Kuroi ie

Enjoyable fare from 1999! Before the Asian Horror boom hit internationally, this adaptation of a best-selling book was made (and remade 8 years later in South Korea). To me, this film is something of a collusion between a Noir thriller and a Horror film. The languid pacing, nebbish investigator, slow unraveling of clues, and cat and mouse between the principal characters, all originate with Noir. But the body horror, psychological analysis, stalking of the protagonist, and color themes (green then yellow then red) come from Horror. However, if I were to leave out the humor, it would be a complete misrepresentation. The Japanese often love to include black humor in their twisted tales, and this film is a prime example. In trying to keep this review spoiler free, I won't include the long list of goofy moments, but it's all plain to see. This plays into the illogical motives of the characters at times which keeps this from being a deadly serious tale. On the critical side, I will say that it doesn't match later efforts in Asian Horror cinema, in respect to taut, action packed storylines; but I appreciated it's place in the history of that genre. When the confrontation about 90 mins in was put off; I must admit I was mildly frustrated. But the final 20 mins(!) ended up being a solid climax, and I then saw some logic in frustrating the viewer just to amp up their desire for resolution. Overall fun but not genre defining. Rather, a piece of the puzzle that lead to something much greater later on.

The problem with the majority of horror movies, and why I dislike most of them, is that the writers are so lazy or inept at character creation. Instead of drawing us into the film we're too often pushed away by their complete lack of human qualities to which we can relate; logic being the most neglected.

A horror writer may be skilled at fantasizing a scene or story that is scary. However, when creating the character with whom we should follow into the horror fantasy they too often fail. They resort to having the character make completely stupid or illogical decisions in order to place them in harms way, and keep them there. This makes me want to scream and storm out of the theater or burst out laughing.

I did much more laughing in this film. While the story and plot twist is pretty good the main character's actions are inexcusable. When a psycho killer is slowly approaching you with a knife a logical person will not stand and wait. Also that person will not run a short distance then wait for the killer to catch up. This movie should have ended way too many times but instead the cheap thrills just kept repeating themselves.

I honestly think that the idea for this movie is great, I really do! But in my lowly and wretched opinion, if you are going to build to the kind of intense climax that this movie does, I truly feel that you really need to pick up the pace considerably.

I DO like the way the story starts, almost whimsically in the office, even with kind of a jaunty soundtrack, showing us the inner office goings on to set the scene for what is going to happen. I think that is just fine. But, for what ultimately turns out to be a fairly straight forward Slasher type film, 2 hours I feel just really kills the pacing. Now, if the filmmakers had all kinds of really creative twists and turns plot wise to keep us really engaged, then sure, a longer runtime is perfectly fine. But, really what we are talking about here, although cleverly done overall, are simply STYLISTIC choices that honestly drag out the film way longer than it should be, and I think it kills a lot of the momentum. If you trimmed out about 20 minutes or so and tightened up the pacing, I think that would REALLY keep the audience much more engaged and swept along by the action.

So, I do really like the film and it's very clever premise, I just genuinely feel that instead of drawing out all these audio/visual little touches over and over, it would have been FAR more effective and packed a lot more of a punch if they had taken out a lot of that redundancy and just kept the excitement level higher building to what likely would have been a more heightened, effective ending.