2.5/5
Written by Luke Barnes
Summary
Three friends go to Japan in search of a supposedly haunted temple, once they find this temple things quickly start to go wrong. It is a very familiar premise.
This idea has been done to death, a group of people seek out x building usually because its rumoured to be haunted, then it is, and things go bad. At this point it is just lazy storytelling, the writers for these films could try and at least come up with some new reasons why these characters want to explore haunted buildings, but no.
Moreover, this film also trots out the dead all along little kid cliché. There is a little child guide in this film who turns out to be either not real or a ghost depending on your interpretation, of course the job of this kid is to lure the young folk out to the temple, what a shock. I think the use of this cliché just shows how bland and by the numbers this film is, clearly the writer of the film didn’t want to give it anything resembling a personality and just wanted to stick to shlock and it shows.
That said I would not say this is a terrible film, the creature design is good and there are a fair few good scares once they get to the temple, there is some promise there sadly it is just never developed in any way.
Overall, though it has a few interesting ideas for the most part this film is just things you have seen before.
Pros.
A few good scares
The creature design
The Japanese flavour to the horror
Cons.
It is riddled with cliches
The writing is awful
Not a single one of the characters is likeable
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Another Millennial Reviewer 