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I have to admit, I was curious. When you see a DVD box with Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge) and Norio Tsuruta (Ring 0) as directors, then you should sit up and take notice. And I did. And I watched. But would I again? Dark Tales of Japan is a collection of five short stories all glued together by a gruesome granny on a late night bus asking a collection of strangers "Would you like to hear a scary story?" Regardless of the answer, she tells them anyway, and so our tales begin.
In The Spiderwoman a couple of reporters are trying to find the truth behind the legend of said arachniod female (also know as the 'Turbo Hag'). They follow leads that they gained from the multitude of letters that they get at their magazine office. The story is about a woman who is normal by day, but when night falls she changes and can count to twenty without taking her socks off. The story is quite entertaining and the effects are quite funny and cheep looking (including a little CGI) but they got the point across and helped to push the tale (and its eight legs) along.
Crevices, possibly my favourite of the stories, is a fine example of how a short horror should be filmed. The guarantor of an apartment is called by the landlord when his friend disappears. On opening the apartment door he sees that the entirety of it is covered in red gaffer tape. Edges of cupboards, doors, pictures even the floor is all taped up. The friend and the landlord remove all the tape and….I can’t tell you any more. Its only a short remember.
The Sacrifice is a strange one. We are following a few days in the life of a woman who’s been called back to the family home as her mother has collapsed. She also has a stalker. In this episode there are a number of strange occurrences, such as dead moths, a strange rash on the woman’s arm, blood and a very large head in the corner of a room. To be honest, the only really good thing in this short is the lead as she is quite a looker.
Blond Kwaldan is the runt of the litter and disappoints greatly. Here we find a Japanese business man staying in California and being captivated by blonde haired women. He has a real fetish for the bleached look and is really jealous of the owner of the house he stays in. There is a picture of a pretty blond on the mantle piece that he assumes is the absent owners mistress. He finds next to the bed a book that he picks up and starts to read and this is when ‘Blondie’ appears. This really was a poor effort and I think that the DVD would not have lost much without it.
Finally we have Presentiment. This is another classic tale of the spirit world coming in contact with the living. We have an unscrupulous office worker trying to leave his workplace after stealing some documents off a PC. As luck would have it, he gets stuck in a lift during his escape effort with an old couple and an attractive young lady. During the incarceration he gets more and more stressed but his fellow detainees remain cool and unworried by the entire experience. Do they know something he doesn’t? This has the most shocking climax to any of the stories and is quite enjoyable start to finish.
What struck me to begin with was the way the entire package was filmed. It looks a bit like a high definition home movie (I think it’s all filmed on digital video) and so I was a little worried that the production values would distract me from the simple pleasure of enjoying the DVD. I’ll be honest though that after the first three or four minutes I had forgotten all about this and never thought of it again. The scarce use of CGI helped too. What little there was I didn’t really enjoy (save for the very end of Spiderwoman and Presentiment) and If it had been left out then I’m sure the directors could have employed some other method to put across their vision.
All in all the package left me feeling a little flat. Except for Crevices and Presentiment, I was not really bothered what happened to the characters, and I was hoping that more could have been made of each piece. I think that those of you that are die hard Japanese horror aficionado’s will be clawing their way to the front of the queue to buy this DVD, but for the rest of the masses, I would suggest a rental. So, to answer my own question from the first paragraph: Not all of it.
The extras included on the disc are nothing special. The making of featurette is basically 5 minutes of documentary for each short film, incorporating such things as footage taken on the final day of shooting. Not particularly exciting and you won’t miss much if you can’t spare the 25 minutes or so it takes to watch.
One part of the DVD I did like though, although you can’t really call it an extra as such, was it’s equivalent to the scene selection menu. The menu called ‘The Tales’ allows you to pick which short to watch, but also gives you a few lines worth of description about what you are about to sit through. I thought that was a nice, and unique (at least in my experience), touch.
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