Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Misa the Dark Angel: GAGA Productions
Rating: USA: R

What do you get when you combine Sailor Moon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and elements from Sam Raimi’s first Evil Dead film? You get Ueno Katsuhito’s Misa the Dark Angel, which is sort of like Japan’s answer to Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Hinako Saeki is Misa Kuroi, a 17-year-old witch who travels from one Japanese high school to the next battling the forces of evil. Along with her uncle Satoru Kuroi (Cho Ban-ho) she fights to keep the forces of darkness from gaining a foothold in this dimension.

As the film opens, a hideously disfigured woman appears on the crowded streets of Japan calling for Misa Kuroi. She dies, and leaves the cops completely befuddled as to what has happened to her. However, Misa and uncle Satoru get the body once the autopsy has been completed and discover that a parasitic larva from another dimension was devouring the young woman. Misa and uncle Satoru lay the smackdown on the larva, and Misa begins her investigation by following her only clue.

That clue leads our heroine to the St. Salem High School. The school was founded by Baron Etori, a known occultist who was into the study of the homunculus—basically a pure human created from alchemy. Before you know it, Misa’s joined the drama club, where several other girls are putting together a new play. Unfortunately, the play isn’t really a play but an elaborately disguised ritual designed to call forth H.P. Lovecraft’s elder gods. When Misa interrupts this, all of the girls find themselves whisked away to an alternate dimension—one filled with zombie-like monsters intent on killing them all as part of some larger ritual. Luckily, the girls have Misa Kuroi on their side to protect them.

Misa the Dark Angel is actually the third film in a series (the first two being Wizard of Darkness and Birth of the Wizard) of movies that were spawned from a 1970s comic book by Shinichi Koga entitled Eko Eko Azarak. Aside from the films, there was also a television series—Misa Kuroi seems to be a very popular character in Japan.

This film also marks the first time that Hinako Saeki would play the role of Misa Kuroi. In previous installments Kimika Yoshino played the part. I can’t compare the two Misas since I’ve yet to track down the earlier films in the series. However, the consensus seems to be that Kimika Yoshino was better in the role.

While the film certainly has an intriguing premise, the execution falls flat in most instances. After an exciting opening, the movie spends the next forty-minutes or so letting Misa hang out with the girls at school, rehearse the play, etc. It also goes to great lengths to establish an undercurrent of lesbianism, which it never follows up on. Things pick up a bit once we get to the other dimension, but unfortunately director Ueno Katsuhito shoots everything in such poor lighting (and with an abundance of blue and green filters) that it’s nearly impossible to tell what’s going on.

While in the other dimension, the film plays out as a sort of surreal slasher film—almost reminiscent of Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap, only a lot less graphic. The girls are stalked and killed one by one, and then we finally arrive at the climactic showdown, which bogs down a bit thanks to an extended (but almost necessary—the villain’s goal is a bit hard to follow in the plot) expository scene. After that, things get a little philosophical.

The movie seems to owe at least a bit to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, giving us a sequence where an evil spirit flies through the building throwing open doors—all from a POV shot like in Raimi’s film. In another sequence, a girl is attacked by vines, again like in Raimi’s film. Although, here, they stop short of having the vines sexually assault their victim—they just kill her instead.

Gore-wise, there’s not a whole lot happening here, and the poor lighting often obscures what’s going on. There’s the charred corpse in the beginning, a guy who gets stabbed in the eye with a pair of scissors, and impalement by sword. Misa does get a few scenes where she cuts through a horde of zombies with her ceremonial dagger, and a few scenes where she uses her witchcraft powers (which are devoid of any kind of cheesy effects, thank goodness), but overall, the film is surprisingly light on violence.

Media Blasters has made Misa the Dark Angel available to American audiences on both VHS and DVD. Unfortunately, no one had the DVD in my area, so I had to watch the videocassette for this review. The film is presented in widescreen format, with English subtitles. The subtitles are white, presented on a solid black background, which makes it so that they’re always readable. Unfortunately, this black bar means that you lose about the bottom 1/5th of the picture. It wasn’t really an issue in this film, but it still seems annoying. The subs themselves are decent, although you’ll find several instances where things simply don’t get translated at all, or where there are relatively few words translated in comparison to all the talking happening onscreen. Oh well, I suppose we should be glad that someone has made a film like this available at all.

Ultimately, I really wanted to like Misa the Dark Angel. After a solid opening sequence, I was hooked into the story and looking forward to watching the teenage witch Misa Kuroi kick demon butt. Unfortunately, though, the film bogs down after that opening and offers up little in the way of gore, action, or even lesbian exploitation. From what I can gather, this is a marked change from the first two films in the series (particularly the first one, which appears to have offered up a fair amount of gore and nudity). Factor that in with the poor lighting and you have a film that had the potential to be something truly special, but falls well short of the mark. I didn’t hate this film by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s still a tough film to recommend.


Recommended: No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV