In File 02, Director – I actually assume that’s his first name – Kudo (Shigeo Ohsako), assistant Ichikawa (Chika Kuboyama), and their camera man Tashiro (Koji Shiraishi) follow a new viewer’s video that supposedly shows a ghost haunting an abandoned school – all schools in the series seem abandoned, and look rather a lot like the same school. This quickly evolves into the search for a disappeared young woman, her curious relationship to an older man, and the occult significance of the Tokyo Skytree, culminating in a bit of High Strangeness.
File 03 leads our heroes into the countryside, where the search of what may or may not be a man-eating kappa ends up in a pretty ineffective banishing ritual.
The basic things I said about the formal cleverness and ultra-low budget creativity of the first Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi as well as my admiration for writer/director/actor Koji Shiraishi still apply. Both of these films actually seed quite a few concepts that will be important later on in the series, turning the whole series also into a bit of an Easter egg hunt once you’ve seen all of it.
These two are also the least effective films of the series seen without the context of the later films. File 02 suffers from being structured like an actual investigation, which means the moments of excitement here are surrounded by some scenes of the characters just observing or waiting around, something you simply can’t make look terribly exciting with the very low budget filmmaking technology Shiraishi has to work with here; however, Shiraishi being Shiraishi, there are also some suggestions of mind-blowing high concepts the rest of the series will heroically triple down on, a great no-budget climax, and moments of actual, simple strangeness that make this very much worthwhile.
File 03 is for my tastes the weakest part of the whole series. Apart from our protagonists, there’s no important connection to the rest of the series, and the kappa hunt tale itself is simply not all that interesting, even though I did appreciate how much stock Shiraishi puts into the importance of cucumbers. This film also has a fun enough final act with said banishing ritual, but most of what comes before is just too thinly stretched not to become a little bit dull.
From here on out, however, dullness is not a problem the Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! series will suffer under, because now, Shiraishi is going to be doing his crazy dance of High Strangeness, low budget, peculiar humour, can-do-even-if-can’t-afford spirit full-time.
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