Teketeke

This film has two dimensions, as an idol movie and a horror movie. Typically these two do not mix, but it did for me in this case.

Teketeke is an urban legend of a woman with no lower body who chops anyone who turns around into half.

Ooshima Yuuko, the girl who played the leading role is in AKB48, a ridiculously large (48 members) idol band, but her acting was very good, just like Maeda Atsuko in "How to Become Myself", a fellow AKB48 member. Of course, she's very cute, but what I really liked about her was her unique voice. Although AKB48 is an extremely stupid band that releases really horrible songs in my opinion, I am looking forward to more movies starring its members.

"Teketeke" is a typical Japanese horror movie. It's scary, but not so much that I can't sleep at night. Girls get chopped into half, but not overly gory and gross. Just perfect for me in every way. All the victims being really beautiful women and cute girls is an added bonus. The people who made this movie must have been pervs, but I must also be a perv too for liking it.

The balance of horror (scary parts) and everyday life (introduction, mourning, researching on the monster etc) was perfect. Overall great direction and production that maintains the suspense throughout the film.

This movie may not stand out among hundreds of other Japanese horror movies, but it's my absolute favorite.

Given my love of Asian cinema, then there was no doubt about me sitting down to watch this 2009 Japanese horror movie titled "Teketeke", as I happened to stumble upon it by random luck here in 2024. I had never heard about the movie before, so I didn't know what I was in for, and thus also had no expectations. Which meant that writer Takeki Akimoto and director Kôji Shiraishi had every opportunity to entertain me.

Just seven minutes into the movie there is a gory scene. And that definitely was a nice way to start the movie. Thumbs up for that.

Now, I am not familiar with the Japanese urban legend upon which this movie is based. So how true writer Takeki Akimoto was to the source material, I have no idea.

The storyline in the movie was okay. But I've been watching Asian horror movies for the better part of 35 years, so this movie wasn't particularly impressive. Sure, it was watchable, and I suppose if you are a newcomer to Japanese horror cinema then you're in for a treat. However, as a Japanese horror veteran, "Teketeke" was a mere walk in the park. A shame really, because the movie started out so nicely.

I wasn't familiar with a single actress or actor on the cast list, which is actually something that I do enjoy when I sit down to watch a movie. The acting performances in "Teketeke" were fair enough, though hardly anything outstanding, if I have to be blunt and honest.

Visually the movie is adequate. There is a bit of gore and blood, which definitely helped to keep the movie afloat for me.

Watchable and enjoyable for what it was, I doubt that I will ever return to watch "Teketeke" a second time.

My rating of "Teketeke" lands on a five out of ten stars.

I really love to watch a good urban legend based horror movie. Lights Out. Kuchisake-onna. Teke-Teke.

Or at least, I expected Teke-Teke to be somewhat good. The story of a woman's torso going around Japan cutting people in half, and two desperate girls trying to break a curse. It sounds like quite a lot of Asian / Japanese horror movies, but this one has potential. It was based off of one of the most famous Japanese urban legends of all time! This legend was so famous, people use to avoid train stations if they could go with other people after dark. It held districts in fear.

And that fear was exactly what I was looking for within this movie. Maybe it's my own fault for holding so many expectations, many of which were high - but this really didn't do it for me at all.

The acting was relatively well done in most moments when needed, but there were many times it just didn't come through. The characters do something insufferable that sometimes leads to death and you're just left staring at the screen like "Were you born naturally stupid or did you have sections of your brain removed?" That's part of this that I'm pretty sure I lost IQ points watching. It's generic horror movie dumbness but it seemed even more rampant throughout this and I assume that's down to the characters not being believable as people.

The CGI was painfully to watch, especially as Teke-Teke starts jumping around. It's meant to be tense scenes that have you sat on the edge of your seat, but you just sit there laughing at how purely ridiculous it looks. Now props to the editors and everyone, this did come out in 2009 when CGI wasn't as great - but it was still a degree better than it was in the film and it seriously could have been better.

It's been months since I saw this movie and I can still write a coherent review on how bad it actually was, that's alarming.

