Chad

DaveyJoe

Has anybody watched this? Is it any good?

TheBigDave

I saw it a couple years back and really liked it.

ViewAskewbian

I thought it was pretty boring. Struggled to keep awake.

Baron Of Hell

So far 12 minutes in I'm not digging. I don't like documentary horror films in general so that is probably most of the problem. I'll give it a 30 minutes to grab me.

Baron Of Hell

47 minutes in and still kind of dull. A girl that ties knots in her sleep. Strange banging sounds. A crazy guy in a tin foil hat. No killing, nothing interesting.

Baron Of Hell

I'm out, if it was English I might have kept it on while playing xcom or something.

Trevor

It was a bit of struggle to stay with it. Nothing really original or memorable. I'll probably never watch it again, but it wasn't all that bad.

Undeadcow

I agree with your comments and found the first third to be boring and scattered. The tin foil guy is too oddball and elements seemed disconnected. However, Noroi: The Cure suddenly gets better around the one hour mark with the demon ceremony bit. It's worth picking back up if you've put in 47 minutes already; not great, but better. I'm not finished with it myself but the change in pace makes me glad I stuck with it so far. In general plot developments and supernatural elements seem too obvious with an annoying emphasis on rubbing your face in details making them cartoonish at times (i.e. this guy's not just crazy, he's covered in tin foil in a tin foil room with erratic facial gestures staring at the ceiling and nervous itching crazy).

DaveyJoe

I liked it. I enjoyed all of the bits of news and tv variety show footage, particularly the little girl with ESP. The only thing that bothered me was the crazy psychic guy got to be pretty annoying before long. And there was a few too many scenes of people randomly falling down and screaming. But I'm a big fan of J-horror, and I think this movie was suitably creepy, if a bit long.

BTW: what are your thoughts on counting this film for the documentary and/or found footage categories for the challenge list? I think the latter is a given, but not sure about the documentary section.

Undeadcow

Aside from an awkward start making it overly long and overall lack of subtlety, Noroi ended up being a decent entry into the found footage subgenre albeit more of the same. I liked the japanese demon vibe.

Do YOU know where Masafumi Kobayashi is? [Is that obnoxious sequel set-up or what?]I'm don't see this as being a documentary since it is fiction and lacks any clear historic context. I assume creative liberties were taken with anything that might have been religious/mythology background.

DaveyJoe

I see, I think I didn't completely understand the category. So I guess we're talking about a behind the scenes feature we might find on a DVD? Or does it have to be feature length? I don't know of too many documentaries about horror movies.

Baron Of Hell

I don't think they meant a real documentary or real found footage. Just a film done in that style. I think this fits the bill along with other crappy movies like blair witch and paranormal activities. There is a real documentary done on nightmare on elm street or friday the 13th, suppose to be good.

rbrown498

Since this was my subset pick, I guess that I should throw a few comments in about it. I picked it because I'd read several good things about it a few challenges back, and it sounded like it would be something that I would like. I even went so far as to order a DVD of it from Hong Kong so that I wouldn't have to stream it (because AT&T is my ISP and I don't trust 'em for keeping a connection going for more than an hour or so at a time without some sort of problem).

There's a sub-genre in Japan of direct-to-DVD movies about people with camcorders going looking for ghosts in abandoned buildings. I assume that Blair Witch can be blamed for this sub-genre, but apparently ghost-hunting TV shows are as big or bigger in Japan that they are in the States. When I lived in Japan in 2002-2004, I watched several of these direct-to-DVD ghost hunting movies, and even without English subtitles, they were pretty easy to follow. There was one in particular that really creeped me out, where a ghost-hunting crew brings back a ghost in the car with them from the building they'd investigated. However, I have no idea of what it's called or how to find it.

Anyway, to get back to the point, it sounded like Noroi would be similar to those films, so I wanted to see it. I liked it, but I didn't love it. I found it to be interesting throughout, but I certainly wouldn't have minded if it had been 20 or 25 minutes shorter. I didn't think that the aluminum foil guy added anything of real interest to the story, and the subplot with the guy with all the pigeons on his balcony could easily have been cut. Still, the reveal of what the producer cut from the tape before showing it to the actress and the final scene were pretty effective.

Overall, I liked it. It's no Dark Water, but I liked it MUCH more than I did Kairo (Pulse).

ntnon

That sums up my thoughts quite well, to: didn't need to be as long, and several parts didn't appear to add anything. However, the core plot made quite a good, if much shorter, film on their own and mostly made up for the lesser elements.

(Also it didn't really have any of the more utterly-terrifying distinctly-Japanese J-horror elements, which pleased me greatly. I watched one of the Ju-on films to count towards the checklist and it was both not very good and horribly disturbing. So this was significantly easier to watch!)