I'm gonna tell you, guys, I really don't know much about this movie, other than that it involves some guy who has a split-personality who kills people. Which sounds interesting. The only other thing I have picked up on this movie is that it's based off of a manga called "Tokyo Tribes." I should mention that I have never read "Tokyo Tribes", so if this movie is any good, I may go out and buy the manga that this thing claims to be based off of.
I don't know if this movie will stand out on it's own or not, but the only way I'll know that for sure, is if I shut up, and I push play, and I'm gonna do that right now. So, without further ado, it's time to kick back, relax, and check out "The Neighbor No. Thirteen."
19 minutes later
OK, I have a stupid question. Who keeps their spare apartment key in their mailbox? I would honestly expect something more sensible like putting it under a carpet or carrying it with them when you go out, but putting it inside your mailbox seems really irresponsible to me.
20 minutes later
Well, guys, I do have some good news. Juzo's split-personality killer has finally killed his first victim. Bad news? Took him only about 40 minutes to get there, but hey, at least he's finally gotten a kill under his belt. Yeah...so far, the pacing on this thing is a bit hideous.
8 minutes later
OK, I think I may have found a problem with this split-personality story. So this is the second time that Seki has seen our split personality killer. He doesn't freak out about the fact that his left eye is messed up greatly or his noticeable facial hair. He's even told by Juzo's split personality HIMSELF that he isn't Juzo. And Seki doesn't react to this at all. Don't you think that if you saw someone with a split-personality, or that his eye is fucked up or that he magically has facial hair, you would react differently in this kind of situation and try to call for help? I totally understand that he's probably going to end up dead in a few moments, but I'm pretty sure I would at least try to react differently to it instead of just letting the situation play out normally. It just feels really off to me.
7 minutes later
So, hold on a second here. She's going to ask Juzo, who's she's met all of twice, mind you, to watch over her son so that way she and her husband can go see a movie. I'm sorry, guys, but I wouldn't ask someone who you barely know anything about to ask them to watch over their only kid. It just sounds really stupid. Just thought I would share that with you, guys.
15 minutes later
All right, this is the third time that this movie has pulled this shit off. This is the third kill our killer has made and it's done off camera. This movie is so fucking cheap, it hurts. And I got almost another hour of this crap to sit through. This is really gonna suck, guys.
Does it even matter anymore?
Wait, wait, wait! Wait a fucking second here. So, the first victim from way early on in the film was behind on his rent for six months. Are you telling me that this guy has been dead for possibly six months and NOBODY around the apartment noticed, like, a horrible smell? Because I'm pretty sure if a dead body was still in an apartment it would give off a really horrible odor and that someone would've noticed it. Guys, the logic in this movie is really starting to grate on me and I cannot wait until this stupid thing is done.
The Review
Well, guys, that was "The Neighbor No. 13." Let's...shut that off. My god. That ending made no fucking sense. Anyway, I may as well get into the review of this thing. As I mentioned at the start, this movie is based off a manga called "Tokyo Tribes." I'm sincerely hoping that the manga has more depth and personality than this fucking movie has, because our characters are about as likable as a styro-foam cup. In fact, I'm going to give you the basic rundown with all of our characters that we follow.
We have Akai, who is the head of a construction job, does not develop any kind of personality from the time he was in school to when he is an adult. Even though he has gotten a job, has a wife, a son, and an apartment to live in, he is still the same the douchebag from back when he was younger, all the way up to his adult life. Juzo, who was viciously bullied as a kid while in school by these bullies lead by Akai, is completely personality-free once he is an adult and he is basically an afterthought once our split-personality shows up. I will talk about his split-personality in just a second. I wish I could tell you about Akai's wife or son, Yuki. But they are as bland as everyone else in this movie. And there's also Seki, who I thought was going to play more of a role in this movie, but, and this may or may not be a spoiler, but he's the second victim of the split-personality killer.
Anyway, going back to the story. So, years later when Juzo has grown up, he gets a job as a construction worker and, what do you know, the head of this construction team is lead by Akai. And when Akai starts bullying him again, as Juzo is doing his job, it's somewhere during that point that he somehow develops this split-personality and begins to kill anyone who gets in his way. And you would think that the movie would become interesting, and in the hands of a competent writer, that would be the case. But no. Our killer is about as shallow and lifeless as every other character in this movie. Now, I'm not expecting mountains of depth from these characters. But when you are making a horror movie, you want to at least give the viewer a reason to care about what happens when Juzo's split-personality starts killing people. When you make your characters unlikable douchebags such as Akai, his wife, or their son, who at one point in the movie, gets kidnapped by Juzo's split-personality, then you don't care what happens to them, because you are hoping that the split-personality killer kills everyone of these sacks of shits off. And it probably would matter more, if I gave even half a rat's ass about any of these characters. But this movie couldn't even do that much.
I would like to touch upon Juzo's split-personality for a moment longer. Not only is he boring and shallow as every other character in this movie is, but every single kill in this movie, is that, first of all, I can tell you how many kills our split-personality has made in just one hand. And that wouldn't have been so bad, except, and I'm not even joking when I say this, every single kill in this movie is done completely off camera. Correction, there is one kill that is kinda done on camera, and that is when the split-personality killer is killing his next victim in the bathroom at a carnival. The problem is that once he starts killing the victim, the camera is focusing on the back of our killer and you can't really tell if he's either beating the victim to death or pulling out his intestines because this movie is too fucking cheap with it's special effects.
