Ju-On (The Grudge) series - Chronological Cuts (* unfinished project *)

My next project (work in project): “Chronological Cuts” of the Ju-On series (the original Japanese movies upon which “The Grudge”, the American movie starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, was made).

Here’s a little bit of background information for the uninformed:

There are at present four different Ju-On movies (excluding the American “The Grudge”, which is based primarily on the third but draws elements from all of them):

1. Ju-On (made-for-TV movie) (2000)
2. Ju-On 2 (made-for-TV sequel to Ju-On) (2000)
3. Ju-On (theatrical movie) (2002)
4. Ju-On 2 (sequel to the theatrical version of Ju-On) (2003)

Discussions about the Ju-On movies on online forums are often very muddled, due to confusion over the different movies and their titles. For some reason, the made-for-TV movies are often refered to in English as “The Curse”, while the theatrical movies as “The Grudge” (I don’t speak Japanese so I don’t know which translation is more accurate, though the fact that the American version by the same director was titled “The Grudge” probably says something).

The made-for-TV movies are significantly shorter than the theatrical movies. One problem with the made-for-TV Ju-On 2 is that it spends half of the movie rehashing and expanding scenes from its predecessor. Contrary to popular belief, the theatrical Ju-On is not a remake of the original made-for-TV movies, but a sequel of sorts (which may or may not contradict the original movies, depending on your interpretation of some events). Each of the four movies contain six disjoint segments, each preceded by a screen displaying the name of one of the main characters in that segment (almost always a victim). The segments are often not in chronological order, sometimes jumping a whole generation foward or backward.

In Singapore, the four movies were released as a trilogy on VCD and DVD. The two made-for-TV movies were edited into a feature-length movie titled “Ju-On: The Prequel” (unfortunately, they used the original versions of some scenes from Ju-On that were extended in Ju-On 2, resulting in the omission of some footage that was in Ju-On 2), while the theatrical movies were titled “Ju-On: The Grudge” and “Ju-On 2: The Final” (I have no idea where the subtitle “The Final” came from, and rumor has it that a third theatrical Ju-On may be in the works, though the director is probably giving priority to the American sequel). I bought this “trilogy” on VCD as it came in a nice box set – though I’m obviously not going to use VCD video as the source for my edits.

Thus far, only the theatrical Ju-On has been released on DVD in the United States (by Lions’ Gate), as part of the publicity for the “The Grudge”, with some nice extras that are subtitled – I hope they’ll do the same with the theatrical Ju-On 2 in conjunction with the American sequel.

(Side note – I bought the imported 4-DVD set on eBay, which was supposed to contain all four movies, but the DVD with the cover for the theatrical Ju-On was actually an unsubtitled bonus features disc for the theatrical Ju-On 2 instead. So I paid for four movies and got only three, plus a bonus features disc that’s completely unintelligible to me.)

Whew, that was a long post. I’ll describe my edits in another post.