Sadako vs. Kayako (2016)

Sadako vs. Kayako (2016)

Dir. Kōji Shiraishi

A crossover of the Japanese Ring and Ju-On franchises that was teased as an April Fool's joke the year before it was released. I'm sure that I'm not alone in thinking it should've stayed a joke - although, while I'm on the subject of such things, does anyone actually like April Fools on the internet? It's fake news. Why is that a good thing?

SvK, however, turned out not to be fake, which is the most praise I can give it, having now seen it. It's getting its own post only because it doesn't fit canonically in any of the other Ring or Ju-On posts that I've made. It's its own thing with its own rules, so can be completely ignored if you choose to, even if you're a fan of the two things that it brings together. You can safely put FoMO to bed.

Some backstory is given at a school lecture on urban legends, in which both horrors are mentioned as being real-world phenomena. The cursed video tape is still out there somewhere, but because the film is set in modern day, not many people have a VHS player anymore, so it isn't doing the rounds like Sadako intended.

As (bad) luck would have it, two female students need a player to transfer something to DVD for a family member. A different female student, meanwhile, moves house, next door to the Ju-On location. All that remains is for the two things to be connected, which, to be fair, it does in an interesting way, one that even manages to give a reason why the two supernatural entities fight.

The journey towards that battle is slow, boring and lacks scares. It feels like a reboot, but fails to include all that a reboot would be required to cover, so it's very much dependent on knowledge of the two individual franchises. It does a few things that neither of the two had tried before, but none of them are good. Two of the original characters, an adult male and a female youth, feel like they were plucked from a bad anime series, one tonally different to both Ring and Ju-On.

It feels further imbalanced by having a lot more Sadako than Kayako, but it's only Kayako that gets close to providing any chills. Toshio is a complete failure, as is the cursed video footage.

I felt a little sorry for the more noble of the two girls, but mostly I was just indifferent to it.

- Yūri (Mizuki Yamamoto) and Natsumi (Aimi Satsukawa) sit on the floor to watch TV, despite there being a perfectly good sofa behind them. -