Stigmatized Properties (2020)

Premise: Yamame was part of a comedy duo but things didn’t really work out. Nevertheless he finds a new job opportunity with a spot on TV! He’s going to become part of a tv show, and his job can basically be summarized as “a comedian filming and narrating his life in a haunted apartment”. It’s a thing you do sometimes.

Under 90 minutes? Nope, no.
Do they say the title? Yup! The titular “stigmatized properties” (the haunted places where someone died in spooky circumstances) are mentioned by name constantly.

First thing I thought of: I know this will sound dumb but this is a career path I didn’t know about and I wish I could just do that, live in megahaunted places and tell people funny jokes about how the ghost woke me up yesterday etc.

Okay, more: So this is very obviously a horror comedy, the tone is extremely tongue in cheek when not openly trying to be funny. It still manages to have some unsettling moments, but you’re here for the laffs… and personally I think it manages to succeed at that balancing act even with all the overacting. I don’t know, it worked really well for me!

A simple way to improve it: I honestly thought this was going to be mostly-found-footage and in the end there are barely any scenes in that format, which is not a bad thing but, you know. I have my soft spot for the genre.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia and Letterboxd user reviews:

A surprising amount of completely mirthless people complaining about how the director of Ringu (you know, the movie that inspired the jaypeg horror image) is the person behind this motion picture. It’s like people really want to be angry at stuff for some reason.