In short: Teketeke 2 (2009)

One year after the end of the first Teketeke, poor Kana (Yuko Oshima), now barely functional and spending most of her time in her darkened room without any red things, does have her final encounter with Teketeke, the legless wonder, on the same overpass. The grad student who had helped a little with the research in the first film is so struck by her death that he begins to obsess over Teketeke, trying to find out what the basis of the urban legend truly is, in the hopes to eventually stop the curse.

When we don’t spend time with his research, we pop over to a group of high school students. One bullied girl meets Teketeke and somehow manages to control her into killing the girls who bully her one after the other.

I am a big fan of director Koji Shiraishi, but this quick-shot sequel to Teketeke just isn’t very good at all. Despite a running time of 73 minutes (with four minutes or so spent recapping the first film), the whole affair feels bloated and overlong, all the jumping between the two plotlines giving the film a disjointed quality. And it’s not as if much of what the film jumps to is terribly interesting: grad student guy is basically revisiting the places our intrepid heroines in the first movie investigated and learning a tiny bit more, while the high school plotline has to fight its damn obviousness, as well as some pretty bad acting by half a dozen young women with little to none acting experience. Even the horror scenes don’t really come together, Shiraishi, for some godawful reason, deciding to show way too much of Teketeke herself, turning what was weird and creepy (if a bit silly, or perhaps even because it’s a bit silly) in the first film into a crap special effect.


The only actual cool bit – and totally fitting in tone with the sort of thing Shiraishi loves to put into his films’ mythologies - is the final explanation as to why Teketeke kills certain people, but others not: let’s just say she’s a yurei with a somewhat scholarly approach to things.