1. The Elevator: late at night a young woman comes home: in the elevator of her building, there is a whole family of weird looking people, 'going down'. Belatedly, she realizes that they were... a) Zombies; b) Werewolves; c) Poor relatives; d) Ghosts; (you circle the most likely option).

2. School Excursion: In a hotel where her class is staying, a girl sees an apparition in the toilet... No, nothing is wrong with her digestive tract: the apparition is of the familiar, grudgey kind...

3. Kengo Nishioka : a lone wife hears someone in the next room: a certain Mr Nishioka, existentially challenged, claims that her husband is responsible for his demise, but for unknown reasons keeps tormenting the housewife instead. In the end, she duly informs us that her husband innocent. Yeah, right...

4. The Visitor: someone's knocking on the apartment door; a little girl refuses to open, but her elder sister does. The little one hides in the bathroom, but the ghostly hand with bright red nail polish opens the door and... teaches her the ways of manicure? It's anyone's guess after the abrupt cut, but -- someone must've been left alive to tell this 'true' tale to the objective producers of this series, right? Right?

5. Covering the 100 Tales: A reporter at a temple hears the stories of ghosts who narrate rather uninteresting tales of how they died. Then, they ask her what's she doing among them. Really, that's an answer I'd like to hear.

6. Cassette Tape: A member of an amateur rock band hears the last message from another (recent suicide) member on a cassette tape... Or is it just the result of poor tape-playback quality? Naah! It must've been ghosts!

7. Spilt Water: Mother and daughter, walking in the park, realize that their deceased husband/father is still 'watching over' them... How sweet. Nothing extraordinary happens. They just 'become aware' of his presence. The case immediately entered all annals of world's greatest unsolved mysteries!

8. The Backward Suit: A girl mocks her often drunk father and his explanation of how he ended up dressed backward -- until one evening she takes the same detour and comes home -- with her clothes backward... Did she go to the same 'haunted street', or the same liquor store as her dad -- I guess we'll never know. A true mystery!

Review: One thing needs to be clarified immediately: this is NOT an omnibus. This is NOT a collection of FILMS. Even a short film has to have a story. It has to have some twist, some climax, some kind of point. The short pieces presented here (averaging at 5 minutes) have none of that. Their 'structure' is as simple as they get, and can be reduced to a formula: person X meets/sees/is confronted by a ghostly manifestation and -- then nothing. It just happens, with no lasting consequence, other than turning the 'witness' into a lifelong reader of National Enquirer (although most of them must have already been regular readers of similar material!)

One might expect that the reduced running time, coupled with the let's-get-to-the-business approach, would produce the all-meat-and-no-bones result, something like a show-reel of the best of Japanese scares without the 'boring' interludes of character development and/or ambiguous, slow build-up of thick atmosphere. Not so. The stories lack suspense, precisely because there is no build-up. One moment you see a person, the very next 'a ghost' is banging on her door; after some unoriginal fumbling with the door and crawling on the floor -- the story ends. And that's it. Move to the next. The stories also lack the morality that is inseparable from the omnibus format: there is no punishment of the wicked, there is no revenge motif, there is no subtext whatsoever to what you're presented with.

This collection perfectly corresponds to Homer Simpson's legendary retelling a story as 'a bunch of stuff that happened': but the problem is not so much in the fact that 'it's full of sound and fury, signifying nothing' (to borrow a quote from a slightly more academic source than Homer). The problem is that 'the sound and the fury' are so lame. The apparitions here are pathetic, unmotivated, ephemeral in the most literal sense. They just don't matter. There are some minor creeps in the School Excursion segment, but even there the horror is spoilt not only by the ridiculous environment, but also by the ridiculously 'twisted' ghost itself (her head appears, horizontally, where her belly should be). And that's the closest to horror you're likely to get in this anthology of the nonsensical and shallow 'true encounters'.

You'll have to be twice as shallow to go for this DVD: first of all, you're supposed to buy the whole 'true' angle; second of all, you're supposed to pay some real money for measly 40 minutes of uninteresting short 'films' plus 11 minutes of even more pointless talk from Ichirô Nakayama, who collected these (and then some) stories. For unknown reasons (compassion towards viewers?), this selection is made up of only 8 tales. There is at least another edition, also available at HKFlix, titled Tales Of Terror From Tokyo And All Over Japan Vol. 1 . In that one, you're treated to no less than 15 of these! And if that does not satisfy your craving for 'true' tales of quasi-terror, there's more where these came from... However, if your mortal life's minutes are dear to you, and if you have any love for your hard-earned dollars, keep them for stuff that's worthier than... this cheat!