Welcome, one and all, to an all new Reaction & Review. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna be covering a Japanese horror movie from 2009. That movie is "Shock Labyrinth". Or "The Shock Labyrinth". It's a little bit unclear as to whether or not there is a 'the' in the front of the title. But since my copy doesn't have the word 'the' in it's title, I'm going to refer to it as "Shock Labyrinth".
Now, I can tell you that this movie was directed by Takashi Shimizu, who also directed "The Grudge" and the "The Grudge 2". And I would've not known that if I didn't decide to read the blurb on the back of the DVD case. For the record, I have not seen any of "The Grudge" movies. I'm not totally sure if I even want to watch those movies, but for now, I'm just gonna focus on this movie.
Essentially, what the movie is about is a group of childhood friends bring their friend, Yuki, to a hospital, after she gets a panic attack from seeing a toy rabbit. I'm not totally sure how a toy rabbit can do that to somebody, but I'll find out the context to it eventually. And then they find out that the hospital is haunted and Yuki disappears, somehow. So they gotta find her, while navigating through a haunted hospital. And that sounds kinda interesting. I don't know if the movie will make this premise work, but I am certainly hoping for the best on that.
I'm also hoping that this movie will be better than the last Japanese horror movie that I watched, which was "The Neighbor No. 13". And we all know how much I despised "The Neighbor No. 13". So I'm hoping that this movie doesn't tread the path of where that movie ended up. But the only way gonna to find out how good or bad this movie can possibly be, 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 "Shock Labyrinth."
15 minutes later
OK, I know this is still early for me to be asking this, but are we going to get an explanation about these visions that Ken's been having about Yuki and these flight of stairs? Or how, apparently, Rin has Superman's X-Ray vision powers when her eyes bug out of her head? Again, I totally understand it's very early in the movie, and there's plenty of time for the movie to explain all this, but I am rather curious.
10 minutes later
Wait a minute. So, we just saw Yuki run away as soon as Motoki shows up seconds later. Rather than noticing Yuki run away down the hall as soon as he showed up, he asks where Yuki is? How the fuck did he not see her run as soon as he showed up?! Either he's more blind than Rin, or the person who wrote this thinks the viewer would not catch this shit? I'm sorry, guys, but that kinda bothered me slightly.
11 minutes later
OK, I have a bit of a stupid question that I'm probably not going to get an answer to. So, we're seeing a flashback to when our main characters were children. One of them decides to go to the Shock Labyrinth, which is this haunted house of horrors, even though they're not old enough to go into this haunted house. My question is where the fuck are their parents? Why aren't these kids under parental supervision? Why is it that Yuki, who looks no different here in the 10 years she's disappeared, is the only one who's looking after these children? I totally understand that most of it sounds, and stupid, but it's these kinds of questions that bother me a bit, you know?
13 minutes later
So...the blind girl is now dead. And I probably would care if her death had any impact, but honestly...I don't. Yeah...this movie's starting to become a little bit dull, guys.
14 minutes later
OK, guys, two things. One, this song, I guess, is getting rather annoying. And two, the CG in this movie is fucking awful. I really want something interesting to happen within the next half hour or so, but right now, those hopes are fading pretty fast.
The Review
Well, guys, that was "Shock Labyrinth"...dear god, that was "Shock Labyrinth". Let me shut the movie off...OK. Where to start? I'm not going to spoil the ending, on the off chance you want to go and see this movie for yourself. I will say that the ending fucking sucks. It was building up to something that would be deemed as interesting. But it failed at being interesting because of that awful fucking twist. Mind you, the movie is not that interesting or scary. I'll get to that in a moment. But the ending was sort of building up to something halfway interesting, up until that twist happened, where it destroys any impact on what this movie wanted to accomplish.
