Eri is a quiet unassuming schoolgirl who stumbles upon her friend Mitsuko being attacked in a classroom by a perverted male teacher. She decides that in order to stop this behaviour she will gather some powdered ashes from a cursed grave hidden deep in some woods and put it in the teacher’s drink. However her plans go awry when another girl Katou who knows about what she’s going to do gives the poisoned drink to a female schoolteacher who promptly goes mad and throws herself from a window at the school. The perverted teacher discovers what is going on, snatches the ashes and decides to take revenge on those who have tried to kill him. Two of Eri’s friends are killed in mysterious circumstances with several limbs missing from their corpses. It seems that in disturbing the cursed grave and retrieving the ashes, the spirit of the dead person is angry. With the police investigating the murders, can anybody stop the vengeful spirit from killing more people?
Boasting 4 members from 4 different female idol groups in the cast, this is just your bog standard J-horror which never tries to do anything different than resorting to cheap and poor scares featuring a long haired female vengeful ghost and throwing in some gore. Don’t expect to see anything new in this movie. If this movie will scare any of you out there I can’t really say but it failed to do so with myself. I’m not sure if the director wanted this movie to be a vehicle to showcase some members of various idol groups or not but fair play to the 4 girls they all act reasonably well. Even though the plot may be unoriginal, it still manages to build a good amount of tension and suspense. It also explores themes of friendship and betrayal which is common in Japanese high school horror movies. The storyline does keep you guessing at times and there is a hint that the ‘bad teacher’ might have murdered a schoolgirl many years ago. The case remains unsolved to the cops investigating the current crop of murders.
Ex-AKB48 Team A member (although she was still in the group at the time of filming) Natsumi Matsubara takes on the prominent role of Eri. She gives a good account of herself as the schoolgirl who thinks that by stealing the cursed urn and its contents for revenge against her teacher it will make everything alright without thinking of the consequences that happens afterwards. I was happy to see Idoling!!! member Rurika Yokoyama as Mitsuko in this movie. Back in 2009 when I was over in Tokyo during a hot and sticky August, Idoling!!! were performing right outside the Fuji TV HQ on a stage during the annual FNS Summer festival. I was the only foreigner in a sizeable crowd of people and wearing an orange t-shirt. I must have stood out as Rurika kept constantly staring at me during her performance. When the group left the stage, Ruriko glanced once again before smiling and waving at me which was nice of her. So since that time Rurika has been my favourite member of Idoling!!! Rounding off the 4 leading roles are Rina Miyazaki from SUPER☆GiRLS and AeLL member Ai Shinozaki. I can’t say I’ve heard of the idol group AeLL.
Depending on whether you’ve got nothing better to watch, you might want to give this a whirl. It’s not too bad a movie (I’ve seen a hell of a lot worse) but it doesn’t help itself by copying various elements from other J-horrors. Just average for me I’m afraid.
Sadako’s Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
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