Teketeke 2

The first film, released contemporaneously, was baseline enjoyable. Everyone did their job, and the audiovisual realization of the titular ghost was surely the best part. Yet filmmaker Shiraishi Koji and screenwriter Akimoto Takeki were straining desperately hard to tease out the urban legend of teketeke into a plot sufficient for a full-length movie, with overall results that were middling at best. It frankly should have been a short film of only a few minutes, trimmed of sixty-five minutes of excess. In a world where sequels commonly struggle to measure up to their forebears, I had no expectations that 'Teketeke 2' would be particularly worthwhile. Unfortunately, it's even worse than I could have imagined, and Shiraishi and Akimoto should honestly just be ashamed of themselves for agreeing to bring it to fruition.

They should have known better. It's readily evident that in making a sequel, neither director nor writer had any idea what they were doing. The scene writing, characterizations, and dialogue are floundering in their weakness; if the narrative was thin before, now it's about as substantive as a split hair. On the one hand, high school cliques, bullying, and social life, all inevitably to be cut short at the waist; on the other hand, a returning character who continues pursuing a thread of investigation into the least convincing aspect of the predecessor; these story ideas will flimsily converge. It doesn't help that the spirit herself has less of a presence, and those facets that were initially so striking the first time around - the sound, her unnatural posture and movement, etc. - are decidedly downplayed to instead lean by bits and pieces into the carnage. Shiraishi's direction is flailing and useless, and he seems to have forgotten how to make pictures; the cast suffer in turn, barely present in their own production, and poor Abe Shinnosuke is just a deer caught in the headlights. Yikes.

Even Shimizu Mari's music is blandly milquetoast now, more than not, and the camerawork is shoddy. The production values have noticeably dropped (not that they were the top of the line in the first place). If I didn't know any better I'd say that no one involved was applying themselves to the slightest degree in these seventy-three minutes, and this again includes shots and scenes that are recycled from earlier in the length. 'Teketeke' was the outcome of stretching a small, dark root idea as far as it could go, then stretching it further still, hoping to grab a few yen from people whose attention was caught by the notion of a cinematic treatment; this is almost built as more of a dull slasher, the sort of halfhearted, fuzzy-brained dreck that James Nguyen or The Asylum would cobble together over a weekend. We can say that the same effects were utilized - but surely not as much or as well, so where does that leave us?

Folks, this is bad. It's really, really bad. It's a stain on the name of Tsuburaya Eiji, or at least that of the company he founded, which produced this slop. Once again, the harder it tries to make plot happen, the worse the result. Anything we could possibly want out of 'Teketeke 2' can be found elsewhere, and done much better, so there's simply no good reason to ever check this out - except maybe for unquenchable curiosity, and even then the feature is very ill-advised from the get-go.

...Then this is just an insult to the word "bad" as a descriptive word for a film.

Spoilers for the first Teke Teke film here; in the original parent story, we see a typical urban legend horror film that's based around finding out what is going on and how to stop it and can it even be stopped. It's quite a cliche for an urban legend horror film and as much as I didn't enjoy it (I gave the original film 4.0/10), it still made me laugh and have one or two tense moments and jump scares. I did not want to watch the second film, I only did because leaving a film or drama series unfinished irks my OCD. This was more of a chore for me so maybe I liked it a lot less because I already went into it expecting nothing - but even then I still came out disappointed.

Teketeke 2 is set as a sequel directly onwards from the original Teke Teke film and that is exactly where this film makes its first mistake. This film is only an hour and twelve minutes long, there isn't much time to fit everything in without it being rushed - so they decided that the first 5 minutes of this second film would be a recap of the first. This cut down the film time for the second movie to an hour and 7 minutes. You would think that this film would be rushed with an overall run time of 67 minutes to fit an entire film into, but, you'd be wrong. The first quarter of this film is so slowly dragged out that I ended up pausing and drinking numerous coffees to keep myself awake watching it. There is so much that is unnecessary for many scenes to include in this for the ultimate movement of the film, that cutting out what isn't necessary at all would bring the film down to maybe 55 minutes in actual length. There is so much you can actually skip when watching this, it is eye-rolling.

After the first quarter of the film, things - thankfully - begin to speed up... and then things just start getting way too rushed. Instead of levelling it out, the directors instead slowed it down as much as possible and then just threw everything in at once instead of cutting out unnecessities and adding in necessities in more detail. You would think after what comes across as quite a rookie director mistake that it would get better but... it doesn't.

