Crap After Dark: Reincarnation

I only turn Japanese After Dark!  Today's film comes to us from a fairly-successful Japanese Director.  You may have heard of his biggest film- The Grudge.  Ring a bell?  In spite of that, his 2005/6 film Reincarnation is part of the After Dark line.  Weird, right?  Did Sam Raimi see this and say 'Nah- I'll make my own movie.'  What is this movie about?  It's about people making a movie...but with ghosts.  This is your typical J-Horror fare, for better or for worse.  Honestly, that sentence tells you all that you need to know for the set-up.  Let's not waste any more time and I'll just ask you to read on...

A man is making a movie.  It's about some real murders that happened.  This girl gets cast because she looked at him weird.  Any questions?

Creepy little girl ghost with a doll- check.  Couldn't make a J-Horror film without at least one aspect of that, right?

Did I mention that the Doll occasionally acts on its own too?  Well, it does.

Since there's not much plot here, I'm going to waste a bit of time...

One odd sequence has our title character grabbed from a library- see above- and fly into an empty city.  Weird shit happens and...

She wakes up.

When did the dream part start again?  Was she talking to the other girl and immediately pass out?

In her bed, the Doll suddenly appears and...

She wakes up in her bed...again.  Holy Inception, Batman!  By the way, what was the point of this?

The story?  If you insist.  The Director takes the movie shoot to the actual location of the killings, rendering all of that stuff earlier about building a set pointless.

They act out a scene and shit goes down.

At the end of that, the Doll of the girl killed by her father walks up to the actress...who is the now the ghost of the dad...or something.  The bottom line...

She goes bat-shit insane.  If I attempt to explain any more of this plot, I will too.  The End.

Seriously, I've got nothing.  As I've mentioned before, I'm not the biggest fan of J-Horror or K-Horror films.  There's nothing wrong with them, but they are not for me.  Like most of those others, the pacing is all over the place.  Sometimes major scenes happen, while other scenes are just of two people sitting around explaining something.  In this movie, it's our heroine explaining Reincarnation.  In one of the first scenes, they even imply that there is an App to tell you what your past lives were.  You're beating us in the tech market, how?!?  Another problem is that our lead(s) just come off as being weird.  If I was haunted by the ghost of a little girl and her one-eyed doll, I might be a little weird too.  However, the main character is kind of crazy before- what with her obsession involving past lives and all.  Ultimately, if you like J-Horror, you'll probably like this film.  I won't say that this film is coherent or all that logical, but it is well-made.  What they were trying to say here was just lost on me...assuming there was a message.  This sums up my reaction quite well...

Next up, I switch gears to Fangoria for this one-shot review.  Can a film with no clear plot twist in mind be good?  Stay tuned...