| Made before the highly successful
Ring
(1998) made the horror genre so "over represented"
in Japan, Haunted School is aimed toward
appeasing a far younger audience then the genre
is normally associated with. Unfortunately, the
movie has no middle ground as director Hideyuki
Hirayama abandons the older audience as he panders
to his intended crowd. The biggest problems with
this production, though, are its oversimplified
plot, lack of interesting characters, poor acting
and extremely lackluster production values as
the feature as a whole is fairly weak.
In terms of the story, the movie
starts off on the day of graduation for an elementary
school in Japan. During the excitement, a group
of kids playing before class manage to accidentally
destroy a nearby statue on campus, as they flee
before anyone might accuse them. The rest of the
school day ends up progressing without a hitch
though, as the students are soon let out to enjoy
their summer vacation. Unfortunately, one by one,
five students during the after school hours end
up finding their way to the adjacent condemned
school building, each lured by a different means.
To make matters worse, each is unable to leave
the premises while increasingly odd events begin
to transpire around them. Eventually, one of the
younger teachers, Shinji Komukai, gets involved
as he helps Kazuo Chiba conduct a search for his
brother and the other missing students while trying
to understand exactly what is going on at the
nearby condemned schoolhouse.
As is fairly evident, the story
itself is pretty simple without a great deal of
setup. This, along with the fact that the scares
are very mild, works well to pander to the production's
young audience. Unfortunately, the pacing here
is very slow, as the movie tends to outstay its
welcome long before the credits begin to role.
The movie’s heavy use of slow motion without
any type of reason as to why it’s implemented
so often, unless the director felt it actually
heightened the fear factor, doesn’t help
this aspect either. The movie also tends to suffer
due to the fact that it never lives up to its
eerie start, where a strange voice calling itself
"Mary" continues to prank call the school
at night as she announces where she is each time,
such as across the street, in front of the school
and eventually on the premises itself. Instead
of going for these type of scares or atmosphere,
the movie is more about focusing on the bizarre
as each room in the condemned structure seems
to have a different angle to it, like the sunset
inspired room with the “witch” or
the upside-down classroom, which is probably one
of the better concepts. Sadly, what this movie
lacks is an interesting climax, which here is
merely the arachnid creature kind of stumbling
around while trying to act menacing to the group
of kids. The creature itself ends up being trapped
behind a weak looking fence that the kids quickly
toss up, which is where he stays as the movie
tends to forget about him despite the fact that
he is only about ten or so feet away still.
In regards to character development,
the movie tends to fall fairly short here. To
the scriptwriter’s credit, the film does
set itself aside more than 20 minutes at the start
for the simple purpose of fleshing out its characters.
This does work to make the kids stand out a little,
as one gets a basic sense for some of them like
the two troublemakers (Shota Segawa and Kensuke
Nakamura) for example. Unfortunately, though,
this time does little to flesh out them out into
complex characters or ones that the audience will
care for, let alone like. As for the two more
prominent “adult” characters, they
don’t fare much better. There is some back-story
to the teacher Komukai about him being bullied
into trapping a girl in a school room when he
was a student there, prompting her to job out
of the window to escape (although the film is
quick to point out, to reassure the audience,
that she did survive the fall). He says this was
a traumatic experience for him during his youth,
as one can imagine, yet the film does little to
work with this element of the character, beyond
it giving him courage to jump near the end when
they believe they have discovered a possible exit
from the condemned building.
The other more prominent “adult”
character is Kensuke Nakamura’s mother,
who ends up being incredibly annoying for almost
every second she is on screen. It’s pretty
unclear too what reaction exactly the writing
had intended for the character to evoke from the
audience. If it was, in fact, to make her seem
like a “cool parent” as she runs her
own motorcycle shop and openly mocks the teacher
by calling him a coward among other things, then
the writing has failed miserably as she comes
off as simply a mean spirited and uncaring person
here. The number of horrible lines and ideas she
provides during the film is also just jaw dropping,
such as scrutinizing the teacher's idea to call
the police for help or how she abandons Kazuo
Chiba after telling him it’s his responsibility
because that's “what love [for his brother]
is all about” (yeah, great advice). She
does end up bringing her ragtag biker gang back
to the school just before the climax, although
it fails to achieve that “here comes the
cavalry” sense that the writing was likely
going for. To make matters even worse, they don’t
really do anything, as the biker gang just seems
to stand around for the most part and only end
up helping to search for the broken object on
the school’s campus. In fact, the whole
thing plays out more like an excuse to bring on
possible family or friends of the staff and have
them just stand around on screen for extended
lengths of time.
In terms of the acting, it’s
pretty poor, although since most of the cast is
made up of child stars I suppose that’s
not too surprising. For what it’s worth,
at least none of the performances are “cringe
worthy,” even the instantly love struck
Shota Segawa who tends to give the worst performance
of the young cast. As for some of the older actors
in the film, they don’t manage to do anything
noteworthy with the material they have been given.
Hironobu Nomura as the young teacher Komukai is
given the most screen time of the non-child stars,
yet Nomura manages to give a fairly inadequate
performance. He seems to have the most trouble
trying to capture the more comedic elements of
his character, like trying to play a straight
face while there is a ghost right behind him;
consequently, this makes these sequences fall
flat as Nomura plays them too over the top to
be credible.
As far as the production values
are concerned, there isn’t much to praise
here. Special effects, for example, are fairly
adequate at best. Some of the stuff, like the
“anatomy model” coming to life with
organs pulsing, is done well, while other things
like the arachnid creature could have been created
to much better effect. The claymation featured
here is also fairly poor, as in general the SFX
crew has fairly mixed results in bringing the
huge number of oddities seen in the movie to life.
On the upside, the green screen work is done fairly
well here, although it’s also used very
sparingly through out the production. As for the
feature’s music, it’s conducted by
Fuji-Yama who, sadly, constructs are a very poor
soundtrack for the film. There are really only
a couple of worthwhile themes here, like the opening
cue and the main title. His end credit piece,
which uses heavy violin work and sounds like it
was plucked out of a video game, is kind of catchy
too, or at least until the children start singing.
However, that’s about it as the rest of
the score is fairly poor and tacky for most of
the film’s duration. I wouldn’t be
surprised, given that the first few themes are
pleasant, that Fuji-Yama had to rush to complete
the rest of the soundtrack; however, since I haven’t
heard his work before, it could be just as likely
that the first few themes were a fluke success
for him.
In closing, Haunted School
is a pretty forgettable film from every angle.
The movie might appeal to a younger audience,
but there is little to entertain adults here.
For whatever reason, though, the movie was a relative
hit at the box office, and spawned three theatrical
sequels and a spin off television show, an impressive
feat for any film one can be sure.
|
(1.5/5)