Still reading my reviews after the Thums-up! one? You are dafter than I thought!!! ;) Anyway I thought I’d write something worthy of your intellect this time. Trust me, I’m not patronizing you.
I’d hate to regurgitate the plot for the umpteenth time. I think the film deserves a bit more of a poke under the surface than that. If you’re only interested in things that make you jump then you really haven’t gotten beyond the ’roller-coaster’ mentality of watching a film. If you are keen to explore a more psychological horror then this is a flick for you…..
It’s basically a good old folklore ghost story yarn about looking in that trunk in your weird uncle’s attic that you’ve been told not to go near. The trunk is replaced by mysterious unmarked videotape and lo and behold (!), some weirdo Japanese minimalist brainwashing material has been recorded on it, and why not? This is Hollywood using a good thing that the Japanese film industry just couldn’t sell to an International audience (unless they were Art House nuts; good news if you are a committed ’Ringer’! There are seven in the Japanese series now). Having realised that ’Six Sense’ and even ’Signs’ were good for a certain customer (All hail to my old mate, Knight for bravely directing those two films), Hollywood extended its appeal from the recent teenage slash movies to something a wee bit more intelligent. Back to that mysterious trunk in the attic….
You know it’s wrong to look, you’ve been told and you’ve been warned, but people just can’t help themselves; can they? On goes the video and our heroine (or anti-heroine) is bombarded with the weirdo minimalist stuff I mentioned earlier. She was warned!! Even the kid who ended up in the nut house knew at the beginning of the film (and to her shock found out that her best pal had watched the minimalist Japanese junk) and saw the consequence of ’seven days later’… but OK our main character looks and then goes threw the worst seven days of her life. The creepy child’s voice on the other end of the phone… ’’Seven days.’’ And you know our heroine is screwed!
As time progresses, she’s screwed, her son’s screwed and her ex-boyfriend is most definitely screwed; all by a phantasm that can’t be gracious enough to accept it’s dead and just get lost in the nether world. Get the picture? But then again if you were a little girl who’d been pushed down the old well in the woods (C’est quoi?), only to die a week later, you’d be a little angry at the world yourself. Especially if it was your loving mum that did the deed on you. And that’s the jist of it my friends; an angry dead girl, taking out her paranormal temper tantrum on anyone daft enough to watch her dodgy video! She’s so fed-up with everyone that even having her long lost body found and put to rest doesn’t pacify her titanic sized foot stamping rage. Oh she’s a real meanie! She doesn’t take to backing off even when you’ve done the best you could for her!
I doubt that Hollywood will take this pintsize horror for another outing but there’s something femininely cerebral about this movie that most muscle bound horror movies lack and it’s all the more sinister for it. One final word; if your holiday snaps come back with warped faces where relaxed smiles should be, you’re screwed too! You should watch the film to know what I mean.