Yakin Jiken (The Convenience Store)
A feature adapted from a Japanese first-person computer game, this oddly defaults to a very standard riff on the Ring franchise with slightly updated tech – SD cards instead of a VHS tape … which makes you wonder whether there aren’t angry J-ghosts out there who can no longer spread their curses because their runes are trapped in now-unreadable zip discs, flash-drives incompatible with anything past Windows XP or discontinued Dropbox accounts. I know spook stories have adapted with tech – I think the first haunted telephone story was in print before Alexander Graham Bell was back from the patent office – but the attempt to make four tiny information storage cards ominous here doesn’t really pan out, even with an added mystery about how they get delivered in the old-fashioned parcel post to the woman who is the primary hauntee.
Evidently, the original game – no, of course I haven’t played it – is from the viewpoint of a young girl working the night shift in a convenience store which has all sorts of paranormal activity going on but that gets a little lost here as the apparent heroine (Kotona Minami) recedes into the background after some nastiness in the store and a male cop takes over the investigative angle, looking at the video clips sent on the SD cards of a family freak-out which leads to eye-gouging and multiple murder involving a scatter of rusty six-inch nails (the major image of the film – those nails keep turning up, to the point when I’d be more worried about tetanus than being haunted to death).
It’s a relatively brief film, but still dawdles – and neither of its lead characters come into focus until quite late in the day, with the most original idea being trotted out in the last ten minutes or so, and then not being explored in depth. In the end, the convenience store itself – a striplit, open-all-night venue for banality and creepiness – doesn’t seem to be all that relevant to the horror business, which means ‘Chô’ kowai hanashi A: yami no karasu (Cursed) (2004) – which may well have inspired the game in the first place – remains the haunted Japanese convenience store horror film to beat. Directed by Jirô Nagae.
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