 St. John's Wort (2001) This one concerns Nami, a skitterish teen girl who takes a trip with her videogame-programmer ex-boyfriend to the seemingly haunted mansion she has inherited. They venture inside with two aims: to find out more about the parents she never knew, and to get ideas for their next videogame. Hence, the boy brings along a handheld DV camera to document the spooky house, and transmits the footage (via wireless laptop) to his assistants. Of course, things aren't quite right in the house, as the two leads start noticing weird, increasingly violent paintings (done by her reclusive famous-artist father before his death), mummified children, and indications that Nami's just-discovered twin Naomi may still be in the house! It's a ramshackle cliché fest from start to finish, and the shaky Blair Witch-style cinematography only adds to the pile of shit we've seen a million times before. The filmmakers try to disguise the low budget with flashy edits and gratuitous solarization effects (assumedly explainable as reinforcing the parallel between the actual story and the videogame the characters develop from it), but it comes off as what it is: a small crew with access to a big house and a bunch of computers. I'd be surprised if it wasn't shot in a weekend. The mood is suspenseful for awhile, then deadeningly boring, and when the big climax finally arrives, complete with hackneyed "shock" twist, the film has long since worn out its welcome. Lesson learned. Ringu was awesome, and I'm sure there are tons of cool, undiscovered Japanese horror flicks out there to discover, but as with American moviemaking, there's also a mountain of crap. Good to know that the Japs aren't so far ahead of us after all; it would be a shame to have to bomb them again.
Review by La Fée |