Ju-on 1
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| Ju-on | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Takashi Shimizu |
| Produced by | Takashige Ichise Kazuo Katō Masaaki Takashima |
| Written by | Takashi Shimizu |
| Starring | Yūrei Yanagi Chiaki Kuriyama Hitomi Miwa |
| Music by | Gary Ashiya Shiro Sato |
| Cinematography | Nobuhito Kisuki |
| Distributed by | Toei |
| Running time | 70 min |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Ju-on (呪怨 Juon?) is a 2000 Japanese direct-to-video film directed by Takashi Shimizu. It is the story of a man, Takeo Saeki (Takashi Matsuyama) who killed his wife, Kayako (Takako Fuji), and his son Toshio, (Ryota Koyama), in a jealous rage. Then Toshio's teacher, Kobayashi (Yurei Yanagi), looks for him because he has not been in school. He discovers the horror that happened recently at his house and he nor his wife that stayed home, make it out alive.
Ju-on was extremely popular and well received for a low-budget V-Cinema film. It was popular enough to spawn a sequel, Ju-on 2, as well as a full blown theatrical remake, Ju-on: The Grudge. After one theatrical remake, a sequel was produced Ju-on: The Grudge 2. Every Japanese movie in the series was directed by Shimizu.
Contents |
[edit] Synopsis
Ju-on and its followers are divided into a number of chapters. Here, there are six.
[edit] Toshio
We start out with a teacher named Kobayashi returning home to his apartment one evening and talking to his very pregnant wife Manami. They discuss a student of Kobayashi's named Toshio Saeki. He hasn't been to school recently and Kobayashi is getting concerned. He looks at his file, reading that his father, Takeo Saeki is an illustrating artist, and his mother is Kayako Saeki. He remembers Kayako from his college days. Manami remembers her as very strange. The next morning, Kobayashi leaves for Toshio's house and leaves Manami at the apartment. He finds Toshio from the side of the house, seeing that he is in the bathroom, his arms through a window of bars. He seems bruised and refuses to talk to him. After Kobayashi asks where his mother is, Toshio falls back into the bath tub. Kobayashi enters the home and brings Toshio into the living room. The house is a mess, trash on the floor everywhere. After a very brief conversation with the young boy, Kobayashi looks out the window. What he does not know, Toshio is making weird cat-like noises behind his back. Then, there was a close-up of the house showing Kobayashi looking out from the window as a ghostly woman emerges from the second-floor window.
[edit] Yuki
An unknown amount of time has passed, and the house has new occupants. The family living there are the Murakamis. Daughter Kanna is studying with Yuki, her tutor, when mother Noriko tells the girls that she will be out for a while. It is revealed that there is a cat or cats that prowl the area around their home, and Yuki is afraid of cats. She begins hearing strange noises, although Kanna doesn't notice. Then Kanna quickly leaves the house because she is late for feeding the school rabbits, but not before embarrassing her brother Tsuyoshi about his new girlfriend Mizuho. Yuki is now left alone in Kanna's room. The noise she hears is more pronounced, and thus she tries to distract herself by playing some music on her headphones, but her player messes up. The noise seems to be coming from the attic, and she packs up her things and tries to leave. She goes into a black hallway and calls out for Tsuyoshi, but gets no reply. Suddenly a cat appears in the dark hallway, and in the throes of cat-fear she stumbles back into Kanna's room and inside the closet. The noise is louder than ever, and she decides to investigate it by looking up through the opening into the attic, but what she finds in there is far worse than any cat. Yuki is suddenly pulled by a womanly ghost into the attic making her kick the sides of the closet as she was being pulled. Downstairs, Tsuyoshi, oblivious to what is happening upstairs, leaves the house to meet Mizuho at their school on his bike.
[edit] Mizuho
Tamura Mizuho is at school waiting for Tsuyoshi, and she sees his bicycle and backpack. Nearby she finds a cell phone. After she waits for a while, a teacher comes and tells her to get off school property. When asking if anyone else was in the school, the teacher says no. She helps Mizuho in searching for Murakami Tsuyoshi, and tells her to wait in the teacher's room while she checks the school again. Mizuho calls the Murakami house and is answered by Noriko that Tsuyoshi isn't home. When she turns on the lights, they blink and go out. The other person seems to have ended the call as well, and Mizuho turns around, sensing another presence. She sits down and plays with a lamp until it stops working. Mizuho goes under the desk and proceeds to fit the plug back into the outlet when she sees a couple of bare white legs run past. The phone on the desk begins to ring, and as she reaches for it, clamps onto the foot of that person. The table starts to shake, and she screams until all that can be heard is the continuous ringing of the phone. Mizuho climbs out from under the table, and looks at the caller's number, which is 4444444444. She believes this to be an opportune time to leave, but decides to wait for the teacher and she answers the phone (which is still ringing). The caller greets with a meow, and Mizuho feels something grab her arm. When she looks down, she sees Toshio, who smiles and meows once more as the camera zooms into his mouth.
