Gekijourei

So a few weeks ago I went to the cinema and saw this horror flick and now I'm finally getting a chance  to sit down and say a couple of things about it.  First just for people who have no idea what the title means let me explain those weird squiggles for you.  "Gekijou"  is the Japanese word for a theater and the "rei" means spirit or ghost.  So I guess a loose, shitty translation of the title would be Theater Spirit but that sounds shitty so I'll stick with calling it Gekijourei for this post.

So the movie follows a young girl called Sara Mizuki (played by Haruka Shimazaki for AKB48 fame) and she is hired to play a role in some stage play for some skinny prick.  She is joined by some other try-hard wannabe actresses as tension builds during the preparations for the performance.  While all this is happening, an even doll possessed by a ghost is going around offing people and it's up to our plucky heroine to put an end to the ghost, save the day and save the production.

To cut a potentially very long post short, this movie just isn't all that good.  It has a few moments but they are too short and too few and far between to make sitting through the whole thing worth it.  If you have ever seen a Japanese horror movie before like The Ring then you've seen this.  It's about a cliche as it gets and you can see the "twists" coming from a mile away.  Just go and watch any Japanese ghost movie and replace the word "ghost" with "doll" and you pretty much have the entire plot of this film.

I want to say that the acting wasn't particularly bad but I think that's because I went in with absolutely 0 expectations from any of the talent.  Haruka Shimazaki especially, being an AKB48 pop star idol, I was expecting her performance to be just complete cringe worthy bullshit but she played her part well enough.

That's all I really have to say about this film, it's not shitty enough for a long rant and it's not good enough to gush over in any kind of way.  It's just one of those "meh" cliche Japanese horror movies that you watch and then forget about  about a week later.  It speaks volumes when one of the highlights of the movie going experience for me and my friends was laughing at the guy 2 rows back who had fallen asleep and was snoring loudly.

Still, if you've not seen any Japanese horror movies before or you're one of those creepy weirdos who likes AKB48 and wants to watch Haruka Shimazaki make terrified faces at the camera then maybe you'll get a kick out of Gekijourei.  Otherwise, avoid it because it's going to be one of those shit £5 DVD movies that you'll see about a million copies of in the "Foreign Cinema" section of your DVD store.