 |
按此可將縮圖變更大的圖像於 案山子
 
Accompanied by a great cast, excellent soundtrack and a plot from the hands of Japan's greatest Horror manga authors, Junji Ito, you'd expect it to be a huge hit. Unfortunately despite everything promising about it, something about KAKASHI just doesn't quite work.
|
Kaoru Yoshikawa (Maho Nonami who makes up for her tragic role in TOMIE) has been worrying about her brother who has been missing for about a week.
Upon inspection of his apartment, she discovers a letter sent to him by an old ex-girlfriend named Izumi (everyone’s favorite sickle wielding psycho, Kou Shibasaki). In the letter Izumi writes about her love for him and how much she needs him and to come to her aid in a village called Kozukata.
Kaoru immediately assumes her brother has gone to see Izumi so she sets out to Kozukata village.
After arriving at the village Kaoru gets a strange feeling and is some what disturbed about how much the villagers worship the Kakashi (scarecrows).
Kaoru looks for clues to the whereabouts of her brother.
While KAKASHI is an exquisitely well-made film, it suffers so much from the fact it’s supposed to be a horror movie.
It’s simply just not scary, apart from a few occasions, you might not even jump.
KAKASHI should be billed as a supernatural drama movie and not as a Horror. If it was Supernatural Drama then it’d get top marks.
It’s the kind of film that deals more with doomed love and people’s inability to accept their fate.
Think of KAKASHI as a mixture of PET SEMETARY and MEMENTO MORI (minus memento mori’s much better drama and horror elements), it sounds great in theory but it just wouldn’t stack up.
Despite all of this Kakashi is a dream to watch.
The beautiful cinematography and music is top notch stuff and the acting is excellent.
Kou Shibasaki over shadows the rest of the cast with her brilliant performance of a character even more evil then her role as Mitsuko in BATTLE ROYALE (oh and keep an eye out for her in Takashi Miike’s ONE MISSED CALL).
The story has been described as painfully slow by some reviewers out there but truthfully it’s nothing in comparison to the much too lengthy build of THE RING.
The plot is interesting and is executed well.
After doing a lot of thinking I’ve managed to pin-point where the film went wrong in terms of horror. The blame can be placed on the dream-like cinematography which, while incredibly beautiful, seems to put a distance between the viewer and what’s actually happening on screen.
If only there was a way to blend the incredible cinematography and horror while connecting the audience to the on screen action, this would not only be an underground success but an award winning piece of film making. Perhaps that would be too difficult of a job and my hat goes off to any director who can pull it off (as well as all my worldly possessions), but we can only dream that in the not-too-distant future it is remade by someone who can pull it off.
A nice film and one of my new favorites.
RECOMMENDED
-Adam Kitano
|
|
|
|