And, I may as well jump into special effects because this is something that I thought was going to be the highlight of the film. Because when I read that the plot involved a split-personality killer, I genuinely thought it was going to show how creative and brutal our killer was going to be. But instead, it only shows you the aftermaths of our victims. In which, all of it looks cheap and lazily done. And to show that the people who worked on the special effects didn't care at all, at one point, we see the split-personality killer carry with him a bag which shows his final victim, and I won't try to spoil who that victim is on the off chance you actually want to check this movie out for yourselves. When he lays the bag down, you can see that the victim is covered in a plastic baggy and as the camera zooms on the dead body itself, you can clearly see that the arm that's sticking out is a plastic doll arm. Which tells me that the people who worked on this movie couldn't be bothered to either cover up the arm, or they could've gotten off their lazy asses and make an arm model that clearly looks as if it didn't come from a $5 toy doll.
Now, I could go on more about how bad the special effects are, but I have to move on and cover the rest of this movie. But basically, guys, special effects in this movie are a massive disappointment. Now let's get to the acting. Well, I did watch the English dub for this movie and the dub here is passable. There are two, however, I need to comment on. First is the voice actress who voiced Yuki; the son. She easily turns in the worst showing here, and I totally understand that when you are voicing a child, you are not expecting much, however I was at least expecting something halfway decent, and she failed miserably. The other one who I need to comment is, actually, a voice I recognized, because he is a well established voice actor. And he goes by the name of Yuri Lowenthal. Now I know that Yuri has shown to me that he can act, but out of every performance I have heard from him voicing in video games, cartoons, and what have you, this is honestly his worst performance, because it really sounds like he was just phoning in his dialogue just so he could get that quick paycheck and move on with whatever else he had lined up. But beyond that, the dub is OK, but honestly, I think you could just benefit from watching this subtitled, provided that you have any interest in watching this movie.
I want to go back to writing for a moment, because I barely touched upon writing outside of our shallow as shit characters. This movie has a ton of logic issues. Not even plot holes, just logic issues that lack any common sense. For instance, when Akai's wife goes to check on Juzo at his apartment, he doesn't answer the door and just goes back to her own apartment. Because instead of worrying about that her son may be potentially missing right then and there, and immediately telling Akai about it, she instead greets him as he's coming home and proceeds to give him a blowjob. Because why worry about telling Akai about their son still not home, when you can instead just attempt to suck off your husband. And when they DO eventually figure out that their son has been kidnapped, the wife doesn't do shit for the rest of the movie while Akai is off going after Juzo's split personality killer to get their son back. While I'm on the subject of the wife, what gave her the idea to let Juzo look after their son while she and Akai go off to see a movie? Wouldn't it make more sense to call someone, like a relative, to look after Yuki, since they are going off together for the evening? I totally understand, then, that we wouldn't have a movie, but damn it, it makes much more since then to do any of the nonsensical bullshit that she does here. She's probably the dumbest character in the entire movie, second only to either Akai or Juzo's split-personality killer.
There is one other thing that bothered me in terms of logic issues, and I brought this up during the reaction portion of the movie. When Seki sees Juzo's split-personality and is told that he wasn't Juzo, he doesn't react in anyway. Now at the time when I was watching it, I thought Seki was going to have more of a role here, because we are told during the first-third of the movie that Seki is also being bullied at the construction job that he's working along with Juzo by Akai, who somehow got to be the boss of the job, but that's not really important. So anyway, Seki is being bullied as well, and when he and Juzo were talking, I thought that maybe he and the split-personality killer were going to join forces and get revenge on Akai for all of the abuse that they have been getting from him. But no, instead, Juzo's split-personality just kills him and ruined what could've potentially been the most interesting part of the movie. Guys, there is so much wrong with this movie in terms of it's writing, but I would be here for another day talking about all of these logic issues this movie has. But I'm going to cut it short and say that the writing here is shit and just move on from there.
Animation. Yes guys, I actually have to talk about animation in a live action movie. Because there is a short sequence in the movie where Seki, who is inside's Juzo's apartment with him, shows Juzo his art-book. And it transitions to an animation where it's taken from Seki's comic and the animation looks great. I really like the art-style and how the character animations move, and honestly, I wish we could've seen more of that than what we got as our actual plot. But for what it is, the animation looks great and I can honestly say it's the biggest positive from this movie.
Camerawork, minus the off screen kills, is done competently well. The lighting is well lit. The music, eh, the music is forgetful as it's mostly there to build up suspense and tension, what little there is, but at least it does it's job. And...that's really it in terms of positives. And it's pretty sad that the only genuine positive that I can pull from this movie is that the short animation sequence was great and the technical stuff is fine.
So ultimately, am I am able to recommend "The Neighbor No. Thirteen"? No. This movie was a massive disappointment and is by far one of the worst horror movies I have ever seen. But it's not the worst horror movie I have seen. That honor, right now anyway, goes to "Curse of the Puppet Master". But this still doesn't stop this movie from having lazy special effects, a dub that is average at best, writing that suffers from so many logic issues. And not only that, but this movie has a lot of down time where nothing happens. And the only movie I can think of at the top of my mind that has worse down time than this movie is, once again, "Curse of the Puppet Master". I'm just...really disappointed, because we could've had a really interesting movie. And, as I said earlier, in the hands of a competent writer, it probably could've been great, but instead, we got nothing but boring, nonsensical bullshit for an hour and 50 minutes. Now, I need to find something else to do. And you know what? I just recently downloaded the Ace Attorney Trilogy on my New Nintendo 3DS, so I'm going to go play that, because at least that thing has better writing and more suspense than this turd of a movie has.
Anyway, with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all in the near future. Peace.
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