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Messengers 2

 

Director: Directed by Kim Tae-Gyun / Horror / Cert. TBC

Manga Entertainment – Released 4 October 2010 – RRP: DVD £15.99, Blu-Ray £19.99

The latest film from Volcano High director Kim Tae-Gyun, Higanjima: Escape From Vampire Island gets off to a cracking start, as masked vampire hunter Atsushi (Dai Watanabe) reduces a vampire’s head to bloody mush with a battering ram.

We then cut to Tokyo, where his kid brother Akira (Hideo Ishiguro) is being chased by a gang of thugs, along the way assembling his Scooby Gang, including pretty archery enthusiast Yuki (Miori Takimoto); her punk boyfriend Ken (Tomohisa Yuge); a chemistry geek and the Scrappy of the bunch, the whiney Pon (Fumito Moriwaki).

It seems Atsushi has gone missing on the vampire-infested island of Higanjima and – following a hot tip from mysterious beauty Rei (Asami Mizukawa) – Akira and chums set off on a rescue mission, soon running afoul of samurai vampires, zombie mad scientists and albino bloodsucker-in-chief Miyabi (Koji Yamamoto).

So, Buffyesque teen vampire slayers take on sword-wielding undead in a gore-filled battle for survival; we’ve got a winner here, right? Well, no. No we don’t. Despite the movie’s fun premise and fast-paced opening, Higanjima quickly turns into a mess.

An example; considerable time is spent giving Akira’s friends signature traits that would come in handy when, say, fighting vampires – Yuki has her bow, Ken his baseball bat, science guy his explosive chemical concoctions and so forth. Yet Kim Tae-Gyun resolutely refuses to pull the trigger on Chekov’s gun; having established his characters, he merely uses them as generic victims to advance the plot.

Talking of which, it would appear that one of the chief dangers of Vampire Island is falling down a plot hole. This would be more forgivable if it wasn’t for the fact that Higanjima also feels half an hour too long; if the director wanted to pad out his flick, he could at least spend the time telling the story better. By attempting to cram all of Koji Yamamoto’s long-running horror manga into a single feature, Kim Tae-Gyun has made a film that is at once bloated and underdeveloped.

Another issue is that while the fight scenes are competently handled, Higanjima seems to have run out of money at precisely the wrong moment. As the movie nears its climax our heroes are confronted by a monstrous, slavering gargoyle, rendered impotent as far as scares go by hopeless CGI. The effect is so jarring, so out of place aesthetically, that I felt embarrassed for Miyabi; you spend an hour and a half toying evilly with the good guys and this is what you had up your sleeve? For shame.

The blood-spraying, vampire-slaying action is still fun, of course; but Higanjima’s excessive length and other flaws sadley prevent the film from reaching its full potential.

- Dave Axbey

 

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