Director: Takeshi Watanabe
Release date: 2016
Contains spoilers
The film Higanjima: Escape from Vampire Island was flawed but was fun. A high-octane action adventure that took anime styling and recrafted it in live action. It did use cgi, and not all of it worked, but for the most part the film hit more than missed.
This film is a sequel to the Japanese live action series of Higanjima from 2013, rather than the 2009 film. Thus, this is within the same storyline but unconnected to the film we’ve already reviewed, and this, unfortunately, misses more than hits. All the actors (exported from the series) are different and in the main are not as good at their craft, the cgi tends towards poor rather than good and the plot goes from nonsense to nonsensical. It is still, however, high-octane when it comes to the fights.
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| There's a Hand in my bucket |
It starts with an overview of the Higanjima backstory, with wartime experiments and a group of kids going to the island, but the recap probably doesn’t explain much to the uninitiated. We get a brief animated water giant and then we see Kato (Ryû Morioka) washed up on a beach – a victim of the giant. He walks through the island, until exhausted and parched, when he finally comes across a village. He tries to get water from the well, but the bucket has a hand in it.
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| blood on tap |
He enters a building and calls out, he hears someone and, turning around, sees a man in a barrel, his head out and spigots clearly used to tap his blood. Kato looks around the corner and sees two men gnawing on limbs, their fangs obvious. Kato backs away but they have seen him, indeed a stream of vampires come for him. He runs out of the building and finds himself surrounded by the grey clad bloodsuckers (in Higanjima sunlight is not an issue). Suddenly a swordsman leaps in to his rescue.
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| Akira and Aoyama |
After a battle, the swordsman tells Kato to run and they escape the village. Once a safe distance away, Kato recognises the swordsman as Ken (Yûya Endô). He asks about Akira (Shun'ya Shiraishi) and Ken says he is with the vampires (by this meaning fighting them). We cut to a battle where Akira and his sensei, the ‘giant’ Aoyama (Renji Ishibashi), are battling vampires and their mutated versions. These take the form of beaked giants and we get we massively enormous enemies in this. Pulling the strings is the apparently fully immortal vampire Miyabi (Louis Kurihara).
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| Miyabi and troops |
If any of the characters were disappointing compared to the 2010 film then Miyabi is the prime one. Whilst the style is the same, the physical demeanour is all off and the prettiness that displays the blurring of gender lines within an anime, and which was captured in the 2010 film, becomes more of an effeminate campiness here and misses the desired aesthetic. He is powerful, nonetheless and survives being cleaved at one point and regenerates an eye (in bad cgi) in seconds, after losing it to an arrow,
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| Ken drinks bottled blood |
Ken is now a vampire, it is revealed, fighting against Miyabi. Akira’s brother, Atsushi (Ryôhei Suzuki), is revealed to be a vampire living in a village of vampires. It is here that we discover that refusing to feed can cause the mutation into a giant. The film heads towards a confrontation between the two brothers – but why isn’t clear. It has something to do with a serum (a cure I assumed) but that plotline was never broadcast satisfactorily.
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| CGI foe |
As mentioned, the cgi isn’t great, but I could live with that (it would be, and is, a shame compared to the earlier film) and the fights were fun enough. But it was the hack job of a story (and this wasn’t down to the subtitling being a wee bit too literal, the story was just a mess) and the interminable length (about 30 minutes needs expunging) that made this difficult. Also, I have to mention that the film really doesn’t have an ending, it just kind of stops. It isn’t a cliff-hanger; it is just a full halt. I think 3.5 out of 10 reflects fairly the poorness of the story, with a soupçon of bad cgi, tempered by the fun fight bits.
The imdb page is here.
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