With iMDB and a host of review sites online to assist me, it's rare that I rent a movie without first doing research. It was only after grabbing Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, however, that I looked at the review on Snowblood Apple and wondered whether it was possible for a straight woman to be seduced by a picture of two cute schoolgirls standing in a pentagram.
I'd picked up a slasher film? (Admittedly, a supernatural one, but still.) Moi? The Mid-Atlantic Eye-Covering Champion?
I needn't have worried. Though the protagonist doesn't get to kick quite as much ass as the DVD's cover suggests, Eko Eko Azarak is a very enjoyable movie about black magic. Oddly, it's black magic Western-Style, with robes and black candles and pentagrams: a Satan worshipper takes possession of a school with thirteen people still inside, ready to use the hapless students as sacrifices that will raise Lucifer and grant infinite power. Lucky for those of us who are anti-Satan, schoolgirl witch Misa Kuroi is on the case, trying to track down the evil force before her schoolmates go the way of all flesh--in this case, flying, bloody and painful.
Asian countries seem to do an excellent job exploring the horror that is secondary school, and this is what lifts the movie above the level of your standard and-then-there-were-none scary movie. The characters are by no means all sympathetic, but they are well-developed: one girl wonders, as the students are trapped in the building, how she'll ever get home to make dinner for her father (hint: not by getting decapitated like that), another wants to know if the school's sports team is winning their match, and the dialogue is otherwise full of rivalries, love interests and classroom politics that beautifully convey the idea that these are real teenagers. An aura of doom hangs over Misa Kuroi, who like Junji Ito's Tomie appears to be a supernatural entity AND a perennial student, but the action nicely balances the existential sadness. The Snowblood Apple site compares this movie to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, and the two do have a lot of virtues in common.
If you're less squeamish than I am (and you probably are), give Eko Eko Azarak a try. It's my new favorite slasher movie.
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