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Woohoo! Dark Water! Man, I used to love this show! It's such a huge shame that they cancelled it midstream! I mean they had JUST found the 8th treasure! That's more than halfway done! Still though, it's cool that they made a movie based on- oh? A Japanese horror movie? Well it still has pirates and dragon-things and groovy bio-tech right? No? ... A custody battle? But yeah, seriously, this week's adventure into the watching of messed up movies is Dark Water, which I'm not going into totally unspoiled since I kinda ended up seeing the American remake in theaters. Full disclosure going in by the way, this really isn't my kind of movie in general. The whole restless spirit of a little dead girl bit tends to be REALLY formulaic, and it's not all that interesting of a formula. Family/character moves into place. Notices things are kinda off. Later, things get really clearly off, in a general menacing GO AWAY OR DIE sorta way, then we find out why the place is haunted, and spirits are laid to rest, and that's pretty much it unless we have some twist ending that may or may not make any sense. The remake of this here followed this formula dead on, but was actually fairly good just from having REALLY good casting, mainly delivering the creepiness from the fact that it was just a REALLY scuzzy rat-hole of an apartment, haunted or otherwise, and it put a huge emphasis on the whole custody battle angle.
So yeah, deal is, Mom here just got a divorce. She just barely managed to get custody of her daughter because, well, she kinda has a slight history of being crazy. The Japanese version here specifies that she used to proofread ultra-violent horror fiction and she just couldn't take it after a while, which I honestly object to because, well, just look at me doing this consciousness stream thing. I'm subjecting myself to horribly frelled up weirdness on a pretty regular basis, and all it's done is desensitize me to the point where I'll honestly recommend people watch Tokyo Gore Police. The American version is more vague on the specifics, but puts way way more emphasis on how she's really just barely allowed to hang onto her kid here, can't afford to live in a less run-down apartment, and is stressed the heck out over it. Meanwhile, in the original version here, this place actually looks pretty nice. Not run-down at all. I'm sure we're still going to have the factor of "I don't want that scumbag to get my kid because people think I'm just getting crazy again talking about my haunted apartment!" but it isn't emphasized as much. Which is a shame, because I can sympathize way more with that than with people insisting on staying in haunted apartments.
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Anyway though, yeah. As these things often do, this starts off pretty slow. Here's our new apartment. It's got a nasty water stain on the ceiling that gets bigger and drippier as time goes on. Extra points to the American version by sticking it over the bed by the way for extra unpleasantness. Daughter wanders off to play on the roof, finds a Hello Kitty backpack apparently lost by some other little kid which her mom is kinda weirdly against her playing with, while everyone else is all, hey, go for it! Finders keepers! Interestingly enough, it's the original version which apparently couldn't land the rights to an official HK backpack and had to go with a generic equivalent. Then there's some mysterious probably a ghost girl just kinda wandering around giving Mom the heebie-jeebies. Plus Mom has some flashback abandonment issues here and there.
Now, here's some deviation. In the original here, the staff at the local school in particular are showing some concern about how ghost girl went missing 2 years ago after her mom skipped town, whereas, unless I'm really misremembering things, the remake has nobody finding it strange that she stopped showing up, with everyone figuring she just left with one of her parents. Other than that though, we're actually un-deviating quite a bit, because here's the crazy-stressed-out angle coming back into the picture, and the water stain is spreading, and sleazy-dad's PI is showing up right when he should... so really the only significant differences we have going at this point are I'm pretty sure the ending foreshadowing is slightly different, the remake has better casting, the original has more, you know, bright sunny day-lit scenes, and you know, there's the general cultural differences factor having a subtle impact on things. Plus the really significant difference in apartment quality.
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So yeah, moving along, eventually Mom's getting a bit overwhelmed, and hires herself a lawyer to help out with, you know, her ongoing custody battle and clearly broken tenant agreement and possible stalker. A lot of this gets cleared up when it turns out someone apparently went into ghost girl's old apartment directly above theirs and cranked all the faucets to full blast at some point. Because, well, yeah, that explains the huge water stain, and is evidence that yes, someone is indeed kinda messing with you, you're not just crazy. Creepiness with the Hello Kitty backpack refusing to stay thrown away though causes Mom to check out the creepy ominous water tower. That and they still keep finding big long hairs in the tap water now and then. That's just gross.
Turns out the whole deal here is, a couple years ago when her parents were getting divorced (and yes, every female character in this movie had their parents get divorced when they were around 6), Ghost girl ended up playing on the roof, dropped her backpack into the water tower the crazy old guy had left open, falls in trying to pull it out, and drowns. Now here's where the original and remake deviate for real.
