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Tsubasa
Sato is constantly on the run from various
thugs and that will certainly come in handy for the
next couple of days. See, as of recently, people
with the very common name Sato have started dropping
dead under mysterious circumstances. Tsubasa doesn't
reflect much on this though, until one day when he
suddenly finds himself in a parallel world where
a group of masked killers have targeted anyone
named Sato. He finds some friends and family in
this parallel world and together they have to find
a way to survive and kill the person behind all
of this before it's too late.
Local horror productions usually go DTV or get very
limited theatrical releases and flop in Japan these
days. The late 90's-early 2000's horror boom may be
responsible for this. However, this year one movie
surprised everyone as it ended up being a major
box-office hit, climbing the chart week by week.
That movie is The Chasing World - best described as
Battle Royale meets The Twilight Zone with a dash
of slasher thrown into the mixture. Now the movie
has finally hit DVD and naturally I was one of the
first people to order it. The verdict? Well let's
go through the somewhat complicated plot first.
Tsubasa Sato is a teenage boy who always gets into
trouble and spends most of his time running from
thugs when he's not visiting his hospitalized sister
who hasn't responded to anything since as long as
Sato can remember. One day Sato finds himself
deserted in the middle of a street and he doesn't
get to ask any questions before he's running for
his life as a group of masked serial killers try to
hunt him down. This parallel world is run by a
king who wants everyone named Sato dead for some
reason. Together with some friends and family, Sato
has to figure out a way to get back to the real
world or defeat the evil king before it's too late.
The concept here is actually pretty neat and there
are many intense chase scenes to be found. For the
first 40 minutes or so I was really loving this
movie. However, the concept eventually grew tedious
and repetitive and there were moments that felt
down right silly and adolescent. Director Issei
Shibata was obviously working with a very limited
budget here and while he does a great job at hiding
that for most of the time, the low-budget shines
through every now and then. However, I think that
my biggest problem with this movie was the fact
that the king looked like he had gone out and bought
a very cheap Darth Vader mask at Wal-Mart. This guy
was supposed to be intimidating but instead looked
silly and made the movie look cheaper than it should
have (yes, the scenes with the king actually look
cheaper than the rest of the movie).
Still, The Chasing World is overall a pretty decent
effort and one of the better Battle Royale wannabe's
out there. If you're in the mood for a fast-paced
horror flick with some of the best chase scenes that
I've seen in a long time in it, The Chasing World
is definitely worth checking out. It's a bit too
out there for me but I still enjoyed it quite a bit.
We get a girl cut in half, an impalement, some
severed body parts and some more. Not much though.
Decent score which at times felt misplaced.
One of the better Japanese horror flicks to come
along as of lately. Sure, it's not very high budget
and it may be quite silly at times but it's fairly
original, entertaining for most of the time and
let's face it, who doesn't love a great chase scene?
So how can you go wrong when the entire movie is
a very long chase scene?
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