Scream Girls

Trailer—Scream Girls

Scream Girls

SCREAM GIRLS is a cheap and derivative shot-on-video horror film from Japan. It's a high school-set piece about a bullied girl who returns from the dead to take revenge on those who deserve it. The film has much in common with the South Korean film series that began with WHISPERING CORRIDORS and followed through with MEMENTO MORI and the like, although it's nowhere near as good. The problems with this production are too many to list, all of them resulting from the movie's generally cheap nature. The acting is of a bad quality, the lighting is too dark, the story too predictable, the scares too telegraphed. In addition, the film seems to focus too much on the main character's predicament and abuse, making it more depressing than harrowing.

A short but very disturbing thriller, that bears no relation to the plot summaries that marketed it a supernatural ghost story. It is a psychological thriller telling the tale of a descent into homicidal madness. Koaru a girl beaten by her father and ignored by her mother, becomes fascinated by the legend of a girl who supposedly haunts her school named Hikiko. Hikiko was bullied by her own father and her school friends, eventually result in either a suicide or accidental death, where she was torn to pieces while dragged by a van for several miles. Koaru is convinced Hikiko has curse the school and that a recent set of copycat murders are the work of her restless spirit and starts a website to that effect. She begins to be haunted by visions of a bandage faced girl with a deformed arm and scarred face, who she assumes is the ghost of Hikiko. However when one of her friends Azumi's younger sister is murdered, the rumour spreads that Koaru herself is the killer. A relentless and incredibly cruel campaign of bullying begins and even Koaru's own friends turn on her. When her web site is revealed to the police and Koaru's father is made aware of it and ordered by the police to shut it down, her father beats his daughter so severely that he refuses to allow her to leave the home until her face has healed. To this end he boards up the door to her room and allows her no food, ordering her mother not to let her out under any circumstance . Koaru escapes and while pleading for help, discovers her own former friends have betrayed her completely, and one of them accidentally knocks her down a set of concrete steps, dislocating her arm, smashing one side of her skull and badly scaring her face. Arriving back home Koaru confronts herself in the mirror and realises she is the vision she has been seeing, and becomes convinced she is Hikiko. When her father decides to free her from the room, she murders him and her mother, bandages her face and takes on the task of curse of Hikiko. In the final scenes, one year later Koaru is still murdering the persecutors of both herself and the original Hikiko .

From the description of the film I expected Scream Girls to be about a group of teens working together to fight an evil spirit, the film is not that. The film mostly follows the troubled young Koaru who is bullied relentlessly by her classmates, and beaten by her abusive father. At some point early on in the film, Koaru's friends abandon her to join in the torment of her bullies, with the only explanation being that they wish to avoid bullying themselves. Not a lot of supernatural stuff happens in the film. At one point a ghost peeks through a door, and one is maybe seen in a field... I think that sums most of it up. The sound effects were silly at times, and the camera and lighting didn't produce a supernatural atmosphere so much as it did a dreary poorly lit one. The plot was rather thin, with nothing brought to the table in terms of suspense, mystery, or twists. All in all the film was rather unremarkable, kind of boring. Because of its lack of "bad" but also lack of anything good it gets a 4 out of 10 from me.