A couple of cops are trying to piece together the strange occurrences that took place one night at a rural convenience store. There’s rather a lot of strangeness, as well as a dead, eyeless manager in the basement to consider.
The case’s main witness is student Tazuru (Kotona Minami). She had been working the night shift of the store that night, as she does six nights a week to earn money for college and to take care of her mother. During the interviews, she, and eventually other characters, reveals some of the peculiar and horrific things that happened at the store during the last few nights.
Because what the girl has to tell is very strange indeed, seeing as it concerns ghosts, apparitions and a doom-saying homeless man, it is lucky she can offer some memory cards with videos to prove at least some of her supernatural experiences. Surely, watching those videos can’t connect anyone watching them to a curse, right?
Director Jiro Nagae has been doing cheap Japanese horror for the home viewing market for quite a few years, and he does by now clearly have a good grip on how to make a very basic horror film. Thus, I mostly found this videogame adaptation a pleasant enough time, featuring as it does some somewhat effective scares and doesn’t overstay its welcome.
The film carries its affection for the superior classics of the J-horror boom on its sleeves: the investigative structure is mostly an excuse to tell the story out of order like a Ju-on story, there’s a little boy ghost also more than a little reminiscent of those classics, and the eventual cursed object is so Ringu, I’m a bit surprised nobody got sued.
Of course, being quite so derivative, there are few surprises here – if you have seen any Japanese horror made post 1995 at all, you’ll know what the big final reveal is going to be very early on, and if you’re bored by J-horror style ghosts, this isn’t going to be the movie to show you how wrong you are (even though you are).
As an unapologetic part of its tradition, The Convenience Store is a pleasant enough experience.
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