Director: Doug Roos
Year: 2024
Country: Japan
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Arriving at a cheap Japanese Airbnb, a group of disparate individuals trying to use the facility or their means manage to individually stumble upon a vicious creature living in the building killing everyone who comes there and must find a way to battle the creature to get away alive.
Review:
There’s quite a lot to like with this one. It mostly centers around the film’s creature action and the preference for practically-driven effects, providing an old-school touch to everything that comes off as genuinely refreshing and enjoyable. The storyline's simple structure and repetitive framework ensure that a constant crop of guests are brought in to stay at the location, fulfilling the constant need for guests to be slashed up or gruesomely dispatched by the vicious creature. The humanoid appearance and misshapen features look great when it’s captured in the dark, murky shadows of the building, and the carnage left behind ensures that severed limbs, scattered teeth, intestines, and even more get ripped out and left on-screen in grisly fashion. Also, the creature’s ability to influence others to carry this out on their own allows for a nice change of pace by adding a touch of suspense to the mix where it’s hard to expect what’s going to happen and giving this one quite a lot to like.
This one does have some issues holding it down. These mainly center on the scattershot and haphazard storyline where it becomes rather hard to tell what’s going on. Since this one tends to feature a wide range of characters who seem to visit the property at various times, it’s hard to tell if this takes place in a day, week, month, or at other random points in time. Getting names to faces is also next to impossible, and any kind of structure is lost with random victims appearing, doing whatever their interests say to accomplish, and then encountering the creature who knocks them out. This setup never really provides a chance to get to know anyone beyond the Army officer or the two best friends who stay there as they seem to be the main characters while the completely unexplained presence of the creature or who anyone else is makes for a confusing time when the film isn’t focused on splattering effective-looking entrails on-screen. It’s the main issue to be had with this one overall.
Overview: ***/5
An overall fun if somewhat problematic creature feature, this one manages to generate quite a lot to like about it even if the flaws present here do end up eing what holds it down the most. Give this a look if you’re a fan of this type of genre effort or are intrigued by it while most others who are turned off by the negatives should heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment