Noboru Iguchi and Daisuke Yamanouchi are an intriguing team-up, but this series is TV-friendly horror with no bite and not enough patience for a slow burn. J-horror scenes get thrown in too fast to have the weight they deserved, then ultimately it's all for nothing when the ghost isn't malevolent. (Probably, I think.)

A dramatic troupe is rehearsing a production of their most famous work, "DICE". When they last staged it, ten years ago, people died. Inexplicable phenomena are about to happen.

The J-horror opening got me interested. Our heroes watch a VHS tape of that ten-year-old production, but the player's being weird. Is the series ripping off Ringu, then? Long hair comes out of the player... oh, no, it's just the magnetic tape from the cassette, which somehow got unspooled. The series can't focus, though. It's skipping through lots of horror cliches without committing properly to any of them. An actress does a Possessed Dance Routine that's pretty good, but afterwards the white-faced ghost feels extremely familiar. There's a straw voodoo doll with nails hammered through it. (Eh? The Blair Witch Project?) There's poltergeist activity. "Mr Bazzuru" getting scared by a pop-up gallery of ghosts is silly in episode 4, then by episode 6 it's all a bit same-old same-old.

The character story's decent, though. The boring protagonist is the spitting image of her dead sister from ten years ago... okay, fair enough. I liked Manipulative And Slightly Sinister Girl, though, and the last few episodes are carried by what's going on between that trio. There's also a girl with ginger dumpling hair and a mighty accent. (We're in Osaka.)

The pacing's all wrong. It's not as wrong-headed as certain 21st century Doctor Who episodes I could name (The Haunting of Villa Diodati), but it's no bloody good. The individual scenes might have been okay on their own, but they've been shoved together artlessly. The potential scares undermine each other and the horror angle doesn't work. (Mind you, I'm not sure if the series is even really trying to be scary, given the bouncy music you'll sometimes hear on the soundtrack.) It works much better as a character drama with a supernatural angle, but even from that viewpoint I wouldn't particularly recommend it.