 | Title: Occult
Alternate Title(s): Okaruto
Country of Origin: Japan
Release Date: February 28, 2009
Genre: Mockumentary, Horror
Director: Koji Shiraishi
Starring: Mika Azuma, Horiken,
and Koen Kondo |
Now here's a strange one. It's one of those "found footage" horror mockumentaries, and it's straight from Japan. It's about a small group of filmmakers making a documentary about an odd mass assault that happened at a resort. It starts off very abruptly, with no information beforehand. When I watched it, I initially thought I had picked a student project instead of the actual "documentary" because there wasn't any credits beforehand. Alas, it was...well...this.
This movie is a slight mess. It starts of really nicely (as far as an abrupt start with no explanation can be), but then it starts playing this strange, grating music that I could have done without hearing. This kind of music is heard FREQUENTLY throughout the film. However, it's not really music. It's more like a strange buzzing and noises that could have been plopped into a Silent Hill game and no one would have knew the difference.
Though actually, the content in the movie is interesting. It starts off like any other horror mockumentary, has a lot of good footage, and has a very interesting first half...even though most of it is just looking for the origin of some random symbol or something. I have no idea. It was getting kind of ridiculous at that point, and it only got worse from there on.
One more thing: this movie has weird direction. It goes from being about the weird happenings around the survivors of a mass assault to what's going on with one of the survivors and the mass assault bit is never brought up ever again except to reference the guy that did it. And the movie isn't really about much of the occult, either, so the title is a misnomer.
(THIS SPOILER IS THE PART THAT DEALS WITH THE ENDING AND SPOILS THE ENDING)
The ending, however, is just the worst part of the movie. The movie went from being about a mass suicide to being about this guy and his "ceremony" to travel across to another dimension that he believes is heaven...but his "ceremony" turns out to be a suicide bombing in a highly-populated area. The last leg of the movie is the guy making the bomb, going to just outside Shibuya station (it looks like it might be the 3-way intersection you can see in the game The World Ends With You)...then he blows it up and you get a nice shot of just after a major bomb that had lots of nails and screws packed in, severed heads included (actually, it didn't look fake). After the director of the film gets out of jail for being the bomber's accomplice, he finds the video camera the bomber guy had...and the footage is just so damn DISAPPOINTING! It's terrible CGI of the guy being in Hell. I mean, seriously, if it wasn't for just this ending I could call this film decent!
But yeah...the film is on the very low end of decent, and just because of the ending. I'd say skip this one, unless you were extremely bored or something.
Plot: 5/10
Sound: 2/10
Quality: 5/10
Effects: 4/10
TOTAL: 4/10
Rent, Buy, or Skip? SKIP
(Note: Physical copies sold of this movie are not compatible with North American or European electronics. This movie has been fansubbed, but as far as I can tell it will not have subs available if you purchase it. In fact, I don't even think you can buy this movie online except in Japan. If you really want to watch it and don't care about piracy, I can get you a link to stream it.)
