Nightmare Detective

Nightmare Detective is a J-horror thriller starring Hitomi (one word name), Ryuhei Matsuda, Masanobu Ando and Shinya Tsukamoto. Directed by .

After the triumph of Inside, I was eager see another release by the Weinsteins' foreign horror-themed Dimension Extreme label. However, the Japanese import known as Nightmare Detective is no Inside and is a bit of a disappointment.

The premise was somewhat promising, if a bit predictable to horror fans. A string of bizarre deaths are occurring in Tokyo, as people are seemingly slashing themselves to pieces while having a nightmare. While the police naturally have to rule the deaths suicides at first, rookie Detective Keiko Kirishima (Hitomi) suspects some element of foul play and recruits the help of the reluctant Kyoichi Kagenuma (Matsuda) who has the power (or curse, as he considers it) to enter the dreams of others and try to help them.

The movie has a strong start: an elderly businessman enters a small apartment, opens a beer and sits at a small table. The camera cuts to a disturbing shot of a mane of long, black hair hanging in a corner. Suddenly, Kagenuma emerges from the floor. He asks the old man about the hair. The old man casually mentions that the hair is the daughter he never had, as his wife had an abortion early in their marriage. He says the hair is in all his dreams to remind him of what he lost. It turns out the old man is close to death, and he and Kagenuma discuss the regrets in his life. Save for the floor emergence, there are no special effects in this scene, yet it remains the spookiest scene in the film, as the hair takes on a more eerie, sinister meaning the more the man talks.

Unfortunately, the film goes downhill from there and descends into a hodgepodge of J-horror clichés, A Nightmare on Elm Street and the underrated 80’s sci-fi flick Dreamscape (all better films). Among the major problems:

The detective story aspect of the film is too much of a cliché. Detective Kirishima is clearly the Hot Female Detective Unfairly Having to Fight for Respect from the Old Guys (of course, her police uniform consists of a very short skirt and high heels in order to be taken seriously). Furthermore, the older, less attractive detectives disrespect her and listen to nothing she says, but she does find a supportive partner in a younger, handsome detective (go figure).

Kagenuma, the presumed hero of the film, spends too much time brooding over his cursed gift. Indeed, he comes off way too whiny at times. Also, though he is eventually “the only hope,” in more than one case, it’s hard to see how he was much help at all. It becomes somewhat hard to care for his character and there is little to no chemistry between him and the female lead.

The main storyline – Kirishima and the Nightmare Detective eventually joining forces to stop a dream-based serial killer – pulls off the rather remarkable but unwelcome feat of being too familiar, yet hard to follow at the same time, and indeed gets lost as the story progresses. The film seems at times determined to use every overdone and annoying J-horror trick (shaky cam, flash cuts, bizarre out of sequence scenes) in an effort to “out weird” the other films it borrows heavily from. The final showdown dissolves into an incomprehensible mess (Kirishima starts to seemingly regress back to her infancy for some unexplained reason) and never fully explains how the killer is able to enter his victims’ dreams.

The film is not without its strengths. Besides the aforementioned opening scene, the next most effective moment is a horrific chase sequence in which a dreamer tries to bicycle away from a zombie-like monster whose face has been carved away and hangs hideously to the side of its head. Furthermore, for the young male audience, I should add that Hitomi is quite lovely to look at.

In the end though, the film seemed to want to be too many things at once (part detective thriller, part gory J-horror, part grim essay about modern society in Japan), yet disappoints on each level. If the film had stayed true to the quiet, yet eerie tone of its opening scene and scaled down the sensational bits, it might have been much more effective. While not terrible, for horror fans curious about the Dimension Extreme catalog, I would definitely recommend Inside over this one.

DVD Features:

• Audio options are Japanese and English dubbed.
• Language choices are English, English for the hearing impaired and Spanish.
• The only extras are the theatrical trailer and an hour long feature on the making of Nightmare Detective (full of spoilers).

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