[edit] Kanna
At a coroner's office, two detectives, Yoshikawa and Kamio come in and are investigating a mysterious body that was found dismembered at a school, with a dead rabbit and a jaw inside. The body to whom the jaw belonged was not found, and it certainly did not belong to the present body. A cadet comes in saying a witness had seen two girls come to feed the rabbits, Yoshida Hisayo and Murakami Kanna. Outside, Yoshikawa asks Kamio if he thinks a person can live without his jaw when it was lost in that fashion. Back at the Murakami house, Noriko comes back from shopping and checks the mail, some of which were to the wrong addressee, Takeo Saeki. She looks upstairs for Tsuyoshi and Kanna, but no one is to be found. Downstairs, she receives Mizuho's call and tells her that Tsuyoshi is not here, but then says someone came back and she will check. As she adjusts her purse, she notices a trail of blood following the person who just came in. Whoever it is looks completely dishevelled and beat-up. Noriko follows the person, repeating her daughter's name before asking "Who are you?" The person slowly turns around and as Noriko screams, we see Kanna without her jaw.
[edit] Kayako
We come back to Kobayashi at the Saeki house, years before. It is now late afternoon, Kobayashi is getting impatient and calls Manami, but she says there is someone at the door and hangs up. Kobayashi finds Toshio in his bedroom drawing strange pictures of cats and his parents. He leaves him there and walks into the hallway. A door opens into a bedroom, Kobayashi enters the room. On a desk are many photos of Kayako with her face cut out of every one of them. Underneath them all he finds a journal, belonging to Kayako. He reads it, finding out that she was obsessed with him. He drops the book and walks away, but he hears flies buzzing in the closet. He ignites his lighter, looking into the attic. He sees Kayako's bloody body in a trash bag. In shock, he bursts out of the room, takes Toshio and heads downstairs ready to leave. It is now night outside. Before he exits with Toshio, his cell phone rings. It is Takeo Saeki, he is calling from a phonebooth near Kobayashi's apartment and says that his baby has been born, meaning he stole the baby from Manami's body, killing her (scene shown in Ju-on:The Curse 2). He states that he can raise Toshio, and Kobayashi drops to the floor. Toshio picks up the phone and meows like a cat into it. Kobayashi begins to realize that Toshio is not what he seems. A bedroom door opens upstairs and a sloshy noise of a wet bag is heard. Kobayashi looks to the staircase and sees a bloody Kayako crawling down the stairs. Kobayashi backs up against the door, ignoring the meowing Toshio. The door opens by itself, and Kayako looks down on Kobayashi from above. She comes closer to him, Kobayashi has a heart attack. Toshio continues to meow into the phone. Takeo has Kobayashi's baby dead inside a sack, hitting it against poles and pipes in the middle of a street near the phonebooth. He drops to the ground near a pile of trashbags. Something inside the trashbags follows him out into the middle of the road, Takeo is killed by Kayako's ghost in the bags.
[edit] Kyoko
Suzuki Kyoko is asked by her brother Tatsuya to come and check a house that his realty firm has recently bought cheap. Apparently all the Murakami's, the family who used to live there had been murdered or disappeared, except for the father, who is in the hospital. Kyoko has a mild psychic ability, as she is naturally sensitive to the supernatural world. Upon seeing the house, she feels some unnatural vibes. When entering the house, she sees something moving through a little window in an upper bedroom. Kyoko checks the mail (everything had been left where they were after the Murakamis) to see the name Takeo Saeki. As Tatsuya is bustling downstairs, she feels a presence upstairs and slowly ascends, when she sees Kayako walking to her room. Kayako slowly bends down until she and Kyoko can see each other's face. She follows Kayako into her room, with Tatsuya tagging along. In that room, Kyoko asks her brother to bring a bottle of sake. She leaves the letters on the table as she hears a noise in the attic. When Tatsuya brings her a bottle of sake, she takes a gulp and splutters it out of the window. She tells him to leave the sake in this room for a while, and to make potential buyers of the house drink it. She states that sake is sensitive to the spirits, and people who taste a difference should never go into the house, and she requests that no one should be sold the house. She quickly flees, leaving her brother to take a gulp. He somehow does not spit it out and goes about his duties. Some time later, Tatsuya tells her that he sold the house without her knowing. He also asks her to check out his son later. Kyoko decides to see the house once more, now owned by the Kitada couple. When she sees Kitada Yoshimi (the wife) looking through the front window in a white dress and eventually turning to face her, fear overtakes her as she realizes this woman is possessed by Kayako.
[edit] Sequels
- Ju-on 2 (2000)
- Ju-on: The Grudge (2003) (theatrical)
- Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (2003) (theatrical)
- The Grudge (2004) (American Remake)
- The Grudge 2 (2006) (Sequel to the American Remake)
- Ju-on: The Grudge 3 (2008) (theatrical)
[edit] Trivia
- The movie was partially remade in the 2004 movie The Grudge, again directed by Shimizu, who also directed its sequel The Grudge 2.
- Ju-on has never been given an official DVD release outside of Japan, Germany and Scandinavia. It is only available outside of these certain areas by internet shopping.
- The film was also remade into a manga of the same name by Miki Rinno
[edit] External links
- Ju-on at the Internet Movie Database
- 呪怨 (Juon) (Japanese). Japanese Movie Database. Retrieved on 2007-07-19.
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