Bottom-feeder J-Horror (Mad Spoilers!)
Sometimes I wonder about Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It seemed at some points of this movie that he had absolute contempt for his audience.
All of the artful touches of this movie go out the window with some of the most overly-stupid things in the history of Japanese horror.
Consider the following:
1) An insane traffic cop, who just so happens to be chillin' on the couch in a psychiatrist's office, starts freaking out and has to have a towel shoved in his face.
2) The female ghost looks so much like modern-era Michael Jackson that it is unintentionally rediculous.
3) The female ghost starts coming through a wall like f'ing Cookie Monster.
4) The female ghost floats on rails and wires and then, as if emulating the uber-stupid final 5 seconds of The Matrix, zooms off over Tokyo.
5) This movie features human corpses that decay in perfect neatness, leaving grizzle-free bones and no lingering odor. This is the kind of plot hole I'd expect in a 1940s adventure film.
6) Like the worst psychological-thrillers, the film shows us dead end stuff that is merely dismissed as "in the guy's mind". We see him clearly take Harue to the train station . . . but we later find out that it was all in his head and she's been rotting in the bedroom for 6 months.
7) A ghost kills a guy by Greg Louganis-ing him into a rice bowl of crappy salt water.
8) Has anyone seen salt water factor into a lame-plot point so bad since Ringu 2?