A fun getaway turns into a journey to Hell for some teenage girls visiting an isolated house to rehearse and perform a play for their private movie club. Taking the trip with an adult chaperone, the girls learn that a previous club member supposedly went missing in the house, and another went insane! Shortly after they arrive, a mysterious videotape is found with footage of a violent killer wearing a Japanese deigan mask. Is this footage real or fake? Soon, their food and equipment disappears and one of the girls is haunted by ghostly visions of the masked demon. Someone or something is in the house, and gruesome death awaits those who cannot escape!Some teenaged girls pack up and head off into the woods to make a short film. They bring along one's older sister to drive, and another girl who is a pariah among the in crowd. They don't get along. There's a video tape and it's creepy and apparently it makes people go insane. Sound familiar? Well, it should, the film begins as sort of a rip off of Ringu, but it does take some interesting turns when things turn out not to be exactly as they seem.
I think one could probably describe Gurozuka as a cross between Ringu, Heathers, Mean Girls, Scream, and any number of other meta-horror flicks from the last couple of decades. The film's saving grace is that the characters are fun to watch, and catty as shit. The plot drags on a bit in the beginning, but once the wind-up begins for the ending, things get pretty tense and all hell breaks loose.
Gurozuka isn't exactly the best horror film out of Japan in the last ten years, but what it lacks in budget, it makes up for with some nice little gore effects and a super creepy mask. I enjoyed this film a lot more than I expected to based upon the tired J-horror formula I was expecting, and good surprises are always welcome.
The Disc:
Gurozuka is presented in an anamorphic 1.85:1 transfer from Synapse that looks pretty good, despite what are obviously low-budget origins. This isn't going to rival any of the more recent films, and anything big budget, but I didn't find the image quality distracting. The film is very dark, and there wasn't a lot of fine detail in the shadows apparent, but that was probably a matter of the source material rather than the transfer. The audio track is equally effective but not showy.
There are two extras on Gurozuka, and one is pretty impressive. There is a quite long making-of featurette that mixes plenty of behind the scenes footage with interviews and other snippets to make for a nice look at what went on with the shoot of Gurozuka. The other extra is the theatrical trailer, which was okay.
If you aren't opposed to giving another J-horror a try, Gurozuka is a decent way to try the genre again.