Strong and Moving!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

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.

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.