The special effects in this are even worse than in the first film. The blood is unbelievably fake that they are using for these death scenes that I think if I had been able to care what was going on, I would have laughed so loudly it would have hurt. Thankfully, the CGI is a little better than the original film (if you haven't seen the ridiculous and infamous Teke Teke jump gif, you're missing out) but it's still not enough to even try and save this film. The good CGI was an attempt to defibrillate someone who's been dead for six years and unburied from their coffin; they literally just tried to give CPR to a skeleton and called it a day.

If the too slow, then way too rushed ridiculous blood spraying wasn't enough to thoroughly ruin any enjoyment I could have gotten from this film, then they turned it into the Ultime Cliche. Ultimate Cliche x Ultimate Cliche. Not only do they still follow some of the (more unliked) cliches of urban legends films, this becomes an over the top Asian high school kids bullying revenge royale. They have managed to take unliked tropes from urban legends and include some of the most well-liked cliches from high school horror films - probably in an attempt to save some of the film with well-liked tropes - and somehow managed to make tropes that don't get old fall flat on their face ridiculously hard.

This entire film was a mess from start to finish.

And I'm sad; Teke-teke was an urban legend that I discovered when I was quite young. It used to give me nightmares and make me wake up chilled and pulsing with adrenaline. It used to haunt me under the covers and whenever I had to walk home at night alone. The film series was always so enticing to me because I wanted to be scared, I wanted it to spark back those childlike feelings of paranoia and terror. Unfortunately, the overactive imagination of an eleven-year-old built a better plot in a nightmare than a director could do for a renowned film.

Definitely just skip this film; the first film can get away with a lot of stuff if you let it but the second one doesn't have a chance to hide from a lot of its injustices. Skip this series and watch a different urban legend film; you'll thank me for it in the future when you stumble across this on late night television and realise you were going to watch it long again.

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. The first film is all about trying to figure out just what TekeTeke is and whether she can be stopped from taking another victim in a three day countdown that has already started. While I didn't write a review for that film, I thought it was leaning more to the less than average side but gave it 5 stars.

This film has a different structure to it. A bullied teenage girl, seeks revenge on the heifers that torment her by using TekeTeke. I'll be honest and simply say that I don't know how she was using TekeTeke without losing her own life. I was reading subtitles but there were a lot of things being written down but not translated and there was a scene where the tormentors were saying something in a flashback type scene while two folks were trying to work out everything and that was also untranslated.

I did think this was better than the first. I guess I just liked the whole revenge aspect of it but there was more blood and more kills in this one. I also thought we got a better look at TekeTeke in this one. Some people may take issue with the quality of the gore and makeup and it isn't the best but I didn't think it was awful. I did find a bit of confusion in TekeTeke's origin story because there were some aspects that had changed but I also saw an attempt to tidy some of that.

So, I didn't hate it but I didn't love it. I absolutely think TekeTeke is an interesting character though and if you don't know much about her, check her out.

This is the second installment of Teketeke. It continues with the lore of ghost/creature called Teketeke (Because it makes the sound that in Japanese sense sound's like teke teke when it crawls) and more victims that falls under it's nefarious slashing power.

Murder is occurring with girls who having red object as their belongings. The killer's calling card is its victim's body is always sliced in half at the waist. Rumor goes around amongst the high school girls that murder is done by Teketeke.

Reiko Kashima is thought to be the girl who turned into Teketeke. She was raped while she was still a virgin shortly after World War 2. Detective who handled the case thinks three men all having the sir name Numazaki committed the crime. But Reiko told the police that she was raped by an American soldier. But it was unlikely that American occupational force came to that area. Soon after the three men dies in a suspicious way. Reiko's grudge still seem to be roaming the streets as Teketeke.

Now Teketeke seems to be closing in on Natsuki (Sayuri Iwata) and her classmates.

Sayuri Iwata has good acting ability that conveys the realism of incident that happens in Japanese society. Portrayal of teenage girls living in Japan is spot on. Their gullible innocence in face of danger raises the fear factor in this movie.

Teketeke 1 was good, but this one is perhaps a tad better because the characters had more facets to their personality. This is one scary movie, and recommended for viewing if you're an Asian horror movie fan.