Hell Girl

This film begins in 1965 with three teenage schoolgirls walking down a hallway when one of them by the name of "Yamada Kaede" (Kimura Hazuki) stops to look through a window where the sky has suddenly turned an ominous dark orange. When she turns back around she notices that her friends have disappeared and that an ugly old man is approaching in front of her. She then quickly runs the opposite way down the hall to avoid him and is then confronted by two other strange people. So she ducks inside a room where a teenage girl dressed in a school uniform is singing a children's song. The schoolgirl then introduces herself as "Ai Enma" (Tina Tamashiro) and after showing Yamada a quick glimpse of her past to reflect on her wrongful deeds sends her straight to hell. The scene then shifts to the present where an elderly woman is lying in bed with not much time left to live. Her adult son, "Jin Kudo" (Kazuki Namioka) is visiting her and inquires about a story he had heard of her being bullied a long time ago and summoning a mystical creature known as Hell Girl to punish the person responsible. Unfortunately, she dies before being able to tell him the full story but as it turns out the event happened in 1965 and she was the one who placed a call to Ai Enma (aka Hell Girl) to take her revenge on Yamada Kaede--who has not been seen since that time. Naturally, being a freelance journalist, Jin Kudo is determined to get more details so that he can write a story on this phenomenon. What he doesn't realize, however, is the horror that he will witness along the way. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this film follows a successful Japanese anime around 2005 which has only recently been made into a live action movie. Having seen the Japanese anime series I can only say that this film is much darker and a good deal more horrifying thanks in large part to the excellent special effects. Admittedly, some of these scenes are a bit choppy in nature due to poor editing and as a result they don't flow together as smoothly as they should--but all things considered I thought this was a pretty good movie and I especially recommend it for fans of the Hell Girl anime series.