One Missed Call (Chakushin ari)

 One Missed Call's premise almost reads like a parody of J-Horror: Young people in Tokyo start receiving a voice message from themselves, timestamped from a couple days in the future, which plays out their last few seconds before they die. And once they inevitably bite it, someone in their contacts list gets a similar message. Oh, and these calls always arrive with a creepy ringtone!

 Not even the Mighty Takashi Miike can save this story (screenplay by Miwako Daira, from a novel by Yasushi Akimoto). He can, however, make it look stylish (there's some terrible-looking camera effects early on, but luckily it simmers down quickly - the rest of the movie goes down very easy). And the sub-genre's conventions - already ossified back in 2003, when this came out - are almost always engaging.

 The plot of the movie hews very, very closely to the template set down by The Ring. Once it becomes apparent that there's some sort of supernatural menace preying on her university friends, Yumi (Kô Shibasaki) starts trying to find out more about the curse, with the help of a mysterious slightly older man (Shin'chi Tsutsumi) who's been on the case since the beginning. The investigation leads them to a family with a history of violent abuse (a major plot point) and a few pretty effective scares.

 No psychics in this one, thank goodness; Well, actually, there is one -an exorcist- but he's part of a fairly funny subplot about a TV show that catches wind of the ghostly phone calls. One of the few cases of a J-horror movie (successfully) sneaking in some satire - the only other one I can think of right now is Suicide Club.

I wonder if Marie Kondo ever had to deal with shit like this. Now there's an idea for a J-horror movie!

 The investigation -a traditional element of the ghost story which almost always lends structure to J-Horror- is interesting, and while the plot ends up tangling itself into knots by piling on multiple twists and red herrings and a (very obvious) Ringu-style fake-out, there are some genuinely cool reveals. Most of the time, though, it's dumb and derivative. Not to the extent that it stops the movie from being fun, but enough that it overshadows almost everything else.

 Miike's pretty restrained here - it could almost pass for a normal teen-oriented J-horror flick. A good-looking one, though, with good atmosphere. And he and his frequent editor Yasushi Shimamura pull off some unshowy but interesting sequences where the past intrudes seamlessly into the present. There is some fun stuff with the hapless police department (led by regular Miike collaborator Renji Ishibashi), the aforementioned TV production crew, and an excellent, very disgusting apparition later on.

 To be perfectly honest, some of the dumb parts are pretty fun, too, like a severed hand busily operating a clamshell phone, or an attempt to foil the curse by cancelling a mobile plan. I mean... come on, that's pretty funny; I did wonder if the whole thing was taking the piss, which is something I've found myself pondering a lot over the years while watching even the most craftsmanlike of this particular director's movies. It's an auteur thing. If this one is tongue in cheek, though, it's plays it too safe, staying too faithful to other, oh-so-serious J-Horror staples.

Noroi: The Curse (Noroi)

  Pitched somewhere between Lake Mungo and Blair Witch Project (though it ends up edging closer to the latter - makes sense, as the former only came out three years later) Noroi is a Japanese faux documentary presented as the last video (VHS, of course) put out by an underground paranormal investigator/journalist.

 The film within the film starts with our fearless journalist Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) investigating some weird, baby-like ghostly sounds manifesting in a family home. When he goes next door, where the sounds seem to be coming from, the neighbour chases him away. Investigating further, Kobayashi finds that the sounds from a recording do indeed sound like human babies - plural, and a bunch of dead pigeons near outside the neighbour's house.
 Smash cut to black, with some text informing us the neighbour soon disappeared and the family that reported the sounds died in a car crash.

 And so it goes: the film keeps accruing incidents like this, and ends up centering around three psychic individuals - a variety show actress (Marika Matsumoto, playing a fictionalized version of herself) who senses something paranormal while visiting a shrine; Kana (Rio Kanno), a young telepath girl who's soon abducted; And a barely coherent clairvoyant nutjob (Satoru Jitsunashi) who wraps himself in tinfoil and keeps screaming about psychic worms.

 Sensing a connection, Kobayashi starts following up leads- Kana's disappearance, pigeons, Marika's unraveling psyche, a recurring word, mysterious deaths plaguing people tangentially involved in the case, and that pesky neighbour back from the first case, who keeps popping up in unexpected places. Sure enough, a pattern begins to appear, one centered around a flooded town and the rituals they performed to contain a malignant entity.

 Noroi was made at the tail end of the 'classic' J-horror period, and it has several hallmarks of the sub-genre- most notably the narrative structure, a haunting that spreads like a disease, a creepy kid, and one of my least favorite tropes: an over-reliance on psychics. Other than that it mostly pivots back to a more subdued, traditional Japanese style of horror. I guess we'd call it folk-horror these days, and I'm very happy to report that warlocks do factor into the proceeds.
 The mystery does end up making sense, most of the new pieces fitting into the story in a satisfying fashion, and the film is effectively creepy despite some misfires. It also nails the feel of an enthusiast documentary, but that comes with its own problems: mainly that there are no real characters in the piece - they're all completely one-dimensional. It makes sense for the format, but at the same time it makes the film a bit of a chore to get through, especially as it drags towards the two-hour mark.

 Again owing to the mockumentary format, it's a pretty ugly-looking movie, all handheld cameras and lossy video - let's call it diegetic cinematography, with a soundtrack added in post. It doesn't do wonders for its watchability, but the realism adds to the film's queasy power. The acting is fine and the (very) limited effects are variable; An early ghostly 'glitch' is laughably cheesy in both conception and execution, but the one good glimpse we get of the big bad is memorably fucked up.

 Director/co-writer Kōji Shiraishi is obviously a big fan of the genre; He'd get to make Sadako Vs. Kayako over a decade later with mixed (I'm being kind here) results, and he does a much better job on this one of capturing its appeal. Noroi isn't a lost J-Horror classic or anything like that - I'd recommend Kairo or Dark Water over it in a heartbeat. But it is a pretty effective, well-made attempt to fuse that genre's strengths with the found-footage craze.