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Audio Format: DD 5.1
Video Format: Widescreen 1.85:1 (Anamorphic)
Languages: Japanese, Cantonese
Subtitles: English, Chinese(T/S)
Region Code: 3
Year Made: 2008
Running Time:
Release Date: 04/14/2008
Following his smash success with "Ring" (1998) and "Ring 2" (1999) — films that launched the worldwide J-horror boom — Hideo Nakata went to Hollywood, where he was hyped as the next Asian directing phenomenon — a Japanese version of John Woo and Ang Lee. But instead of churning out blockbusters, Nakata has spent the past five years making the Hollywood version of "The Ring 2," a cake that failed to rise at the U.S. box office, and developing other projects, including "The Ring 3."
For his first Japanese film since 2002, Nakata has made "Kaidan," a period shocker based on the work of Encho Sanyutei, a 19th-century writer and rakugo (comic monologue) performer. In other words, Nakata is returning to his native roots, which makes creative sense since some of the scariest elements in his J-horror hits were deeply Japanese, beginning with vengeful female ghosts, elements that Hollywood remakes often diluted or abandoned. Nakata must have had many a frustrating script meeting.
"Kaidan" begins with a storyteller reciting a tale about a samurai who cuts down a debt collector. The dying man curses the samurai and his family, and the samurai ends up killing his wife and himself. Their baby son is raised by a loyal servant, while the slaughtered man's daughters wait in vain for his return.
A quarter of a century later, the baby has grown to become a handsome-but- poor tobacco seller, Shinkichi (Kikunosuke Onoe). By a twist of fate, he meets the elegant Toyoshiga (Hitomi Kuroki), the daughter of the debt collector, who runs a singing school in Edo (premodern Tokyo). Shinkichi is irresistibly attracted to her, despite their considerable age difference (with the ageless Hitomi Kuroki playing Toyoshiga, the attraction is easy enough to understand).
Soon, Shinkichi and Toyoshiga become lovers, and Shinkichi takes a position as an assistant at the school, whose students are overwhelmingly young and female. It's not hard to see what comes next: Toyoshiga becomes madly jealous, until she begins driving her students away, despite Shinkichi's efforts to reason with her.
Finally, Shinkichi decides to leave her — and Toyoshiga throws a fit. In the ensuing struggle with Shinkichi, her eyelid is accidentally slashed by a shamisen plectrum — an injury that eerily reflects the one the samurai inflicted on her father. In other words, the curse is at work.
Toyoshiga soon dies in agony, while Shinkichi runs off with one of her students, the peachy-sweet Ohisa (Mao Inoue). But now Toyoshiga's ghost is on the loose. This starts a pattern: Shinkichi, poor fellow, can escape neither the jealous ghost nor the attentions of the various women he meets in his wanderings; a bad, potentially fatal combination.
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