Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 18, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
—
The causes of female-centric and foreign horror aren’t advanced very far by either the Japanese anthology Unholy Women or Russia’s Dead Daughters, which received their East Coast and North American premieres respectively at the 2007 Philadelphia Film Festival. Both movies take their cues from the trendy/played-out (choose one) themes of Asian fright films of the past decade or so, and with the exception of one of Women’s stories, they don’t add much that’s fresh. Despite the unifying gender spotlighted in that film’s segments, and the birth-canal imagery that introduces the title sequences of each, little about the feminine condition is explored in any of them either.
A further disappointment is that the least of them was written and directed by Keita Amemiya, who has won a following via his monsterrific Zeiram films and other sci-fi fare. His Women opener “Rattle Rattle,” however, is just one more entry into the distaff-revenge-from-beyond-the-grave stakes that’s too little, too late. While not that original, this tale of a young woman haunted by what may be the spirit of a mother who witnessed her child’s fatal plunge off the side of an apartment building at least held the possibilities for a decent dose of spookery. Instead, the overacted hysterics of lead actress Noriko Nakakoshi and the funniest faces ever pulled by a vengeful ghost-woman combine to elicit unintended chuckles rather than the intended shrieks, on the way to an annoyingly inconclusive ending.
Takuji Suzuki’s subsequent “Hagane” (“Steel”) also gets laughs, but it earns them—when your jaw isn’t dropping to the floor. A mix of absurdist comedy and over-the-top body horror, it manages to out-weird even acknowledged masters of Japanese strangeness like Takashi Miike and Shinya Tsukamoto, while staying grounded and consistent enough that its oddest turns never feel gratuitous. The deadpan insanity begins when lackadaisical garage worker Mikio (Tasuku Emoto) agrees to do a favor for his boss by going out with the latter’s sister. When Mikio arrives for the date, he is greeted not by the pretty face in the photo his boss showed him, but by a girl whose head, arms and upper body are covered and tied in a burlap sack. I wouldn’t dream of giving away the particulars of what happens next, but suffice to say that you’ve never seen anything like it, and you’ll want to see more. Suzuki has apparently only done other shorts and anthology segments before, but “Hagane” stands head, shoulders, hips and legs above its Women counterparts, and someone needs to give him a feature of his own, stat.
Another past contributor to multistory features and TV series, Keisuke Toyoshima, scripted and directed Women’s closer “The Inheritance” under the supervision of prolific Ju-on creator Takashi Shimizu. The focus is a young boy who is brought to live at his grandma’s house by his recently divorced mother, whereupon his mom starts acting strangely and eventually turns violently on her son. There’s a decent amount of mood to Toyoshima’s filmmaking, but his story plays out placidly, and the punchline is pretty much given away by the title. Women may be worth seeing just for Suzuki’s contribution, but overall it leaves a lingering feeling of disappointment, especially when compared to the variety and imagination seen in the Three anthologies.
Writer/director/editor Pavel Ruminov’s Dead Daughters, meanwhile, received much advance hype as a new groundbreaker on the emerging Russia genre-cinema scene, to the point where it has already been snapped up for a Stateside redux. One wonders if those producers took a good look at Dead Daughters before purchasing those rights, because if they did, they might have realized that American companies have been making films like this for almost a decade now—not only the U.S. Ring et al., but the Final Destination series as well. It opens with a sufficient bang as a crazed man jumps into the car of Vera (Darya Charusha), begging her to drive him away. Once convinced to do so, Vera hears his story of being haunted by the spirits of three young girls who were drowned by their mother, and who now linger around human targets for three days, watching for them to do wrong. If that happens, they kill their victims by violently utilizing any handy lethal objects.
By hearing this tale, Vera falls under the curse, and when she relates it to her initially disbelieving friends, they become potential victims as well. Once convinced that the dead daughters exist and mean business, the group realizes that they have to watch their actions, and try their best to stay on the straight and narrow. Meanwhile, some of them attempt to uncover the ghost girls’ origins and figure a way out of their predicament—and Ruminov draws out the initially intriguing idea past the two-hour mark, and the breaking point. The occasional entertaining scenes in which one character or another’s efforts to do good are ironically thwarted are separated by long stretches that do little to advance the story or shed light on the characters.
Worse yet, Dead Daughters features what may be the most distracting, show-offy cinematography yet in a modern cinema landscape that’s way too full of it. It’s not enough that the film employs the by-now overly familiar trope of draining the images of color; the camera just won’t sit still, lurching and bouncing up and down and sideways, in both “scary” scenes and simple dialogue exchanges, until you want to reach into the movie, grab the cinematographer and tell him to lay off the vodka. By the midpoint, non-Russian viewers will be thanking God for the subtitles, as they provide a fixed point on which to orient one’s eyes. Having to keep focused on the characters’ faces as they bob and slide all over the screen would be enough to cause an upset stomach well before the long-in-coming gore setpieces.
In the midst of all these visual calisthenics, Ruminov apparently thought he was being subtle by keeping the few deaths that occur in the first hour completely offscreen. He also throws in a couple of wink-wink references to his forebears, like the trio of young females who at first appear to be threatening but then prove to be the rock group “Samara Girls,” complete with that iconic long-haired image on their fliers. The former touch will likely annoy hardcore horror fans, while the latter will simply have those who’ve OD’ed on Asian-inflected fright fare rolling their eyes. Ruminov should’ve paid less attention to such gratuitous details and camera trickery, and devoted more attention to honing his script—which contains potentially intriguing ideas about responsibility in a supernatural context—and making up his mind about how to give the genre audience what it wants. Perhaps appropriately given its subject matter, Dead Daughters winds up playing like the combined efforts of three siblings trying way too hard to please in completely different ways.
