In short: Death Blog (2014)

Hitomi (Kana Nakada) is probably the shiest girl in the world, or at least at her high school - though, to be fair, said high school only seems to have five or six students on most days. She’s apparently living alone with her younger sister – at least we never get to see the parents and they are never mentioned. She has started to live vicariously via an anonymous blog portraying what the film probably thinks is her inner turmoil. However, blogging’s a dangerous business as we all know, and there has been a series of baseball bat bashing murders by someone following blog entries.

Once Hitomi – very much to her own surprise – gets together with the hot guy (says the film) from her school she has been dreaming about, various baseball battings seem to be based on her blog entries, too. Or is it just the curse of the…death blog?

Naturally, giving the year most people are living in, there have been quite a few social media based horror movies by now; just as naturally, most of them have been rather bad. Well, let’s be honest here, not just rather bad but utterly so. Death Blog, as directed by Masaki Jindo, fits right into this halcyon group by being a movie in which nothing whatsoever works. Jindo’s direction is aimless and meandering, managing to make an eighty minute movie feel like an overlong three hour epic by an improbable incompetence at pacing. Then there’s the script’s decision to not show us quite a few things that could give the plot at least a bit of impact. There’s, for example, the buddy of Hitomi’s boyfriend who gets baseball-batted shortly after they are introduced. Alas, we never get to see the scene where our heroine actually meets the guy, so the whole thing is just another random baseball batting incident involving a total stronger to a viewer. The film’s full of aggressively anti-dramatic decisions like this, as if it were made by people who really don’t understand that d-word at all.


Even worse, if you can imagine that, is the acting. I’ve seen enough Japanese movies from the last decade or so to understand that contemporary Japanese taste in acting styles is rather different from the contemporary Western one (the Japanese prefer their actors to actually emote, for example), so I’m not down on the actors because their work follows rules different from those of a contemporary Hollywood movie. It’s just that nobody on screen can emote even the least bit convincingly, following rules of emotional behaviour even our Martian cousins would probably find dubious (unfortunately, I lost the phone number of Martian Manhunter to check), and seemingly intuitively finding the worst possible thing to do in any given scene. Nakada is particularly dreadful, which is a bit of a problem seeing that the camera’s on her ninety-nine percent of the time. She’s clearly not understanding the difference between shyness and whatever the hell she thinks she’s doing, getting into a lot of heavy breathing, eye-rolling and theatrical shaking whenever she’s asked to portray emotion. You’d think the director could have guided her a little, but then you look at the rest of the film and realize he probably didn’t know any better either.