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ST
JOHN’S WORT
6/10
Otogiriso : Japan 2001 : Ten Shimoyama (aka Shimoyama Ten) :
85 mins
Student
Nami (Megumi Okina) and her boyfriend Kohei (Yoichito Saito) explore the
crumbling mansion which Nami has just inherited from her estranged father.
They film their expedition with digital cameras, beaming the results back
to the video-game company where they work. As their colleagues construct
a new game around the footage, Nami and Kohei make a series of increasingly
grisly and terrifying discoveries…
St
John’s Wort is as refreshingly
unusual as its title: a more-than-slightly bonkers Japanese horror movie
with an engagingly freewheeling post-modern edge. Though the story involves
much high-tech gadgetry, it’s clear that this is by no means a big-budget
production – instead, director Shimoyama and cinematographer Kazuhiko
Ogura digitally tweak nearly every image, heightening colours, freezing
the action into awkward, pixellated frames, inserting computer-style text-boxes
and ‘graphics’ that turn the movie into something very close to a game
itself: “It’s all computerised!”, as someone says of Nami’s spooky mansion.
By
these means, we’re provided a coherent (if somewhat loopy) back-story
for ‘St John’s Wort’ – the real-life video game on which the film is based,
itself an adaptation of a lurid novel by Shugei Nakasaka. As such we’re
a world away from the more prosaic approach taken by Hollywood when it
brings games to the screen – the likes of Resident Evil, Lara
Croft : Tomb Raider, and Final
Fantasy – The Spirits Within.
But
this technique, while original and often amusing, comes at a price. It’s
hard to pay proper attention to the convolutions of the actual plot when
we’re being bombarded with such a stream of distracting, self-conscious,
self-referential gimmicks. Shimoyama isn’t too comfortable with the ‘straight’
horror aspects, and Nami’s flashbacks to her various childhood traumas
soon become tiresomely repetitive. We build to a deliriously over-the-top
fiery-conflagration climax straight out of a Hammer or Roger Corman classic
– or do we? Technology intervenes, and provides us with a slightly less
harrowing alternative. A clever touch – but also one that dilutes whatever
horror and suspense might otherwise have built up.
On
the plus side, the film scores points on the classiness front by having
the enigma revolve around a series of paintings produced by Nami’s crazy
father – his daubs an amusingly blood-thirsty hybrid of Aubrey Beardsley
and Francis Bacon, prominently featuring St John’s Wort - “the flower
of revenge”, we’re told. And stick around for the closing credits in full
– they showcase an editing prowess and use of music that’s much more striking
and confident than anything in the movie itself.
21st
June 2002
(seen 12th April 2002, De Balie, Amsterdam : Fantastic
Film Festival)
by Neil
Young
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