SADAKO VS KAYAKO

CONTAINS VS SPOILERS

There's a strange and unaccountable tradition, as demonstrated by the likes of King Kong Vs Godzilla, Alien Vs Predator and Freddy Vs Jason, for taking two characters from different series and making them fight each other. Who would win in a fight between Robocop and The Terminator? Could Jean-Claude Van Damme beat Steven Seagal? Monster mashes have been going on for a while now (in the 1930s Universal had Dracula, The Wolfman and Frankenstein's monster turning up in each other's sequels); and within the Marvel Cinematic Universe we've had Iron Man fighting Captain America, while DC gave us Batman Vs Superman and lots of it. Rights and "intellectual property" laws fortunately mean we're unlikely to see Bond Vs Bourne or Jean-Luc Picard Vs Davros, except from the blogs of fan-fiction writers constantly churning out what-if stories where Austin Powers takes on Dumbledore for absolutely no good reason whatsoever.

This latest is a prime example of having to find two participants with broadly equivalent abilities to make it a fair fight (The Incredible Hulk Vs Bambi would not be a very long film). Sadako Vs Kayako is basically The Ring Vs The Grudge: two girls fall victim to the Ring by - duh - watching the cursed video (double duh - after they've been told about it and triple duh - one of them after her friend has already received Sadako's death call). Meanwhile another girl has just moved next door to the spooky Grudge house in which the lank-haired spiderwalking girl ghost and the small white-painted boy ghost kill anyone who enters. One more than usually ludicrous and entirely unsuccessful exorcism later, an eccentric Doctor Who-type turns up and hits upon the brilliant idea of getting the Grudge ghosts to fight the Ring ghost, hopefully destroying each other and breaking both curses.

It's all babbling nonsense, obviously, making about as much sense as a talking meerkat commercial and full of people doing the most stupid things at any opportunity: don't go in the house, don't watch the haunted video. Still, it's quite watchable, occasionally creepy and, like Hollywood's recent Rings, at least ponders the notion of uploading Sadako's (radically different and much shorter) video to the internet, even if the idea doesn't go anywhere with and it's done for absolutely no reason. But, within the confines of an obviously silly idea, it's a passable Friday night entertainment and certainly no worse than any other entries in their respective (wildly variable) sagas. Maybe that's not much of a stretch but it worked well enough for me. Sadly it's a Shudder exclusive, so if you're not a member you're out of luck.

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