Things don’t look good for the teens whose school is in the center of a giant pentagram, but what do you expect when you’ve got Satanists in the basement, a pervert teacher who feels up all the girls before they get in the door, and secret lesbians in the art room. Nope, things don’t look good at all, that is, until Misa Kuroi (Kimika Yoshino) enters the scene. She’s an attractive minx with good witch powers and intense eyes. Problem is, she’s a bit slow on the uptake this time, and she and twelve other classmates find themselves trapped in the school, waiting to become sacrifices to a ritual that will resurrect Lucifier. It’s going to be a bad night.
What’s Lucifer doing in Japan? Part of the charm of J-horror is the non-Western religious and philosophical assumptions, but here we are with Satanists. Oh well, pale female ghosts with stringy black hair are popping up in Hollywood films, so I suppose it’s some kind of horror exchange program.
Pre-dating the J-horror boom by several years, Eko Eko Azarak has many of the movements characteristics, but with a different tone. There are girls in sailor school uniforms, tense music, and some incredibly bloody events, but Eko Eko Azarak doesn’t fit with Dark Water. It’s a first cousin to anime. The acting (voice and physical) is broader than reality and the dialog both simpler and more dramatic than necessary. People scream when they should talk, jump when they should stand, and make loud, indefinable whines when they should sigh. The proper descriptive word is “cartoonish.” Of course that makes sense in anime, which is a type of cartoon. For a live action production, everyone should have taken a dose of Prozac. The exception is Kimika Yoshino, a popular teen model turned sometimes actress. With deep liquid dark eyes, she’s brings not only the beauty that was her meal ticket, but a sense of calm and control that is greatly needed.
Following its anime sympathies, Eko Eko Azarak is a film that defies American expectations and sensibilities. It is a film for adolescent boys and particularly girls, who are a few years younger than the characters and can hold up Misa Kuroi as a role model for the future. But no U.S. film for twelve-year-olds would have bodies ripped apart with blood splattering over the windows or a topless schoolgirl in a lesbian kiss with her teacher. U.S. films are the poorer for it. For anime fans, this is old hat.
The story is simple: a group of teens run around in a building and get picked off. It’s been done many times before (and since). Happily, it works better here than in the dozens of slashers that do the same thing. It never gets frightening, but it’s not light and fluffy either. The deaths should satisfy most run-of-the-mill horror fans, and the surprising gore adds needed spice (there’s several stabbings and throat cuttings, a beheading, a group torn limb-from-limb, and a topless girl nailed to an altar).
Eko Eko Azarak is fun, in a Sabrina the Teenage Witch meets Sailor Moon meets House of a 1000 Corpses kind of way. Yeah, dwell on that combo. It’s the perfect film for brave, magic-loving tweens who can’t get enough lesbians. Hmmm. That might be a hard sell.
It was followed by Eko Eko Azarak II: Birth of the Wizard (1996), Eko Eko Azarak III: Misa The Dark Angel (1998), Eko Eko Azarak IV (2001), Eko Eko Azarak: R-page (2006), and Eko Eko Azarak: B-page (2006).