Ura Horror (2008)
Premise: Japan is famous for a lot of things, but chief among them is the fact that they have some TV shows that will show you GHOST VIDEOS or CURSED TAPES or stuff like that. Like, the two first things that come to mind when I think “japan” are “CURSED GHOST VIDEOS” and “haha godzilla is kicking a pagoda again, what will he do next?”. So, if you’ve ever been on youtube and you like dumb spooky vids I’m sure at some point around the late aughts you watched at least one supposedly true ghost video from a japanese variety show, with the little thumbnails in the corner with people reacting and the very cheesy REPLAY segments so you’d see the very obvious person pretending to be a ghost, right? Okay so this direct-to-dvd movie pretends to be a collection of those videos. That’s it, that’s the movie.
Under 90 minutes? Yu-yup. It’s less than 75 minutes long and the segments are more often than not about five minutes long so it qualifies for the Comfy Watch award.
Do they say the title? Not exactly, they say (or show) similar stuff but not the movie title.
One sentence review: (smugly, chuckling) bold of this movie to think it can worsen my health, mental or otherwise.
Okay, more: So I think the only way to know if you’d like this movie or not is to answer these two questions: do you know what kind of video the premise section was talking about? If so, have you ever looked for those on youtube, specially for a laugh?
If the answer is “yes and also yes”, and specially if it is “yes of course, and I still do” then this movie is basically tailor made for you, congrats. The visual effects are extremely cheesy, the whole movie feels like it was recorded with the first digital camera ever and yet it has a delightful charm to it, probably because you can tell the director/writer (Koji Shiraishi, the guy behind Noroi -a great great movie- and previous review Shirome -not great!) loves this kind of dumb video too. Fun stuff.
A simple way to improve it: All things considered, I miss having the little picture-in-picture reaction shots of people watching the vids on a variety show.
Trivia about the IMDb trivia early youtube:
Once again the trivia on IMDb was boring as hell so here goes some funny thing I realized watching this movie: youtube is full (and I mean full) of clips from this movie, completely out of context, in JAPANESE GHOSTS CAUGHT ON CAMERA compilation videos, which is kind of hilarious because it means the people responsible for this movie managed to replicate the style so well, people think it’s the real (fake) deal.
On top of that, it is also very funny to me that there are a lot of japanese youtube channels that go for exactly the same style as this movie for their videos, very very clearly inspired by it (things like the voiceovers having distorted audio to ensure the speaker remains anonymous, the editing - everything). If like I said before you’ve ever liked this kind of video even a little, do yourself a favour and give these two youtube channels a watch, they are so clearly inspired by this movie and they are great!
