Prayer Beads – The Complete Series
Picture:
C Sound: C Extras: C Episodes: C
Are you
afraid of the dark? Here is the
supposedly gruesome and disturbing horror anthology that was an ‘audience
favorite at the 2004 Fantasia Film Festival,’ Prayer Beads – The Complete Series.
The series loosely tells varying tales that are meant to thrill, shock,
and excite but only disappoint. The
short films are filled with ‘gross outs’ such as blood, rotting corpses, and
unusual violence that once again seem oddly placed and poorly executed. The story cohesion is so loose and poor it
may as not exist. Overall, the complete
series holds nine horror tales as they have interpreted by ‘CGI/SFX’ master’
Mashiro Okano. The stories play like a
bad TV series based on The Grudge or
Saw, and rarely hold interest beyond
a good laugh. In the end, this is a sure
skip due to lack of storyline, bad good acting, and the oddly displayed visuals
that just don’t work.
The
storied included in this horror anthology include:
Disc 1
Prayer Beads
Vending Machine Woman
It’s Me
Real
Mushroom Hunting
Disc 2
Eddie
Echoes
Cat’s Paw
Apartment
The
technical features of this 2 disc DVD set are unimpressive at best. The picture is presented in a rough
letterboxed 1.78 X 1 Widescreen, the picture quality varying greatly. The Director of the series (Masahiro Okano)
uses a variety of camera angles and visual color and blurring techniques to
‘emphasize the horror,’ but even beyond his intentions the picture quality
begins to play like a bad Japanese Soap Opera.
The picture is either way too clean or way too gritty with no happy
medium. Also throughout the series
dark/light issues pop up, which is quite distracting. The sound is adequate, being fully in
Japanese with English subtitles, in its Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo format, but
nothing to write home about. The extras
are equally unimpressive only offering the audience a simple trailer and still
gallery. Overall, the 30 minute film
episodes look as they were filmed on a home video camera with matching sound,
and contain slapped on extras that are sure to bore
If you
are a fan of Japanese horror TV or film this series falls short of most
expectations; leaving audiences questioning the direction and quality of what
is being offered as a form of art.
- Michael P Dougherty II
