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Kourei |
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A woman is trying to convince the police that she can feel
dead persons presence and tell where they are but the
police doubt her. When a young girl is kidnapped but manages
to escape from her kidnapper, she happens to run by the
psychic woman’s husband who is currently recording sounds
in the woods. The young girl decides to hide in his sound
equipment case but things take an ugly turn when the man
locks his case and heads on home, unaware of the young girl
who is struggling for air in his case. When the police ask
the psychic woman for help, she finds out something that
she didn't want to find out, and things are just about to
get even worse...
I've been wanting to see this movie for quite some time
since everyone keeps telling me how great it is and since
I did like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's other films that I've seen,
I instantly became interested. Well, as soon as I put the
tape in my video player I realised something negative about
it, it was a low budget TV horror movie. Since I know that
Japanese TV horrormovies can be quite good (a la Ju-On),
I thought that it might be all right anyway. Well it was
all right but that's just about it. It's more original than
most Asian horrormovies these days but still I felt kind
of cheated. There wasn't much of a plot to hang onto here
and the plot that existed took so many weird turns that I
strongly disliked that I had a hard time hanging onto it at all.
Kurosawa has advanced a lot since this film. There was nothing
special about the directing at all and at times it even looked
directly poor even for a TV movie. I also felt that Kurosawa
had watched Ringu a few too many times since some scenes felt
directly copied from Ringu, even if the movie itself has almost
nothing in common with Ringu. The acting was a different story
though. We routed for the characters almost instantly and that
increased the entertainment factor of this movie a lot. There
was not a single person who felt "off" actually. The acting
was probably the thing that surprised me the most about
this lowbudget horrormovie actually.
Kourei is a creepy ghost flick to say the least but somehow
I didn't feel connected to it at all, I just never got very
interested and in the end I really just wanted the movie
to end. There was too much drama in this movie and not
enough horror filling up the running time, luckily the scenes
where we actually do get horror are really creepy and almost
makes you feel like you're watching a masterpiece but then
the horror is over and the drama begins again and you're
eyelids start weighing more and more despite the fact that
it's only early in the evening.
Ghost stories usually don't have any blood in them and this
is no exception.
Really creepy soundtrack, I'll have to give it that. I think
it helped that the man worked in a sound recording studio.
The scene that was particularly creepy was the scene where
they hear some deep dark voice on a tape, gives me shivers
just mentioning it now.
An
allright flick to watch if you've seen all the other big
Asian ghost movies that came out during the past 5 years or
so but not for beginners of Asian cinema as it is really
nothing very special in my opinion. There are some creepy
scenes but unfortunately they don't make up for all the
slow parts in the movie.
Review By: AnthroFred
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