St. John's Wort (2001) Starring Megumi Okina, Yoichiro Saito & Koji Ookura Directed by Ten Shimoyama Written by Shûkei Nagasaka & Goro Nakajima

An intrinsic belief in the supernatural is easier for the Asian culture whose origins are rich in the lore and and mysticism of the afterlife. We in America prefer to deal with the visercal, blood and guts on the sword so to speak. Both are scary, both bring death and mayhem but you can hide from the knife wielding maniac, try doing that to the force that can walk through walls or hide in your sheets while you're laying on them.

American adaptions of Asian films tend to be extremely poor so I highly recommend going and renting The Ring and The Eye in their original format. If you have issues with sub-titles, get over it. They can be a little bit frustrating but in the end it's worth it.

St. John's Wort suffers from a few flaws that had plenty of reviewers panning it left and right, sad to say, it buried the film so much that I couldn't even find some decent quotes from it anywhere on the net. I freely admit the title doesn't exactly grab you and the dialogue tends to falter in places which can be distracting. The story is one hell of a creepy, disturbing and gruesome ride of discovery about the true depths of depravity in to which the human soul can sink.

This is a movie that is laden with moodiness and atmosphere. This is a story within a story. Nami (Megumi Okina) is a artist whose ex-boyfriend Kohei (Yoichiro Saito) and two friends run a small video game design company. Her strange dreams have inspired him with the idea for a video game based around an old house, and an eccentric madman. As the game unfolds, so does Nami's odd past, complete with a dead mother, unknown father and an aunt whose last words were "St. John's Wort". She has inherited a house from an man she's never met or even heard of, a mysterious painter who while famous and well known to even her twenty-something ex-boyfriend, is a complete mystery to her.

Just like Shaggy and the gang, Nami and her ex set off to explore the decrepit and decaying house which has, a whole garden of St. John's Wort, locked rooms, a creepy doll collection and oh yes, a photo of twin girls named, Nami and Naomi. There's even a strange figure in rain gear because as you guessed it, a torrential rain storm hits just as they arrive there trapping them without a car or decent cell phone reception. What did people do before cell phones were invented when investigating haunted houses, I ask you?. As they go deeper into the heart of the house, Nami has stronger and stranger visions of her childhood which now include a previously forgotten twin sister who may have been murdered.

This a mystery layered with horror and as each strange twist is revealed, another section of one man's personal grotesque soul is exposed even as each room of the house is uncovered, including some things better left buried. There is a reason I mention that this movie has a story because the plot is thin and rather weak. The difference is that a plot can be random scenes strung together, many times with only chewing gum and paper clips, to tell a tale. A story draws you in because you want to know more, handing you clues and tantalizing you with character flaws and fears to make you anxious to know more. So where St. John's Wort really craps out on plot, it definitely has a story to tell, if you can hold on through some odd dialogue and really creepy stuff.

Because of the element of a video game that was inherent to this movie, the director uses a significant amount of hand held camera shots, along with dramatic hue colored shots of the outside and a camera that gives you a watchers view of our main characters as they wander through the house. Who or what is watching them is part of the final denouement.

There are long silences in this movie which really bugged several of the other reviewers but that's another huge difference between not just Asian and America movies but certain types of horror movies. Lack of sound track means suspense is built through what you imagine or fear, not madly jangling piano notes that signify that something terrible is about to happen. I prefer to hear and see the sounds of the movie and the characters. When there is no music to give away plot surprises or distract you with, "mm..I know that band." you are compelled to watch the characters interact, to see their faces as they anticipate whatever might lie just around the corner.

This is not to say there is no gore in Asian films and while St. John's Wort is not loaded with it, there are some scenes that had me cringing because they let the camera stay right on the action, never allowing you the luxury of imagination. There are lots of Asian films that have the focus on gore and slash, but the majority rely more on the tale they have to tell and the revenge of the spirit which is much worse than of the flesh.