Shibuya kaidan (2003/4) has been packaged to look like one continuous film called The Locker, or packaged to look like two shortish feature-length films, Shibuya Kaidan: The Locker (2003), & Shibuya Kaidan: The Spirit of Vengeance (2004). But they seem to be a single continuous overlong film, more like a tv miniseries than a proper movie.

Some young campers are telling scary stories around a campfire, laughing, drinking, when one young woman goes off to get more beer kept cold in the river, & hears strange sounds, including a crying baby.

There's a rustic statue nearby of Jizo the patron of children, erected in the woods as an offering-place for dead fetuses.

Nothing more specific happens during the camping trip, but the spirit of some infant seems to follow the campers back to the city to pick them off one by one.

The underlying reason for the events would seem to be their disrespect toward that Jizo statue, the broken head of which one of them had disrespectfully used as a scary story prop.

But when they return to the statue to repair its broken head, their bad luck if anything worsens.

As the clumsily told story procedes, it will turn out that nothing has anything whatsoever to do with the camping trip, the Jizo statue, or anything from the first half hour of this amateurishly written film.

The story is badly acted, with the worst cinematography hardly any better than a home movie, with a story that is chaotic & boring. It takes a very long time to even find out why the film is called The Locker which may be why that's not it's Japanese title, as Shibuya kaidan would've translated "Ghost Story of Shibuya Station."

When it's finally revealed that they are being picked off one by one because they'd left something in a coin-operated storage locker before even going on that camping trip, it's just eye-rollingly stupid.

At some time in the recent past a tragedy occurred, a young woman leaving her newborn baby in that locker to die.

It has become a "lucky locker" for young women who come & make obeisances to the locker, but an "unlucky locker" to whoever actually uses it. The "rules" for whether it becomes lucky or unlucky are never very clear.

It's got to be one of the dumbest reaches ever for a haunted modern object. J-horror delights in making everyday technological objects of the modern world into harbingers of ancient evil -- haunted video tape, haunted cell phone, haunted web page -- but haunted station locker is really hard to find spooky.

The usual longhaired girl ghost is what manifests instead of an infant ghost, with no explanation for why if its a baby it appears to be a crawling young woman.

If you'd never seen any J-horror before this crawling longhaired girl might seem novel & strange, but she's just so standard she has very little effect on any but the most novice viewer.

Context is what gives the most commonly recurring ghost figure of j-horror any impact. And the context of a pay-locker isn't enough.

A couple of the gruesome death scenes are well designed, which makes it all the odder that the film as a whole is so badly photographed.

It's also butt-achingly long, & should never have been done as 80-odd minute films instead of edited down to one better paced film.

So it's too long by half, & too stupid by a factor of ten. Nothing happens that hasn't been seen far too often, & it's rehashed badly. Be prepared to laugh at what are presented as the scary bits (think "Cousin Itt's Sister" when you see the longhaired ghost); & be prepared for outright tedium for the greater bulk of the film.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl