Ju-On: White Ghost / Black Ghost Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Ju-On: White Ghost / Black Ghost Blu-ray Movie Review

Shades of gray.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 17, 2011

Sometimes a completely unexpected reference can spoil a horror franchise forever. The Scary Movie franchise’s ruthless pillorying of The Grudge franchise, where all the “Japanese” dialog consists of consumer electronics brand names and other Japanese verbiage which has entered the public lexicon, may have put the kibosh on any future chills the original Japanese versions of the films, called Ju-on, can provide. But if you can get that patently silly imagery and dialogue out of your minds, this new outing, consisting of two short films made to “celebrate” the series’ tenth anniversary, can at least provide an unsettling moment or two, if not outright scream-worthy scares. Separated into two segments called White Ghost and Black Ghost this Ju-on plays more like two somewhat linked episodes from the half season of The Twilight Zone when that show went up to a one hour format. Both discursive and somewhat padded, Jo-on White Ghost Black Ghost certainly has an unsettling ambience most of the time, but it doesn’t really hang together very well, and the two denouements may leave a lot of viewers scratching their heads and asking incredulously, “That’s it?”

While both of these outings have their individual moments of spookiness, White Ghost is inarguably the stronger of the two films. It has a nicely surreal quality permeating its fractured storyline, a storyline which is constructed—or deconstructed, really—across several timeframes, leaving it to the viewer to put the pieces together. This weird non-linear approach only adds to the unsettling feeling that is endemic to White Ghost, despite its flaws and so-so ending. We start in a field where we witness the gruesome final seconds of a suicide, and then, in typical Ju-on fashion, get a bizarre visual of hair growing manically out of a nearby duffle bag.

White Ghost then ping-pongs back and forth between several characters (again, a typical Ju-on trope), slowly letting the audience infer the connections. Some viewers have evidently been confused by the two different timeframes, not understanding that the teenage psychic girl Akane is the grown up version of the young girl haunted by the hideous slaughter of a family whose daughter she had befriended shortly before the girl’s unfortunate murder.

This episode creates a really nice nightmarish quality from its first moments involving a motorcycle delivery boy dressed in a Santa Claus outfit who’s attempting to get a cake to a house that is filled with spirits. The strangely deserted streets of Tokyo in and around the holidays add a haunting quality to White Ghost that helps to elevate its spookiness quotient considerably. What White Ghost can’t really pull off is tying together its disparate plot elements. Just one example: who exactly ordered that cake the hapless driver is attempting to deliver? And the episode’s central “raging” spirit, an elderly Grandmother who crazily carries around a bright orange basketball, may actually elicit more laughs than anything else.

Black Ghost is simply too familiar for its own good, with its central “Grudge” being an unborn twin who is out to reclaim the life it never had. What seriously hobbles this pretty cliché-ridden enterprise is the fact that it follows White Ghost. While the first outing is certainly no masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, it at least carefully weaves a disturbing story which creates an ineffable mood. Black Ghost simply seems too pedestrian when thrust up against its “lighter” sibling. This two-fer might have worked much better had Black Ghost led off the duo. (There are some linking attributes between the two episodes; keep an eye out for the little furry toy which, while more important to White Ghost's story, also shows up in Black Ghost.

Both of these outings are to be commended for their relative lack of gore. The shocks and unsettling aspects are often created by implication rather than outright depiction. Even the central murder that is the focus of White Ghost is handled relatively pristinely, albeit extremely disturbingly, with everything leading up to the individual murders shown, but the actual deaths happening (sometimes just only slightly) off screen. It proves that filmmakers don’t need to wallow in blood and guts to create unease in the audience, and in fact it’s arguable that the approach taken in Ju-on White Ghost Black Ghost is infinitely creepier, as it leaves the horrid details up to the viewer to fill in, and imagination is always more hauntingly active than any mere blood smeared depiction can be. Both segments also benefit from some very smart directorial touches overall, including some nice tracking shots that slowly reveal certain horrors and a couple of nifty CGI elements that will raise a goosebump or two.

Ju-on White Ghost Black Ghost may show some signs that this franchise, now considered the most successful horror outing in Japanese cinema (and actually at this point multimedia) history, is beginning to reveal its tattered edges. The problem with a death curse that fans out, ensaring ever more people, is that there really isn’t any mystery anymore, and the audience basically sits around and waits to see who’s going to get it next, and how. White Ghost at least deconstructs its linear narrative to offer a unique storytelling technique that helps to alleviate some of the “same old, same old” aspect that the Ju-on series is suffering from. Unfortunately that leaves Black Ghost stumbling around in the dark.

Ju-On: White Ghost / Black Ghost Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Ju-on White Ghost Black Ghost has the shiny, overly polished look of high def video, which is how this was shot, no doubt due to budgetary concerns. Delivered on Blu-ray via an AVC/1080i transfer (in 1.78:1), Ju-on White Ghost Black Ghost is also the subject of considerable filtering and color boosting which gives the entire enterprise an odd and unsettling look. The palette is filtered at times to a bleak, ice-cold blue-gray spectrum that seems, well, positively ghostly. Occasionally certain distinct colors—as in White Ghost's supposedly iconic basketball—burst with bright hues. There are several naturally lit and colored sequences that look very good indeed, with impeccable saturation and excellent sharpness and vividness. Everything here is smooth, textureless, though reasonably well defined and inarguably sharp. With the excessive filtering, contrast is played with purposefully, and looks appropriately dank. If you don't mind the flat look of hi-def video, you'll probably like the weird appearance of Ju-on White Ghost Black Ghost.

Ju-On: White Ghost / Black Ghost Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Two mixes of the original Japanese language track are offered, a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix and a standard Dolby Digital 2.0 mix. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix sounds nicely robust, and that weird rasping sound that has become one of Ju-on's stocks in trade is brilliantly reproduced here to disturbing effect. (I used to drive my Mother crazy making a sound very similar to that when I was a kid). While there is decent utilization of surround channels, with nicely placed discrete sound effects, Ju-on White Ghost Black Ghost never really rises to amazing levels of surround activity simply by nature of its more limited, small cast ambitions. The best sound elements here are the spooky effects which include everything from weird thumping noises to the ghostly rasp to the almost preternaturally weird quiet, interrupted by a sudden rush of sound, in a forest glen where a suicide has taken place. The sound design here is quite effective on its own terms, and the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix reproduces it to a tee, but there's no really overhwhelming sonic activity here that is going to amaze typical listeners.

Ju-On: White Ghost / Black Ghost Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray.

Ju-On: White Ghost / Black Ghost Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Ju-on White Ghost Black Ghost has undeniably spooky elements, but this franchise may be nearing the end of its lifespan (deathspan?), at least for a while. White Ghost is suitably moody, though its denouement leaves a little to be desired, and while Black Ghost is also creepy at times, it plies a too often seen storyline to ever really get to really creepy levels. Both of these shorter outings work best when thought of almost as television movies, lo-fi works that don't really aim for the bleachers and which will satisfy when taken on their own limited terms. Both of these films look nice, if obviously glistening-smooth courtesy of their HD video sources, and the soundtracks are nicely detailed if not overwhelmingly immersive. If you're a fan of the Ju-on series, this Blu-ray is Recommended.