Movies
‘The Ring’ and ‘The Grudge’ Spirits Battle in Second ‘Sadako vs Kayako’ Trailer!
Earlier this week we told you that Paramount hopes Rings, their long-gestured sequel to The Ring and The Ring Two, will become an annual Halloween event.
Gore Verbinski’s 2002 The Ring, starring Naomi Watts as a journalist must investigate a mysterious videotape which seems to cause the death of anyone in a week of viewing it, was a remake of Hideo Nakata’s Japanese Ringu (1998). I still consider it to be one of the scariest and most unnerving horror films ever made.
And while The Ring was one of the most successful horror films ever here in the States, the Ringu franchise was also huge in its native land. It started the “J-horror” craze, and is responsible for the birth of the 2000 made-for-TV movie Ju-On, which would also get a U.S. remake in 2004 (the film was produced by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House, and its success is one of the reasons we never saw Ash vs. Freddy vs. Jason) under the moniker The Grudge.
While both franchises centered around a curse and feature a super scary evil spirit, they were inherently different stories, but had equal the spooks. I’m unsure which is bigger, but there are way more sequels to Ju-On than that of Ringu.
We’re pretty excited for Rings to reignite the franchise here in the States this coming October, but there’s a primer coming out of Japan on June 18th.
As previously reported, after a brilliant April Fool’s Day joke went viral, Kadokawa and NBCUniversal Japan have joined forces for the ultimate J-horror battle: Sadako vs Kayako.
Grotesque director Koji Shiraishi is behind the camera with Mizuki Yamamoto caught in the middle of the two battling horror icons.
We’ve already seen a teaser trailer, but now have a full-length version to go along with a handful of awesome screengrabs.
It looks as if both stories are seemingly separated, at least until the two spirits come across the same victim in the final shot (it reminds me of Monica Keena’s scene in Freddy vs. Jason). The coolest shot is that of Kayako being choked by Sadako’s famous hair, although the trailer loses its power with an awful Japanese pop song playing over much of the footage.
Ju-On: The Final, billed as the final Ju-On, opened in Japan last June, while Sam Raimi is producing a re-remake here in the States.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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