Higanjima (2009)

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Lightening

Director Tae-gyun Kim

Stars Dai Watanabe, Asami Mizukawa, Terry Doti, Yoji Yamamoto, Hideo Ishiguro

Country Japan, South Korea

Things You Might Like

• The adorable puppy
• Akira’s fun for five minutes
• Cutting leaves with swords is impressive

Things You Might Not Like

• The anger inside you as you try and be kind about the film
• Losing hours of your life as you blood pressure rises
• The absence of sense
• The lack of a clear main character
• Realising you’ve punched your TV to make it stop

Conclusion
Barely worthy of a TV movie status, this thoughtless jumble of ideas is neither a good vampire film nor a good horror.  Worse than you’d imagine it could be.

1 out of 5 Impaled Senses

Luke McGrath

***

There aren’t many films classified as unwatchable for good reasons.  For any film to even make it to the screen requires years of effort from writers, designers, actors, directors and so on… Just because they’re bad at their jobs, or have conspired to make a product of lesser acclaim, doesn’t mean that their film is unwatchable.  Even cynical, shallow, films aimed at launching merchandise rather than careers are often watchable.  Higanjima, however, sinks so far below these levels, into a depth so low that I’d urge you to avoid it at all costs.

The plot, for what it is, is something to do with killing vampires on an island.  Based on a Japanese manga series, I’d hoped for something more structured than the old group-of-unlikely-heroes beats the odds business.  Sadly, there’s precious little invention on show as a sub-Goonies troop of teens are cajoled into heading to a scary looking island to save one of their older brothers.

Just how they’re cajoled is something of a mystery as only Akira ever shows any inclination (as it’s his brother to be saved), the others just pop along for the ride.  An early altercation with a vampire proves to them that the task ahead is little below certain death.  Yet they all show up; the cool one, the geeky one, the pretty one and the fat one, and all march off to their doom. They’re a fun enough bunch to watch if you don’t take them seriously, but they sure aren’t there for any reason I can see.

Akira is the default hero of the story for the first half, while he gathers the courage to visit the island and banters with his friends.  Hideo Ishiguro starts off strongly as a cheeky school kid evading bullies and raises a few laughs, but tails off as the story deserts him.  Confusingly, the focus switches to Akira’s Rambo-like brother Atsushi after we meet him and a tribe of vampire hunters.  In the final act it switches back and forth, never really choosing a side before the end credits.

While we’re with the tribe, a couple of unusual and annoying things happen.  Akira decides to become a vampire hunter and goes from dead man walking to ninja in twenty minutes, all under the supervision of a mask-wearing sage who seems to run the show.  Pleased by his skills, the sage agrees to a full-on assault of the vampire stronghold, including fighting an angry CGI monster that was hinted at in earlier flashbacks.

All that action causes a great deal of emotion to reach the surface, of course non of it is handled well.  There’s a weird scene at the start of the film that shows Akira and a friend, Pon, playing with a puppy.  This is evidently only used so that when Pon is in danger (after being offered to the vampires by two of his friends in an inexplicable twist), Akira can whistfully visualise those happier times.  In fairness, the puppy isabsolutely adorable.

It’s not often that the best thing about a film is a dog (Beethoven and Homeward Bound aside), and it’s rarer that any genuine effort is this unwatchable, yet Higanjima is one of the worst of the worst.  It’s not a cult waiting to happen, it’s not a good way of passing a couple of dead hours.  All that this film can muster is a sense of indignation that you even tried, a pining for lost time and the urge to pass this warning on to someone you know before it’s too late.

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