Sadako
Tsutomu Hanabusa
The story: There is a cursed video clip online that shows a man committing suicide. After watching it, the viewer dies as well. When one of her students dies after stumbling upon the footage, high school teacher Akane (Satomi Ishihara) is reluctantly drawn in. It turns out that Akane has special powers and she has to use them to battle the curse of a resurrected Sadako, the long-haired ghoul who first appeared in Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998).

Even curses need to get with the times.
In the original Ring, Sadako’s curse was spread via a videotape. How quaintly old school. Without an upgrade, the curse would have soon met with a quick end in this day and age. Accordingly, the curse of Sadako is now transmitted via an online video clip so that curious students and geeky techie types can serve as cannon fodder.
The other aspect of the film that has been updated is that audiences can now watch this in 3-D. Given that the scene of Sadako crawling out of a television screen in Ring is such an iconic one, you wonder how the 3-D effect will be used here. Disappointingly, it is merely employed for cheap scares.
Worse, the scares are really not very scary. Ring was creepily atmospheric but director Tsutomu Hanabusa, whose previous credits include comedies such as The Handsome Suit (2008), is this close to venturing into parody territory here.
As Kashiwada, the man who brings back Sadako and dies on film, Yusuke Yamamoto’s performance is exaggerated to the point of being campy. And while there was Nanako Matsushima’s harried reporter to root for previously, the protagonists here are the blandly pleasant-looking Satomi Ishihara and Koji Seto, who plays Akane’s boyfriend Takanori.
There is actually a sweet backstory on how Akane and Takanori got together in high school after she was ostracised for her powers but it is buried beneath the garbled and nonsensical goings-on in the present.
For example, we are shown Akane’s special power the first time she encounters Sadako. And yet in the final showdown, she does not use it right from the start and instead unleashes it only after a drawn-out cat-and-mouse sequence.
This movie just feels like a shoddy exercise to cash in on a certain long-haired ghoul’s notoriety. Sadako would not be pleased.
(ST)