Movie-making is money-making as well as it is art. This situation is in the process of changing, thanks to the availabilty of increasingly sophisticated consumer-range video equipment and the ever-growing DVD and Internet distribution channels - grab your DV camera and go ahead!

But naturally, there is still a need for filmmakers to eat. Hunger, like greed, may serve to loosen mind's boundaries... or art's... or quality's.

And thus, here is Ghost System, a Japanese horror movie - or is it? Quoting from www.ponycanyon.co.jp: "The "Ghost System" was designed to grow and expand to a variety of "horror genre" delivery channels: the Internet, Movies, Publications and Games. (...) "Ghost System" aims to be the "Star Wars of horror," not just a film but a cultural phenomenon."

There was a short film, disctributed over the Internet, a novel, and this movie. A computer game, animation, feature movie, television drama series, original video release are partly underway, partly in the planning stages. Thus, we are witnessing an enterprising TV director's efforts to create a franchise.

Which is obviously doomed to fail. Still, it's depressing how shallow this movie is.

After a diffuse intro, the story, told as a flashback, goes like this: two high school students, male and female, are receiving photos of a forest through their cel phones - the first clue in finding a friend of them who vanished a month ago. (The missing girl was the boy's girlfriend, and he has been searching her for her every day.) They run around in the woods, the shots' quality giving evidence that the film was shot on DV, and happen upon a) some freehand camerawork, and b) a derelict facility, where the male part of the search party promptly disappears.

A meeting between the girl and a ghost starts well, with a quiet, understated, somewhat old-fashioned long shot; however, seconds later, we have to watch the heroine tripping over something during her flight (you may have seen this before) and turning around, seeing the ghost, slowly moving, hardly mobile, in a great distance. We then get a drunken, desaturated POV shot of something (the ghost?) approaching the girl, who screams. Fade out.

Enter a lady, apparently the resident mad scientist, who holds a longish monologue better suited to the 1930ies, the point of which is that she has created the titular system to communicate with the dead. Her point is proven when she materializes the ghost of the heroine's friend who, lurching zombie-like (not at all ghost-like), promptly attemps to kill her but fails to do so when the boy appears and simply takes the heroine by the hand, leading her out of the room.

They run out of the facility into the woods, have a confused talk and finally embrace, while romantic piano tinkering is heard on the soundtrack and the camera does one of its occasional pointless right-to-left tracking shots. At this point, the dead girl's ghost shows up again, leaning against a tree and staring indignantly, while the cameraman refuses to place her into focus (making me think of the possessed Jon Agar close-ups in Brain from Planet Arous).

They run. The ghost appears again - already frustrated by sporting a head wound, she now has to watch her ex-boyfriend and her best friend getting close. And she is still out of focus. No wonder she points an accusing hand to the cameraman, sorry, to the boy, blaming him of murdering her. Now, if this was the case, why would she have gone after the girl, who obviously had no part in it?

So they run again. Oddly, there's a quick long shot including both the couple running away to the left, as well as the ghost (in focus for the first time, ) on the right. Being shot in bland daylight, this looks singularly unfrightening. Later, the boy tells that he "heard voices" in his head... "Kill her"... and proceeds to strangle the girl. Which doesn't look scary, either; perhaps this was supposed to be understatement, but the whole concept of the boy being a mad killer comes totally out of left field and simply doesn't fit in. (A lame explanation offered much later doesn't help.) However, the ghost re-appears, somehow killing him and managing to turn her shots into night shots (it's still day for his). She also informs the girl that "You can never leave this forest".

After more pointless scenes, the film finally does try for an apocalyptic ending, but fails to realize it. We never find out what does happen after death, despite all the voice-over questioning. The pseudo-Evil Dead camerawork, used mainly for padding, has no meaning or effect; and the plot, while borrowing from everything from Kairo and Blair Witch Project to Zeder, is a failure. This is not a cultural phenomenon á la Ringu, but an under-written home movie with few redeeming features.

All in all, the most bizarre thing around Ghost System is a little note on the Universe DVD box: "Please choose TV display on DVD machine before screening."