Sadly Over-hyped

not as good as all the hype

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

I found this a creepy and psychological horror from Japan. It wasn't especially original compared to Ring (1998) but it was fittingly scary. It didn't make me jump but I was grabbing hold of anything tightly so that I wouldn't feel so scared. There was one amazingly scary moment. I found the end part of it pretty confusing although I can excuse that because of all the fear and tense atmosphere that was built up with the sole purpose of giving the viewer some paranoid scary thoughts. Scary and enjoyable.

A divorced mother wins custody of her young daughter after a bitter court battle. Together they move into a rundown apartment complex where the apartment is dirt cheap but soon after moving in, they begin to find the unit plagued by water damage. Not just that, but a red child's bag begins to appear in strange places, even after being disposed of. The mother, who is beginning to fear for her sanity after her tough childhood, discovers that the bag belonged to & is the sign of a young girl who has lived in the apartment above them & who disappeared several years ago.Ever since he hit paydirt with RING, director Hideo Nakata has gone on to make several films in both his native Japan & in Hollywood. For years, fans had been waiting for him to return to the horror genre & make another classic, a wish that Nakata had proved too tempted to avoid.Unlike the majority of horror fans, I was one of the few that didn't think that Ring was any sort of classic. Sure it had a couple of great jump moments (particularly that scene with Sadako climbing out of the TV), but it was a hideously overrated supernatural mystery film that had a plot that was obtuse at times & never made any particular sense (not to mention an internal logic that was twisted like a pretzel). However, it did have some interest & the remake was considerably better.With Dark Water, Nakata tried to do another Ring, only with a red child's bag & a flood of water standing for a videotape. Most of Nakata's fans & even some critics who had mixed feelings about Ring were impressed with Dark Water but I wasn't one of them. To be honest, the plot belongs more in a drama film than a straight horror film. Not just that, but Nakata's skill as a filmmaker isn't entirely consistent – his style was crude with Ring, but when it came to making Ring 2, he had improved somewhat. Here, however, his skill deserted him. There are no jump shocks & Nakata's constant use of the red bag's ghostly appearances was a poor attempt at providing tension.When it came to the ending, Nakata does the same sort of foolish mistake that M. Night Shyamalan did for his films & throws in an end twist that makes no sense whatsoever. I'll explain the following – the girl fell into the water tower & drowned (something that went unnoticed by anyone else despite the girl living in the building & which was never investigated) & haunted the building ever since. Her apartment's kitchen taps were turned on & left on for at least six months, resulting in the apartment being flooded (how on Earth does an apartment become flooded without anyone noticing for six months? Doesn't make sense to me either), which resulted in the water damage to the heroine's apartment. Not just that, but the ghost's red bag keeps reappearing in places despite being dropped into the water originally by the girl herself. And how does the drinking water (which came from the water tower the girl fell into) become dirty without most of the people living there noticing it. I mean, hair shows up in some of the taps, for crying out aloud! But in the ending, the ghost forces the mother to abandon her daughter & join her in the afterlife for no reason. Really stupid if you ask me.Having said that, the day-to-day drama the mother & daughter living in the apartment go through is okay, although strictly routine. Not just that, the acting is reasonable & has some interest in it (Rio Kanno makes for one cute kid & who would make a good actress when she grows up). The epilogue that follows the mediocre ending compensates somewhat for the weakness of the rest of the film's story but doesn't elevate what is an otherwise unexceptional film.

I did seen the remake before this and I did re-watch this few days before this movie as I thought I had not seen the remake before but then it hit, that I did see the remake before and It was very get able There was not much different from the remake at all, it did have some better and some bit more creepy feel to the remake/ Maybe I soon have not seen too soon after the remake, I was really bored by it, I watched it's all way thought.This didn't seem the same impact on me as other J-horror movies, I loved Ringu, ju-on and One missed called series. There were one or teo creepy moment that really stand out this movie nothing really that memorable.A liked the ending in this movie a lot better then remake cause here easy to understand. 4 out of 10

The American horror film scene has been getting staler and staler for the better part of two decades. We get the same boring clichés and jump scares packaged under different titles with little originality. That is not to say that there aren't some very good American horror films to be produced since the 1980s but the more Asian horror that I watch the more I see that they have taken up the torch and are producing the best horror movies of the era.Dark Water isn't necessarily one of the best Asian horror films to come out but it certainly is a good one. The American remake is really indicative of what is wrong with the industry in North America. The story is the same and many of the scenes are very similar but for some reason, some intangible reason, it is of remarkably lower quality. Even with a very talented actress in the lead role it still doesn't shine like the Japanese original, even though it possesses every required ingredient. It is these intangibles that the Asian horror scene has somehow mastered and the American scene has lost.Dark Water itself is a nice little ghost story. It is a slow-burner with an unsettling tale and reveals itself subtlety. The characters are not throw away fodder as in many modern American horror tales and there are some scenes that had me, a hardened horror veteran, wanting to squint my eyes at the television screen. This is not American horror in the sense that everything is not in your face blood, gore, and knife wielding psychos. This is a much more subtle, psychological tale. It will creep under your skin.Asian horror is the new standard. I hope that the American industry will learn thing a thing or two from the Asian scene and not just try to emulate it so that perhaps the next generation of filmmakers can bring the torch of horror back to the United States.