By Danny Contreras

There is a relationship between horror films and the viewers. In horror films, there is a relationship between the film itself, and its viewers. Ultimately, the strength of the relationship determines whether or not the film is successful or not.

The Japanese have managed to create films over the past two decades that breaches the language barrier and exploits the relationship both at home and internationally. Primary examples of these films are Ju-on (The Grudge), and Ringu (The Ring).

Then we come to Carved: The Slit Mouth Woman (or Kuchisake-onna). This film is based on the popular myth/urban legend about a woman mutilated by her husband and coming back as an evil spirit to seek revenge.

While the premise sounds like a typical horror movie, the Japanese always manage to turn it into something else. However, this time, they failed. The Slit Mouth Woman is ultimately a film that has an unsettling feel, almost creepy, but never lives up beyond its low budget reality.

The story is fairly simple: The Slit Mouth Woman has returned to Japan to terrorize Japanese school children. After the disappearance of a child in a neighboring town, the school where our story takes place begin to organize teacher led drop offs to avoid any problems. It is not long, however, before someone from the town disappears, and all witnesses point to one suspect: The Slit-Mouthed Woman.

Covering her cut face with a mask, she appears in solitary places where children are and either kills them or kidnaps them. But the Slit-Mouthed Woman has a painful history that relates to our main character: Noboru Matsuzaki. Matsuzaki is the son of the Slit-Mouthed Woman before he killed her when he was younger. The ghost, real name Yukiko Yoshida, was a bad mother. She would beat up all three of her offspring, and eventually killed two of them. Afraid of what she would do to Noboru, she begs for her death at his hand by cutting off her head. The young child is unable to kill his mom as she had asked, and could only stab her in self-defense. While she did die, she returned as an evil poltergeist. Noboru is now the only one who can sense her due to their blood relationship.

That is as much as can be described without giving away much of the plot which is largely simple. While the movie deviates from the original telling of the story, it is still faithful to the character at least in terms of her manners.

The movie cannot escape how bad it looks: the Slit-Mouthed Woman’s costume appears lazy and boring and the make-up overdone. Her eyes are creepy because they’re all white, but she looks like Scorpion of Mortal Kombat. It could have been better done, but it would have went over budget. The movie is not all terrible, and it is the feeling of unending pursuit that a viewer will enjoy the most. It’s not up to par with Paranormal Activity 3 in terms of chills and scare but it’ll leave you paranoid for a couple of hours.