It reminds me of the Gakkou no Kaidan film series that started in the same year. You could call this a horror film if you were being generous to the point of mendacity, but its cast and target audience are both primary school children. I watched this movie in front of Natsuki and Misaki this morning. No one turned a hair. Mind you, I nearly didn't find the film in the first place. I'd been looking for Hanako of the Toilet movies, but this one's English title doesn't contain the name "Hanako" and the only copy I found was missing its last ten minutes.

The supernatural elements are "blink and you'll miss it". This is basically a real-world story. A transfer student (Saeko Mizuno) gets bullied and is assumed to be the ghost called Hanako of the Toilet, even though Mizuno's alive. Does anyone really believe it? Sort of. These children are young and empty-headed enough to start believing crazy stories that they'd started themselves, while the bullies' logic doesn't stand up to scrutiny at all. It's playground mass hysteria, with a dose of malice.

Mizuno is lovely. She's so nice when introducing herself and she only ever wanted to be friends with everyone. Unfortunately, she's also: (a) clever, (b) pretty, and (c) told to sit next to a boy called Takuya Sakamoto, so an idiot decides that she's a love rival. Soon, everyone's being weird and shitty. The Sakamoto siblings defend her a bit, but Takuya's unreliable and Natsumi's two years younger. These elementary school children are too young and muddle-headed to be as evil as a high school bully, but I still hated them. Horrible, horrible. They make Mizuno cry and drive her so far that one scene made me worry about a potential child suicide.

So we've got playground drama... but there's also a serial killer. He's murdered two children in another school. We learn about this in a staff room announcement around the fifteen minute mark, whereupon the film pays it no further attention and returns to the children behaving badly. WHAT THE HELL? The brats might not care, but we do. The serial killer does something gross and upsetting, then appears in person with a sickle and some kind of mental disability. He seems incapable of speech. He just hisses like a vampire, or else starts panting and snarling.

A children's film turns into Friday the 13th, or John Carpenter's Halloween. Technically, in principle... although of course it's still for kiddies and we're not seriously scared. My brain still exploded, though.

The finale's silly. An unarmed ten-year-old has the best of a fist fight with an armed adult. Eh? That sickle falls to the ground, but Mizuno waits until the killer's retrieved it before trying to grab it herself. The whole class arriving at night time with torches is almost magical... but for that there's a reason. Hanako called them. Maybe she'd been helping in the fight too? Yeah, the real Hanako. We never see her, but we hear her laughing in an empty toilet. Shutting a door is about the limit of her on-screen supernatural powers, though.

If you're looking for J-horror, don't bother. It's a tame children's film and its ghost is benevolent and never seen. Underneath the family-friendly tone, though, is strong material. The Mizuno story gets nasty and will make you worry about child fatalities. Incidentally, that's why I'm less willing to forgive the bullies than the film ultimately expects me to be. (I'd send them to jail.) I suppose this must be a good film, then, since it got a strong reaction from me. I'm also happy to have met another friendly Hanako of the Toilet.