The Tale of The Seven Rats: Black Rat (2010)

Black Rat (Kuronezumi) (Japan, 2010)
Rating: ***
Starring: Misaki Yonemura, Hiroya Matsumoto and Rina Saito

Asuka was a cheerful girl who didn't let anything get her down, trying her best to lift up the spirits of everybody she's befriends, even if they don't return her kindness. However, she committed suicide one day, jumping off a building while practicing a dance for a festival.

Months passed and the six teens who "befriended" Asuka receives a text message from her, asking them to go to their classroom at midnight. There, they met up with a girl in a grotesque rat mask who makes it clear she's going to murder them in revenge. Has Asuka returned from the grave? Or is it someone with a bloody grudge?

In a nutshell, Black Rat (2010) is as easy as any slasher film would get; if you are familiar with the sub-genre, you can tell most of the clichés before they appear on the screen from masked killers to some fairly intense stalk-and-kill scenes, though the kills are tame as they're barely bloody and cuts away before we could even see it happen.

To elevate the plot and its lack of bloodletting, however, the film features a rather cool and cute-looking masked slasher that does away some SAW-style trappings on her victims, in which they have to win games to be set free. Thing is, these are nothing torturous. Just silly challenges such as blocking a soccer ball or getting 100 points in karaoke. I find this workable as it did well around the considerably low-budget but it does make the tone rather rocky seeing most of the direction appears to be aiming for a serious approach.

Thankfully, a better bulk of the film plays out as straight as possible; in typical J-Horror element, the reason why these teens are in this kaput is told via flashbacks which reveal to us bits and pieces of what happened months ago and who's to blame. This works well in execution, although it's nothing overly shocking once the pieces are put in together. We can tell it's all for vengeance, so the only mystery left for us to ponder about is whether it is Asuka killing them or somebody else, and Black Rat (2010) did attempt its own set of twists to sway us off but, in the end, they're nothing too outlandish.

I can easily say this won't be anything grand but if you managed to grab hold of a copy, it's a fair viewing from time to time. Not gonna win any big fans but at least worth a look.

Bodycount:
1 female jumps to her death
1 male beaten to death with baseball bat
1 female electrocuted
1 female tripped down the stairs and gets a machete stabbed to her gut,
1 male beaten to death with lead pipe, pounded
1 female hacked to death with axe
1 male immolated in explosion
Total: 7