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62%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #6,306
...out of 20,698 movies
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A TV station employee takes a camera crew out to an abandoned factory to investigate a purported snuff film that was made there, only to end up running for her life when a small, fetus-like creature murders her crew.
--IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: October 21, 2004
Nami Tsuchiya (Miyuki Ono) is the host of "Late Night With Nami", a television show that airs home videos and is geared towards the insomniacs in the crowd. Apparently, the quality of the video submissions has been lacking lately, so when she receives a package containing a tape that says the viewers will be satisfied with it, she pops it in to check it out. It starts out being pretty boring, showing some footage of the outside of a moving vehicle. It pulls up to an abandoned building, and from there, it turns into a snuff movie, featuring a young lady being stabbed and cut whilst tied up. Nami recognizes the route that was taken to get to this place, so she decides to round up her crew to go check it out. Joining the party is her sound engineer Masako Abe (Aya Katsuragi), her makeup girl Rei Sugiura (Hitomi Kobayashi), her script writer Rya Kawamura (Eriko Nakagawa), and her assistant director Akio Kondou (Masahiko Abe). They show up to the place in the film, and find out that it's a huge, abandoned military place. Since the place is so huge, they decide to split up in order to check it all out; two of the crew members check out one building, the other two check out another, and Nami goes off by her lonesome. One of the crew ladies makes a rather disgusting discovery, and is soon killed off as a result of said finding... the rest of the crew is being stalked by a masked man, as well. Meanwhile, Nami runs into a guy that's hanging out behind the building she's checking out, who claims to be here looking for his brother Hideki....
The movie starts out as your typical slasher for the first quarter of the running time, but quickly moves into supernatural territory later on, and culminates with a truly bizarre ending. As predictable as the plot line may seem, I would almost guarantee that ninety-nine percent of the audience will not see the last few twists coming (unless said viewers check out other sites detailing this movie, all of which seem to spoil it). What makes that high percentage so great, however, is the fact that the twists aren't of the nonsensical, Americanized nature; there's no "OMFG it was her boyfriend's cousin's brother!!" revelations to be found. No sir, I'm not claiming that you won't see said twists coming as a result of them being completely off-the-wall and moronic, but because they actually fit into the movie quite well, and seem about as realistic as one could expect from a supernatural horror movie.
As I mentioned, the film does start out like your typical slasher, with members of the group being killed off one by one. The nice thing about this, however, is that it seems like the director got a good deal of inspiration from the likes of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci in regards to how the deaths were handled. Even though the grand finale of the snuff film seems to be a bit too influenced by Fulci, the rest of the kills are quite original and excellently filmed, making them look as realistic as possible. This certainly makes one wonder how a pretty low-budget film that was made almost twenty years ago can look incredibly real, while multi-billion dollar films today still look completely fake. Back to the movie at hand, realism only goes so far in a horror movie for grizzled veterans of the genre like myself; you could make a stab wound or a gunshot look as real as you want, and it really wouldn't do much to excite me. That's another area where this excels, as with the exception of one death, each one is a done in a very unique fashion.
Overall, this is yet another great film from our Far-East friends, and one that completely dominates most American horror. If you can't find it at your local Blockbuster, I'd recommend buying it at your favorite online retailer; it would be money well-spent if you're a horror fan. 9/10.
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