FolkHorror Format: Amazon Prime - Language: Japanese (English Subtitled) Released: 2009Director: Ryut MiyakeStarring: Hiroki Suzuki, Ichirota Miyakawa, Naysuki KasaWhere to start? Well it's short, which is a blessing! To be strictly fair to the film it does start out well enough, with the initial building up of tension that I have come to expect from Japanese horror films; then sadly, rather then building on the initial success, the whole thing falls apart.Ju-On: White Ghost is the story of a house that was the location of a brutal mass murder. The film consists of a series of short segments, each one showcasing the history of a different character and setting out why they eventually come to their various unfortunate ends, as well as giving the background to the murders.As a direct to DVD film it is very low budget and it shows, badly. Yet for all the appallingly bad and cringe-worthy acting there are occasional moments of great, outstanding performance; for all the unbelievably poor stories there are some strong, genuinely creepy tales.At an hour long it is worth sitting though the rubbish mainly because when this film gets it right, even with the cringe fest that some of the actors put us through, it delivers some genuine scares. It just unfortunate that director, Ryuta Miyake, comes across as not having the slightest clue about how to make/direct a film.Like this film this is really all I can think of to say on the matter, short and pretty much lacking in any direction.

Paul Magne Haakonsen Normally I am very fond of Japanese horror movies, and in overall then the "Ju-On" series have been adequate; the Japanese originals of course, not the abysmal Hollywood cash-in on the success of the Japanese movies.However, this 2009 installment in the franchise was a swing and a miss.First of all, the production level of the entire movie feels like something I could have done myself as an audience. It just lacks proper production value to be a proper movie.The story was fragmented and a scrambled mess of a story, that made very little coherent sense.The acting in the movie was adequate, although the actors and actresses had nothing to work with."Ju-on: Shiroi rôjo" had fair special effects, but they were far from being great mind you.There was nothing scary about the movie at all, which made it a very dull and pointless experience to sit through. Especially if you compare it to the previous installments in the franchise.This is definitely not a Japanese horror movie that you should rush out to invest your time or money in.

DigitalRevenantX7 On Christmas Eve, a cake shop worker arrives at the Isobe household, only to find the family dead – the result of an uncle who went crazy after failing his law exams & after being caught molesting his niece & who went to the forest to hang himself – and their ghosts already haunting the house. The worker is then surprised by the family's grandmother, herself a ghost too & holding a basketball. The film then follows the fate of several people who had contact with the doomed family in the final days before they died.The Ju-On film series was one of Japan's great horror franchises – a worthy contender to the likes of the RING cycle & PULSE, as well as giving Western horror fans something new to contend with after they had worn out their VHS copies of the Shinya Tsukamoto classic TETSUO: THE IRON MAN into the ground. Director Takashi Shimizu had created what is effectively the Friday the 13th of ghost stories – a killer ghost going around passing on a lethal curse to anyone who she comes into contact with. Not much in the way of character development, plot exposition or even a cohesive narrative – the films pass between victims with no logical connections to the point that trying to decipher the story is like sorting spaghetti. In 2009, nearly a decade after the original Ju-On films came out, two DTV features came out in order to celebrate the series.Of the two spinoffs, Ju-On: Old Lady in White is the better of the two. While this one might not quite match the major unease of the original films, it does try to make a reasonable ghost story. Newcomer director Ryuta Miyake manages to put in a few interestingly weird moments – everything from a severed head in a bag to a supernaturally resilient audio cassette & the rather silly but still weird image of the old lady ghost holding a basketball, as well as the film's highlight in weirdness with the uncle possessed by the house's evil spirits that leave his reflection still in the mirror while his body goes walkabouts – but like I mentioned above, the story is so murky that the plot threads are mixed together like your favourite Italian restaurant's finest spaghetti. Passable at best.

DICK STEEL I suppose it makes logical sense for the distributors here to combine both Ju-on: White Ghost and Black Ghost stories in 1 screening. After all, each is only 1 hour long, and narratively are somehow intertwined together quite loosely, with their production marking 10 years since Ju-on's cinematic premiere. Helmed by two different directors, we're given two direct-to-video productions, each with its own flavour and separate storyline dealing with the Ju-On Grudge curse, and frankly, with its limited production budget and consistent elements, For those unfamiliar with the Ju-on mythos (like me), fret not, as the films are self- contained, so prior in-depth knowledge is not required to enjoy what's essentially one of the longer enduring J-horror franchises out there, which has been remade by Hollywood as always. For both tales, the story lines were done in non-linear fashion, which is supposed to make you work at piecing together its chronology, with an increased challenge in White Ghost being two separate timelines you have to make mental notes of.Then there's the episodic cliffhanger that trails off each segment. On its own, the episodes within White Ghost and Black Ghost can be extremely short stories of their own, since each contains its own dedicated shock-scare moments, though White Ghost seemed to enjoy making it look so cheesy with its atmospheric jump scares, sudden appearances and the likes, and I admit it did get to me, especially with that old ugly woman with a penchant for holding onto a basketball (yes, all will be explained in due course) seem to have a fetish for charging towards her victim / screen.Personally, between the two, I'd prefer White Ghost to Black Ghost, mainly because of the storyline which was more engaging and kept within its limits, save for a tangent in White Ghost for AV star Mihiro to appear in a needless scene that had most of her screen time being butchered for a screening here (no, my friend who has met her before, says there's nothing sexy about that segment, more of a violent treatment which was rather tame that the censors frowned upon). For Black Ghost, it went off into the hokeyness of a Japanese medium of sorts, probably to show off some snazzy looking CG-ed belly, and a tale that's less engaging.For what it's worth, these stories did enough to pique my interest in the original Ju-on mythos, and I just might pick them up on DVD just to see how those got executed. For starters though, I have to get used to how "The Grudge" can be used as a plot device for ghouls to get created / passed on, as I felt White Ghost had it quite nailed down, and Black Ghost didn't exactly do a great job on that concept.