Now, setting aside that awful ending, let's talk about the writing. I can only talk about the writing so much without going into heavy spoilers, but I will say that it had a lot of promise. Because, as I mentioned before, it involves our five main characters. And one of them, Yuki, ends up turning alive, after being left dead, supposedly, at this haunted house of horrors, otherwise known as the Shock Labyrinth, if you will. And because of her sudden reappearance, they try to figure out how she's still alive, or if it's even Yuki at all. And after Yuki ends up being at Rin's house, she's starting to get acquainted with her past memories of her room. And then she sees her toy rabbit, which is what triggers an entire chain of events as Yuki starts panicking and suddenly falls down the stairs, where she ends up unconscious. They then decide, rather than going to the police by Miyu's suggestion, they end up bringing her to the hospital. And it's where everything starts to become haunted, because there's no one there and Yuki ends up running off, so they end up trying to find her. Along the way, we get a ton of flashbacks, where it connects to how Yuki disappeared and how our main characters interact with these events with their past selves from 10 years ago. And I will say, again, that this story could've been interesting, had some of this stuff made any sense. And perhaps if I cared enough to watch this movie a second time, I probably would end up noticing things that I might not have noticed on my first viewing. But because of that awful twist, any chance of me watching this film again was completely shot down because of how terribly handled that ending was.
While I can't really talk too much about the writing, I can talk about the characters. The characters are not all that developed well, with the one lone exception being Miyu, who is Yuki's sister. Miyu was horribly jealous of Yuki when they were children, and Yuki was always considered as the perfect child. And anything that Miyu did, Yuki would let her do as she pleases, which always ends up with Miyu being in trouble. And because of what happened to Miyu, she wanted her sister to die for it. And you do kinda feel for her, because of all that Miyu had to go through with her sister. As for the other main characters, I could barely tell you anything interesting about them. We have Rin, who is blind, and has somewhat of a love interest for Mitoko. Oh, and she also has Superman's X-Ray vision for some reason, where she was able to use it when Yuki was at the door of her apartment, and she uses it when her eyes bug out rather creepily. We never get an explanation as to how she's able to do this, or how before she's killed, she's able to see one of our main characters with her normal eyes. It probably would've helped out her character immensely, if we had gotten an explanation as to how she's able to use these "powers". And I understand that it's probably something else, but that's what I'm going to stick by. But we don't get that, and it made her character kinda pointless. Now I mentioned Mitoko, and how she had a love interest for him. Mitoko, as far as I know, did not have any kind of personality to speak of. And I couldn't tell you a single memorable thing he did that would warrant me even talking about. We also have Ken, who would've been interesting, had he not kept bringing up the idea of what happened to Yuki was his fault. And to a certain extent, it was his fault. But again, I'm not going to spoil how, otherwise, it would result in me talking about that horrendous twist at the end. And then we have Yuki, who is the center of this whole movie, and she's the connection with how our main characters interact with the events of what happened to her at the haunted house. And I will say that she is the only other interesting character in this movie. So, outside of two characters, I could really not care about anyone else in this movie, and the writing kinda solidified that by making these characters rather shallow and empty.
Now, because this film is advertised as a horror movie, how well does the horror aspect hold? Honestly, not really all that well. Now, this is partially because, I have been watching quite a number of horror movies within the last few number of years. So, at this point, I have been conditioned enough to not let any of this scare me. But setting aside my personal aspects with horror movies, this movie is not scary at all. Now, it's not impossible that you could get creeped out by some of the images in this movie, but this movie, ultimately, is not scary in the slightest. And what few attempts at jump scares are in this movie are not that interesting or scary. I'm actually kinda surprised by that, because in many horror movies, specifically American horror movies, they would attempt this shit constantly, because that's what they think constitutes as scary to viewers. So I have to give this movie a little credit in where it doesn't try too hard to go for the obvious jump scares. But like I said, it's still not scary. It's kinda creepy, at times, but not enough to where you will be scared by anything in this movie, including the toy rabbit. And I'm gonna jump ship to special effects. Normally, I talk about the acting after I'm done discussing writing, but I really need to talk about the special effects in this movie, because they are a ridiculously mixed bag. I will start by saying that the practical effects are pretty good. I'm talking about stuff involving makeup effects, the animatronics on the mannequins, and what little practical