Director
Yuichi Sato
Cast
Tetsuji Tamayama
Asami Mizukawa
Katsuya Kobayashi
Fumiyo Khoinata
Sanae Miyata
The Movie
When I saw the preview for this movie I figured it would be the prototypical Japanese horror flick, filled with blood and gore to an extreme. That made me want to dive into this film and have fun with it. Unfortunately this doesn’t provide everything I was looking for.
Mitsuru and Maki need money to pay off a drug related debt. The best way to score that cash, they think, is to kidnap a little girl and hold her for ransom. They pick the little girl and hide out at an old school, which may or may not be abandoned. I say that because it looks abandoned but certain things make you think it might be fully functioning and this might be the weekend.
Regardless, they take her to this school and call her parents to demand their ransom. This is when they find out that the girl has been dead for a year. Woops! The little girl disappears and odd things start happening and there are many plot twists that go along with the story. So much so, that I honestly have no idea what happened at the end of the movie. People die, I can state that. But as for who did it in all actuality, I have no idea. It got that confusing.
Here’s the thing: As a premise for a movie, a dead girl that gets kidnapped works really well and can be played into one hell of a ghost story. Throw in about 10 crazy twists and turns and you confuse the viewer. If the person watching the movie sees the ending credits roll and has no clue what happened, 9 times out of 10 that’s a bad thing.
While the movie was confusing it also had its moments. The twists and turns that I did understand were enjoyable and the gore that I thirsted for came around, albeit in a tame sense.
The performances themselves were good but very short of fantastic. It may be the reading subtitles thing that draws me away from their performances, but in general I find most actors in Japanese movies to be wooden. Tetsuji Tamayama (Mitsuru) is the main figure of this movie and makes it out of the wooden zone but barely advances to cardboard by the end of the movie.
Overall it’s a little bit of fun, a little bit confusing. If you watch it, shoot me an email and explain to me exactly what happened at the end.
Score: 5/10
The Video
Anamorphic Widescreen: Transfer is fine. It is certainly much better than some DVDs I have received in the past.
The Audio
Dolby Digital 5.1: Sounded fine and scary when it needed to.
The Extras
The Making of Pray: This is basically a long interview with Tamayama that gives me the feeling that the movie was really about increasing his presence as an actor.
Pray Q&A: This is an interview with the director and Tamayama to promote the film to the press. Nothing of note, although I think Tamayama is something of a star in Japan.
Original Trailer: It’s a trailer, but it has an odd Ghostbusters like theme to it. Kind of funny, actually.
Score: 5/10