In the original, while Mom's up there piecing that together via supernatural means (weird path of water leads her up, ghostly pounding on the side of the tank, that sorta thing) ghost girl turns the faucets on back in the apartment, filling the bathtub up with nasty black water, emerges from the filled tub as a zombie that looks like it's made of greenish brownish mud, and drowns Daughter. Mom comes, sees half-drowned daughter next to creepy tub, freaks out, grabs her, runs for the elevator. Stuff's going all floody, the elevator breaks down, and she sees the approaching dripping form coming up the hallway of... Daughter? Wait a sec, if she's over there, that means... GREEN MUD ZOMBIE GIRL "MAMA!" HUG OF DOOOOOOM! So yeah, Mom gets strangled by evil ghost girl while Daughter looks on helplessly. One big last wave of dirty water, and we skip ahead to when Daughter is in high school, coming back to this apartment since her dad ended up moving back to the neighborhood, and inside she finds... her mom. Who "apparently" isn't dead, and is suspiciously low key about seeing her daughter again after all this time. So they sit down to have a nice little chat. For a bit. And Daughter asks if she can move back in with her, because Dad got remarried and there's all these lame half-sisters running around. Mom though is all, yeah, sorry, no can do. I'm kinda stuck taking care of Ghost Girl there behind you. OK, she just says sorry, I can't, and Ghost Girl disappears when Daughter senses her approaching and turns around. And Mom disappears too because, really, it was way too painfully obvious that she was a ghost too. So she's all, huh, that's weird, and leaves, but figures "aww, how sweet. My mom has been here this whole time protecting me from a clingy evil ghost."
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Now, here's how the remake went. Mom checks out the water tower based on way less supernatural vibes, and more on the apartment's handyman being a shady dude who won't come clean on who the other little girl was that left her backpack up there. She actually ends up crawling partway in on a hunch to find out, oh gross there's a corpse in here! They take the classy route and don't show the audience a big bloated corpse for what it's worth. So there's a big criminal investigation, it turns out Ghost Girls parents just kinda sucked. They split up, mom just ditching out never to come back, dad assuming the mom had taken the kid with her, when the reality was that she'd gone and drowned on the roof. The handyman who left enough things unlocked to work as a death trap, and then just kinda hit the fact that there's a rotting corpse in everyone's drinking water gets arrested, the parents get investigated, OK, happy ending. Daughter takes a bath in the thick glass doored bath/shower, mom relaxes a bit, starts reading her a story when she comes out all covered in towels and a book in her hand. Eventually it turns out that it's really ghost girl with the book, no magical disguise powers needed, they're just similar looking kids and she's covered in towels, also no grossness on the reveal, just, a different little girl's face. So yeah, real Daughter is locked in the very Chekhov's Gun-ish bath/shower which is seriously seriously flooding and can't be broken open. Ghost Girl is kinda trying to pull a dodo on'em since they're planning to move to a less crime-sceney place, expense be damned. So Mom cuts a deal with Ghost Girl that OK! I'll stay here and take care of you already! Just don't go offing my daughter! For some reason, it doesn't occur to Ghost Girl, who in both versions has been playing with Daughter, but especially here, and whose corner Mom has quite frankly been in for a big chunk of the movie, since, again, she's investigating this mysterious backpack when everyone else is going "nope, no little girls here!" that really, all 3 COULD live happily ever after. She's dead set on drowning SOMEONE though. So mom gets bumped off to take care of Ghost Girl, which she's semi-OK with, and yeah, this means she also gets to be a ghost, and have a nice little goodbye hug with Daughter before she goes off to live with her dad, and that's it.
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Now, when I first saw the remake, I thought the ending felt rather tacked on, and it would have gone just fine on a relatively positive note with people getting neglected. Comparing the two though? The American ending works a lot better since, seriously, you can only have a corpse in a water tower for so long before people check it out, and heck, in the original version, the old guy who left it open gets off totally guilt free. It's just, well, he's old, he forgets to lock up some times, you know. Jerk ghost vs. lonely ghost is a tough call though. The Ring, which was by the same Japanese director, based on a book by the same author, and also involves a ghost girl, is primarily nifty by way of the ghost totally not having a sad tragic backstory. It's just the ghost of an evil murderous psychic girl, who was drowned because that's what you do with evil murderous psychic girls. Solving the groovy mystery does jack squat for you. Interesting change of pace. I can see making that your thing, and thus making the ghost girl in your next, honestly way too similar book, also just be a jerk for no reason, vs. the traditional tragic story take the remake has. The thing of it is though, here we're just not developing ghost girl as a character at all. There's a ghost. It tries to choke people to death. It says mama. That is all. Oh, and I am now done with J-Horror for the foreseeable future. Not that I'm going to stop watching screwy movies from Japan. I'm just saying the 5 billion movies about vengeful ghosts of drowned girls with bodies crammed into closets that get American remakes that seem rather pointless but actually tend to come out better? THOSE I'm done with. Actually, I'm getting dangerously low on screwed up stuff to ramble about. Maybe I need to get back into the creepy creepy animated movies.