blood is used here. All of that stuff looks fine. And then we get to the CG, which, as I stated before, looks awful. This movie came out in 2009. And the CG in this thing would've looked awful if this movie came out in 1999, that's how bad the CG is in this movie. Two examples I can think of are when our main characters see Yuki running down a hallway. And I'm not talking about when they first get to the hospital where Yuki first runs off. The point I'm talking about happens later on in the movie. So, they see Yuki running down a dark hallway, and as Yuki is running, her face slowly turns around, except it looks like Yuki's face was chroma-keyed into the shot, and really poorly chroma-keyed, too. It looked so awful, that it actually ruined the scene, and took me out of the movie quite a bit. Another example of poorly done CG is when one of our main characters gets killed off, and I'm not talking about Rin, just in case you're wondering. And there's water droplets that looks to be like rain, except the rain droplets are done in CG. How bad is it? Well, when our one of our main characters die, you don't get to see the rain water make impact on the clothes. Instead you just get to see stains pop up, and it looks really lazy, and poorly done. Which really begs the question on why they couldn't use practical water? I mean, it couldn't have cost that much to use practical water for this scene, right? Now, most people are going to notice that one as a minor problem, and you would have to actively look for that one if you were watching the movie like I was. Going back to the toy rabbit for a moment, there are also moments where the toy rabbit is in CG, and in the few instances when it appears in CG, it looks terribly done. And it really showcases how awful the CG is in this movie. So overall, I can say the special effects, when it comes to CG, is terrible across the board. And it really overlaps the good practical effects that are used in this movie.
Now, let's get to the acting. There is no English dub for this movie, so I do have to warn those who prefer dubs, you're probably going to want to avoid this movie, if you're not interested in reading subtitles. Now, I will say that, even though the writing is a jumbled mess, and the characters mostly suck, the acting was pretty good. Nobody in this movie, as far I know, turned in anything that I would say was a bad showing. And I'm even including the few child actors that are in this movie. Which is astonishing, because a majority of child actors are terrible by default. Now admittedly, I haven't listened to a ton of Japanese child actors, so I can't gauge it as well with the adult Japanese actors, but from what I heard in this movie, they do turn in a decent showing. So, I can give props to them for turning a performance that would mostly be seen as terrible. And as I said, everyone else turned a rather good showing, especially the script that was given to them.
Camerawork here is pretty good. Lighting, however, I do need to talk about. And I don't get a ton of chances to talk about lighting in movies, but this movie is an exception. Because there are a few instances where we will get flashbacks, and the lighting is so bright in most of these flashbacks that I was almost having a hard time trying to see what was going on. I'm talking about flashbacks involving when our main characters were at the fair, and when Ken was seen at the hospital as a kid, and the flashbacks were so brightly lit during these scenes, that the people in charge of the lighting could've toned it down during these flashbacks. Now barring the few instances of bright lighting during flashbacks, the lighting for everything else is OK. Sound-mix is mixed well. The music is kind of an odd one. I say that because there are a few moments, during the latter half of the movie, where I would hear music that reminds me quite a bit from, of all things, "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess". For those who haven't played "Twilight Princess", in the early portions of the game, you would enter the Twilight Realm, and would hear music that would sound very similar to what you would hear in horror movies, such as this one. Because that's where I got most of those vibes, when listening to that part of the score. Now, mind you, the score, as a whole, is serviceable. But those few moments where the latter half of the movie's score reminds me of a Zelda game's soundtrack kinda caught me off guard slightly. So I will say the music here is decent.
So, when all is said and done, can I recommend "Shock Labyrinth"? Um...if you're into horror movies, then maybe you'll find something more out of it than I did. And you would have to get through the bullshit twist ending as well. Personally, I would say just skip it. This movie kinda sucked. Now I will say that it is far better than "The Neighbor No. 13.". However, that's not saying a whole lot. And considering that this was from the director of "The Grudge" movies, I'm probably just going to skip those movies, because if this film is anything like those movies, then I don't think I'm missing anything of value there. Now...I think I'm gonna go watch a better horror movie. And I see my copy of "Repo! The Genetic Opera" sitting on my DVD shelf. I'm gonna go watch that, because it's been a while since I last seen it. And as for this movie...well, it left a rather bad taste in my mouth, especially that fucking ending.
Anyway, with that, guys, 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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