Nami is the host a late night talk show and one of the segments they do is to feature home videos that their fans send in. It shouldn’t come as any big surprise that the kind of people who would stay up real late to watch an ugly Japanese woman do a talk show, might be a chopstick shy of a pair, if you catch my meaning. One of the viewer submitted tapes shows someone going through the city and ending up at an abandoned factory where a woman is tortured and killed. To establish that this is one of those “over the top” movies we get a nice long, loving shot of a knife going into her eyeball. Nami is horrified and does what any of us would do. She gets four members of her crew together and they follow the landmarks that were on the video tape and go to the abandoned factory.

They get there and it’s abandoned and Nami immediately decides that they should split into groups of two, two, and one. Don’t they get slasher movies over in Japan or is it all fire-breathing dinosaurs and flying turtles? Since they’re split up, this allows the group of two comprising a female and the male to get it on! Yes, you would have thought you were watching one of the classic Friday the 13th installments if it wasn’t for the ugly Japanese people with late eighties hair replacing the ugly American people with early eighties hair.

Because this movie is cutting edge and quite the trailblazer, they don’t get killed in the act. They get killed later. I should also note that this “news crew” Nami has assembled consists of maybe one or two people with regular old cameras. You’re going in search of a depraved killer and you don’t take a video camera or at least tape recorder and microphone? Come on! He may grant you an exclusive!

The movie then spends the rest of the time killing off everyone but Nami. Along the way Nami runs into a whole bunch of TVs with her image, just in case none of us caught on that the reason this idiot sent the snuff film was because he was obsessed with Nami. While Nami is milling around the warehouse waiting for really gross stuff to happen to her friends, she runs into a guy dressed in black, who eventually tells her that he and his brother, Hideki, used to play in this place as kids and that he’s looking for his little brother now.

Nami gets help escaping the warehouse and she gets ready to leave (all her friends have disappeared at this point), but then she sets her face in a grimace, takes a swig of some soda left in the SUV, ties her hair up in a bun, grabs a flashlight and heads back into the warehouse! ARRRGHH! I’m sure the filmmaker wanted to show that this experience empowered her (too bad it was at the cost of four of her friends’ lives), but this isn’t some kind of Terminator 2 thing going on here. Sarah Connor was trying to save the future and she went into serious training. Nami is just going back into a warehouse that if no one ever went in again, the killings would probably stop since Hideki has already moved in and wouldn’t want to break the lease.

The movie lost whatever momentum and mounting terror it had at this point. It is suspenseful when someone is trying to survive an evil dead trap (whatever that is), but once you survive and make it out, it’s over. If you make it out safely and then go back in, I’m jumping ship and I’m hitching my bandwagon to the killer because you don’t deserve to live, but I know you will, because that’s what always happens in these cruddy slasher flicks.

Once back inside the warehouse, she finds the killer’s lair and it turns out he has a mother fixation and sees Nami as some type of mother substitute. There is a confrontation and the film then rolls out the old parasitic twin gag and bottoms out with a nonsensical shock ending.

The movie is an overrated jumble of slasher cliches. You have nice, fancy camera work and elaborately staged death scenes to distinguish it from the rest of the murderous freak movies out there, but the movie isn’t about much of anything and it is basically just a slice and dice flick with some Japanese flavoring. If you lower your expectations and don’t mind watching a derivative, but fast paced splatter movie that has a better than average look, both you and the psychotic vestigial fetus festering in your brain will be mildly satisfied.

© 2008 MonsterHunter