Visitors - Complete Edition

Director - Kenichi Ugana (Rolling Marbles, We Are Aliens)

Starring - Ryuta Endo (The Tokyo Wind Orchestra, Junnai Dissonance), Saki Hirai (Aru Shokuba, Omimi ni Aimashitara), and Rii Ishihara (Flashback Before Death, The Lump on My Heart)

Release Date - 2023

Genre - Horror/Comedy

Format - Bluray (Personal Collection)

Rating (out of 5):

     I'm always open to Japanese horror.  Over the years I've seen some of the wildest and most depraved films that Japan has to offer.  These are some of my favorite films and I'm always recommending them to genre fans that have never stepped outside of the country in regards to what they watch.  I'm always on the lookout for other Japanese horror films that I had never seen before.  Recently, Terror Vision released a Japanese horror double feature that really caught my eye.  The release featured two films, Visitors and Yellow Dragon's Village, with Visitors really peaking my interest.  I snagged a copy and tossed it on my watch list until I had the time to check it out.

     The film follows a group of friends as they make the trip to visit the brother of one of them.  He hasn't spoke with them for some time so they are paying him a visit.  This quickly turns deadly when they one by one become possessed by something ancient and sinister.  One of them survives and starts hunting demons where she saves a man from a trap set by a different demon.  She becomes possessed and follows the man she saved back to the apartment where this all began where they encounter even more zombies but live in relative peace.  That changes when demon hunters show up and start killing everyone.  Those that survive find themselves abducted by visitors from another world.  

     I went into Visitors knowing absolutely nothing about it aside from the comparison to Evil Dead and that it had a cameo from Troma's Lloyd Kaufman.  I went into it blind and was a bit confused.  After doing a little bit of research I learned that this was originally a short that had subsequent shorts attached to it which is why it felt like an anthology at times.  It was fun for what it was but the entire time if felt like a huge missed opportunity.  The acting in this one is solid for what it was.  The characters have some pretty big characters to bring to life but they brought the energy to do so.  The characters are a lot of fun and they bring so much to the film but they are lacking depth.  In fact, it's hard to keep a lot of the character separated.  The story for this one has a lot going on but the film itself is stretched too thin.  I loved the idea of the friends visiting a friend only to be possessed one by one by an evil presence.  The short should have left it at that.  Instead, we drag it out with other connected shorts that ties back to the original short.  This is what makes this the complete edition.  Honestly, I wish I would have just seen the original short instead of the follow up segments.  They don't do a great job wrapping up the story and feel out of place from everything else.  Finally, the film has a lot of practical effects.  The deaths have a lot of blood and some light gore along with some seriously fantastic make-up effects.  The movie does draw a lot of inspiration from the Evil Dead franchise and the effects are the most obvious.  Overall, Visitors is a must watch for fans of Troma, Evil Dead, and Japanese horror.  It does fall a bit short of what it could have been but it's still fun as it is.  Check it out.