Overall, if you're here to watch something scary, give Teke-Teke a skip. However if you're here to watch something comedy, give Teke-Teke a try. They were in the ballpark with this movie, but in the complete wrong state. Comedic in general, not as horrifying and scary as you would think and a bit of a let down to the original urban legend.

I do think the story is pretty interesting on how it's based on a Japanese urban legend that I never heard of. The movie does a good job on explaining the myth of the spirit and the backstory of her. The opening of the movie actually does a good job on building up the suspense when the spirit first appeared. And I like how the movie doesn't show the spirit face until the end.

Unfortunately the movie contains a couple of flaws to it. The movie feels similar to other supernatural movies with the characters trying to find answers about the myth. The creepiness factor feels really weak because things happened way too quickly and there isn't that much suspense after the opening. I also find the climax to be poor because it feels really anticlimactic at the end. And I felt the movie could be a little bit more longer to make the movie more creepier.

Never underestimate the power of good sound effects. In any genre of cinema but maybe most of all in horror, and whether subtle or vivid, creative audio cues have made all the difference in giving unexpected power to some moment or creature, allowing them to gain infamy and live rent-free in our minds. The tell-tale skittering noise of the ghost in 'Teketeke,' born of urban legend in Japan, is surely one of the top highlights in the abbreviated runtime of seventy minutes. For that matter, the very notion is ripe for genre storytelling; how many flicks have made an impression even just with the visual design of some facet, or an intangible idea that gets lodged in our imagination? Factor in unnatural posture, and/or movement, and one has a viscerally unnerving trifecta on their hands with strong potential. With Tsuburaya Productions providing some key practical effects, it would seem as if essential elements are all in place for this 2009 release to be a sinister good time. The question does remain, however: beyond a short film of a brisk few minutes, how might the modern myth of the teketeke spirit could be drawn out into a full-length feature?

The answer is "with mixed success." Some choices of stylization are outright unnecessary, including the occasional first-person perspective. I very much enjoy Shimizu Mari's music in and of itself, but it sometimes seems too overt and grandiose to entirely fit here, somewhat working against the vibrancy of the primary horror material. Speaking of which, while the entity looks great as designed, I wonder if the conception here isn't too fantastical for its own good; if an urban legend is about a human, to any degree rendering the subject in a more outwardly inhuman form seems a step too far. Moreover, as is too often the case, I think we maybe see too much of the specter, reducing its effectiveness, including at the climax.

And the fact of the matter is that try as they might, screenwriter Akimoto Takeki and director Shiraishi Koji were straining way too hard hard to conjure substance for cinematic treatment. The plot is built around the personal life of protagonist Kana, then subsequent efforts to find out more about the spirit. No few shots get repeated to pad out the length, however; some bits of dialogue are revisited with only slight variation as characters ponder the ghost and who she was in life. All additional info and plot frankly just come across as a transparently thin, flimsy effort to dress up something which may after all have been better off realized as a tiny, punchy short that had no excess in the first place. Case in point, within the last twenty minutes Kana and Rie face obstacles so absurdly mundane that the result is almost parodic, and even the climax is one tidbit after another of "are you kidding me?"

The cast ably play their parts. I appreciate Akimoto's effort - incidentally, the final scene might bear the best thought poured into the otherwise shaky expanded narrative - and Shiraishi did a fine job with what he had to work with. It bears repeating that the audiovisual rendering of teketeke, in and of herself, is excellent, further including special makeup. The picture is broadly well made. Yet it rather comes off as a cash grab: not necessarily insincere in its intent, but the outcome of latching onto any slight modicum of a thought and stretching it as far as it could go, then further still. We watch this happen too often when a studio picks up a short film to adapt into a full-length movie, taking something brilliant and watering it down; see Bryce McGuire's 'Night swim,' or Andres Muschietti's 'Mama.' And here, too, albeit without a prior short involved. I don't dislike 'Teketeke,' and I commend the work everyone put into it. I just think that it didn't really need to be made at all, and unless you're obsessed with Japanese horror, there's no particular reason to go out of your way for this.