5/10
A Different Flavor
26 October 2012
"Professor Shiraki" (played by Toshio Kurosawa) arrives from Tokyo to a new school for teenage girls in a small Japanese village. Upon checking in he learns that the principle's wife died a couple of days earlier and that a student named "Keiko Nonomiya" (Tomoe Mari) went missing about the same time. That night he has an encounter with a vampire that matches Keiko's description but dismisses the incident as nothing more than a dream. Not long afterward another student named "Kyoko Hayashi" (Keiko Aramaki) faints in his classroom and is taken to the school's doctor, "Doctor Shimimura" (Kunie Tanaka). During Kyoko's examination two small "needle pricks" are discovered but neither Professor Shiraki nor Doctor Shimimura are able to figure out their significance. Since she appears to be tired, they send her back to her dorm room to recover with her two roommates, "Yukiko Mitamura" (Mio Ohta) and "Kumi" (Mariko Mochizuki) promising to take care of her. All hell breaks loose after that. Anyway, having outlined the first part of the story, I'll stop here so I won't spoil everything for any viewers who wish to see the rest. Now, although this is a "standard" vampire story, the fact that it is entirely Japanese results in a few curious details. For example, a white rose is seen by the bedside of each of the females who have been bitten. Once they drink blood the rose turns red. I thought that was an interesting touch. Having said that though, I thought there were a couple of faults as well. First, the dialogue was awful. But the movie I saw was originally in Japanese and dubbed in English and it is quite possible that much had been simplified or even lost in translation. Likewise, the acting was also quite bad. Even so, this film had a different flavor than most other vampire movies and I thought some of it was actually quite good. Obviously, there will be people who might not like this film. Like I said, it has its flaws. But I think fans of this genre might be pleasantly surprised.
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