Back to the horror stuff with a quick review of this Japanese horror movie that’s been remade in the US. The remake, Pulse looks really bad, and has gotten horrible reviews, but people keep telling me the original is quite good.

Kairo isn’t really much of a horror movie, though. It tries to be a philosophical look at loneliness and alienation in modern Tokyo, with computers and the internet as an important ingredient. And then there are ghosts, and a zombie-type apocalypse. The mood and tone it tries to strike is of one of fevered nightmare, unease and decay.

And yeah, it’s dream-like, but it’s one of those annoying, slow-moving, frustrating and repetitive dreams where you get nowhere and can’t get anything done. The pace is excruciating, and when it finally does move, it makes little to no sense. Like many J-horror movies, concepts are demonstrated and insights revealed through endless expository dialogue. What insights there are feel trite and banal, like pretentious student film by students oblivious to their own limitations, and the script makes little sense, don’t come together, flows badly or not at all, and the setups and payoffs are so trivially obvious and by the book that they had me rolling my eyes and scoffing.

It’s not all bad, though. Some of the actual horror sequences (of which there are few) are creepy, but not hard to watch scary and tense like some other, more successful Japanese horror movies. Visually, it’s nice, although the “we don’t have a big budget, let’s just break out 3D Studio and After Effects” look of all the special effects gets annoying after a while.

All in all, this might be worth watching for mood. It might be better on opiates, I don’t know, and I’m not going to be bothered to watch it again to find out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Horror, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.