Review Rating: 6.5

A series of inexplicable suicides leads Tokyo residents to investigate computers (and various other electronics) supposedly being haunted by ghosts.

That is a mighty simplified version of what I think might be the plot. Sad to say, I’m honestly not completely certain what the plot was. Most of the movie has Japanese folks with no apparent connection wandering about attempting to investigate the supposed suicide of people they knew, in like the last fifteen minutes of the film does anything else happen, and boy does it get even more odd. At some point in the movie, a graduate student who came up with a computer screensaver-like deal that the ghosts apparently like, attempts to explain that he thinks the place ghosts go to when we die is overfull and the ghosts are flowing back into our world. At least, I think that’s what he meant. From that, I guesstimate that the last 15 minutes of the film, where a plane crashes into a building, most electronics are fried and won’t work and a ton of people appear to be missing from Tokyo; that most people were being haunted by their electronics and at that point just chose to give up and go with (or get taken) by the ghosts.

There are still a lot of unexplained things that happen in the movie. What’s with the red tape and the door? How did that graduate student know what happens to ghosts via computers in the first place? There’s a traditional J-Horror boogeygirl ghost, with the Kabuki-white skin and the stringy black hair, that scares the ever-loving crap out of people when she shows them her face, but why? (She never shows the camera her face, dernit.) Throughout the entire movie, there is but one what I would consider a truly memorable scene: the college student who was a first-time computer user facing a ghost with little scary about him other than the blurred black halo and the dead white skin, swears up and down that he will turn about and chase that ghost down and grab him and then the ghost will disappear, because they always do, right? Well, that college student does indeed turn around and rush down that ghost, only to find as he grabs a pair of scary black shoulders that oh %$#@, you’re now touching a ghost, and boy do his eyes bulge. That’s about it.

If ever J Horror needed a translation of an entire movie, this would be it.