While not all J-horror entries are required to be compared to Hideo Nakata’s massively influential Ringu (remade for Yanks as The Ring, of course), it’s nigh impossible to discuss Yôichi Nishiyama’s Gurozuka without drawing the comparison. With automatic thanks to a rumored videotape on which the narrative must hinge, the similarities are too strong, ultimately to this film’s detriment.
With an all-female cast, the imported spookshow follows two high school groups collaborating on a project for class: the Movie Club, all two members of it, and the Drama Club, more popular since it numbers a big, fat three. Virtually doubling as cliques, both clubs can be defined by their members’ behavior toward others: respectively, goody-two-shoes and snooty bitches. With teacher Ms. Yoko as their chaperone, the nice girls and mean girls venture deep into the woods to shoot an improvisational film. Looking not unlike an Asian Sarah Palin, Ms. Yoko (Yûko Itô, Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust) is despised by the girls, who suspect she is having an improper relationship with Takako (Nozomi Andô, Tomie: Forbidden Fruit), the strange and silent pupil tagging along for this field trip.
Mind you, the above paragraph delivers far more background than Nishiyama needs to give his audience, other than to set up Takako as a social outcast and, therefore, a de facto red herring. The real story kicks in at the abandoned lodge in which they stay, because that’s where the Movie Clubbers stumble upon the creepy Super 8 footage that serves as the Zapruder film in Gurozuka’s world: a legendary reel depicting — or capturing, hmmm? — a woman in a demon mask slicing up her “co-star”: a fellow student of the schoolgirls who never was heard from again.
Furthermore, this found footage reportedly was shot on the lodge grounds … yet with this being a horror film, “reportedly” can be jettisoned. That demon woman still sports that undeniably unsettling mask and still grasps that same sharp implement and, yep, still remains on-site. I wish there were more to the flick than that, but — as is the case with the majority of J-horror movies — predictability reigns supreme. That’s not to say Gurozuka can’t be enjoyed half-heartedly, provided expectations are cut into simplified fractions; it helps that 84 minutes is all Nishiyama asks of your time for a work so reliant on the ideas of other films before it, including a scene lifted wholesale from Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. (Domo arigato, Samuel.) —Rod Lott