering and being anchored, seemingly unwillingly, to where she died, but still aware of what she’s doing.

Channelling the spirit of a 00s game reviewer: The scariest thing about this game is the controls!!!!!!!!!!!!

The tagline of “haunted house simulator” really does fit as this game has no ideas beyond walking through a series of corridors with the occasional jumpscare and that walking is so, so painful. I am a fan of gimmicky control systems and motion controls but this game feels like trudging through syrup at all times, inching towards the next inevitable jumpscare that will arbitrarily trigger the level to progress until Kayako finally puts you out of your misery.

This series, when it worked, was carried by the atmosphere carefully crafted by Takashi Shimizu’s careful direction. Without that and with the most bland Hollywood script imaginable—let’s invent a new family member for Kayako again!—there is no substance at all left.

While the Ju-On films do feature overlapping nonlinear vignettes this just feels like three different short movies in a trench coat. In the most boring and straightforward we have Amber Tamblyn as Sarah Michelle Gellar’s cheaper replacement sister uncovering new Lore that makes no difference to anything, in the school we have basically nothing of any substance, and finally in Chicago we have some decent but familiar scenes of families succumbing to the curse as it spreads. Also in the scene with the milk you can see someone holding a cloth at the bottom of the frame to catch any that falls.

I really didn’t need to watch this.

This short manages to achieve the ideal form of the Hollywood Grudge movies: Not a single Japanese person in sight 😌

Bringing in Kobayashi’s story from The Curse into The Grudge makes a lot of sense for the remake but I can’t say I’m fond of the rest of the changes. The plot is more linear now and much more focused on having a central protagonist in a way that makes everything unfolding much less interesting and everyone in Tokyo other than the Saeki family is a white American now. I understand that Hollywood thinks that audiences are terrified of subtitles but the degree to which almost everyone with a speaking role is made white is incredible.

Even though it’s still nonlinear this one feels a bit more focused and straightforward than the others, to start with at least. There are some sillier moments as they experiment with different ways Kayako can appear—these movies are good at building tension but never seem quite sure what to do that tension breaks and the ghost violence starts—but it does generally feel like this is trying to move the series forward when it has been stuck doing the same basic thing for three movies now. I also really enjoy how it plays with the nonlinear structure by having Chiharu herself also experiencing events out of order, building on Izumi and Toyama’s shared visions of each other in the previous movie.

The ending is silly but it at least is doing something different and it would have been interesting to see what the series could have done with that if it had continued.

Does a better job of recapturing the creeping dread of the original than The Curse 2 did and also executes on the concept of Kayako forcing her victims to relive her trauma and become like her much better. The strange beauty of Toyama seeing a vision of his daughter, and her of her father, across time is also and how it is a cursed blessing that leads to their deaths is also wonderful. I don’t think having a higher budget than its predecessors did the film much favours though, with the special effects being distracting and looking much worse than the simple makeup the ghosts have in most scenes.

This gets off to a bad start, with the start of the movie just being the end of the first one. Starting with a climax the film then has to try to escalate in some way from the first one and depicts the curse spreading so quickly that subsequent movies have to ignore it in order to work at all.

While there’s not all that much to the story in the end the slow buildup of tension across the overlapping vignettes is excellent and climaxes with something suitably horrific. Like many horror series the first (non-short) film really nails what its going for in a way that its sequels never manage.

I prefer this one a little bit to In a Corner if only for the weirdness of the cat noises thing, which the Ju-On series just decided to run with forever afterwards. Like In a Corner it’s undercut a bit by a funny final shot.

A prototype for Ju-On that doesn’t really land for me. Kind of highlights how thin the series is in general and how much it relies on building that atmosphere that this short doesn’t have time to build up or execute well. There is also something strangely comical about the fade to black at the end as Hisayo grips her obviously inadequate weapon. Also why are they wearing their school uniforms just to call in to check on the rabbits when they’re on summer holidays.