School Day of the Dead (Shisha no Gakuensai) review

With the surge in popularity of J-Horror in the early 00s due to movies like Suicide Club and Kairo it’s easy to see how a movie called “School Day of the Dead” could sound interesting to fans of the genre. Unfortunately if that’s the type of movie you’re expecting you’d be barking up the wrong tree with this one. School Day of the Dead is an extremely formulaic murder mystery thriller – and not a particularly good one at that. The acting performances are borderline atrocious across the board, there are exactly zero scares anywhere to be found, and you could drive a truck through the plot holes that surface toward the end when everything is being “explained”. In fact the only saving grace for this one is at times it does tiptoe dangerously close to “so bad it’s good” territory. Thankfully a few good snickers at horrible acting here and there kept me from feeling like I totally wasted 100 minutes of my life.

School Day of the Dead opens with a drama club student named Yuko Yamizaki (Yu Kurosawa) taking a nose-dive off the roof of Tezuka Gakuen High School, leaving behind only a script of the play she had been planning entitled “The Blue-Eyed Angel”. In order to honor her dead friend Yuki Machiko (Kyoko Fukada) plans to put the play on anyway. When her friends Haruko and Mayumi are late to rehearsals Machiko finds them in the computer lab trying to hack into student records. While joking around Haruko types in a line from Yuko’s play, “Even the weight of my sin cannot overpower this joy!” which causes all sorts of weird numbers and words to pop up on the screen. Oddly enough, the numbers match something Haruko saw on one of Yuko’s floppy disks recently. However before they have a chance to get to the bottom of it they’re interrupted and have to go to the drama club rehearsal.

At the rehearsal Yuki and Haruko explain the play to everyone. “The Blue-Eyed Angel” is based on something that happened at the school 80 years previous. A teacher from Germany named Eugon Metcalfe had an affair with another teacher named Sumiko. Because of the scandalous nature of the relationship they were forbidden to see each other. To show that she still loved him she would play Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune on the piano every day in the auditorium. One day her father, the school’s founder, had the piano moved to the chapel. No longer able to hear the piano, and thinking Sumiko didn’t love him anymore Metcalfe left the school and moved away, leaving a painting entitled “The Blue-Eyed Angel” as a final gift to her. When Sumiko discovered Metcalfe had left she was so distraught she threw herself off the roof of the school. Upon hearing the rehashing of this story and it’s similarities to Yuko’s suicide Mr. Thornhill, the current art teacher playing the role of Metcalfe, storms out of the room suddenly.

The Next day Haruko tells Yuki and Mayumi she found the disk that had those strange numbers that matched the ones on the computer. Unfortunately Mr. Nishida the resident uptight disciplinarian chooses that moment for a bag inspection and pulls Haruko away. She manages to keep the disk out of his grubby paws for the time-being however, and later receives a note from Koyama, the new and ridiculously stoic transfer student saying he needs to see her. She never manages to make it to their meeting though, because on the way there she gets run over by a car… twice. The driver then gets out and takes the disk, which obviously holds a whole lot of importance to someone.

Now that the film has established itself as a murder mystery all the standard murder mystery plot devices apply. Everyone becomes a murder suspect and in keeping with that idea they all try their best to act suspiciously, whether that be through their actions or just glancing back and forth like a shifty silent movie villain for no particular reason. It doesn’t really make much sense to keep explaining the plot beyond this point because frankly I had a hard time following it myself. People die, other people act suspicious, and then we get tossed a lame, completely infeasible explanation to wrap it all up. In the end I half-expected murderer to say “And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”, although watching someone point a gun at someone else with every intention of killing them, only to have it knocked away no less than 6 separate times in the span of 3 minutes or so was funny enough for me. I have to admit after the 10th or 11th inept gun-point in the scene I was thoroughly amused.

I guess it’s pretty obvious by now I probably wouldn’t recommend School Day of the Dead to anyone unless they were really hard-up for something to watch. It’s not completely unwatchable - it’s about on par with most murder mystery television dramas. That is to say if it was on TV on a Saturday afternoon and you were really bored it would be a completely satisfactory way to pass the time, however if you paid $17 USD for an import DVD like me you’d probably end up quite annoyed and ready to write a scathing review of the experience to save others the trouble.

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