Misa the Dark Angel DVD

Following a clue in the dead female's belongings, Misa goes to a nearby high school for girls. Misa befriends a student named Aya and enrolls in Aya's drama club. Hikaru, the "Chief" of the drama group, assigns Misa a part in the current play, which seems to incorporate many occult elements.

The girls from the drama club use a holiday period for extra practice at an old house that once belonged to Baron Etori, the founder of the high school. During one practice session, while Misa is in another part of the building using the telephone, Hikaru and the other girls fall into a trance and begin to invoke the Seven Angels of Darkness:

·Atorakunakua, god of the spider (Atlach-Nacha);
·Huster, god of the wind (Hastur);
·Tsatugua, god of the underworld (Tsathoggua);
·Nialratohotepu, god of chaos (Nyarlathotep);
·Dagon, god of water;
·Shupunigras, god of the black goat (Shub-Niggurath); and
·Cthulu, the sleeping god (Cthulhu).

Misa returns and interrupts the ceremony before it can be completed, but evil forces, in the form of misshapen cloaked figures, have been unleashed. One by one, the other girls are killed by the creatures of darkness, until only Misa, Aya, and Hikaru remain. Misa attempts to expose the source behind the eldritch events at the house, and this proves to be the long-dead Baron Etori. Etori's spirit claims descent from the Weitly (Whately) family, notorious servants of the demon-god Yog Sototo (Yog-Sothoth).

Etori's spirit informs Misa that the deaths of the other students have been arranged as sacrifices to Yog Sototo. In return, Yog Sototo will give full human life to a Homonculus, an artificially created being. Puzzled by this, Misa banishes Etori's spirit-only to learn that both Aya and Hikaru are Homonculi, created by Etori's magic in years past.

Somehow Aya lost her memory of her unnatural creation, and was raised by foster parents, believing that she was a normal human being. Hikaru, however, is working in consonance with the Baron's plan. She kills Misa, and then begins the final arcane preparations to sacrifice Aya to Yog Sototo. Hikaru feels this will make her completely human.

But Misa's mystical powers enable her to return from death to defend Aya. In the confrontation with Hikaru, Misa blasts Hikaru with sorcerous energies-which also cast Hikaru back through time, where she appears on a Tokyo street, dying as she speaks the words "Misa Kuroi". . . .

The storyline is a bit murky-why Yog Sototo or the Angels of Darkness would care about making a Homonculus fully human is not obvious to me. But I did enjoy the movie, with its modest Cthulhu Mythos references, and its rather somber protagonist. In addition to being an enchantress, Misa is also a Buffy-style fighter; in one sequence, she hikes up her skirt, pulls a dagger out of a thigh sheath, and starts carving up a band of robed zombies.

I found it interesting that whoever did the English-language translation did not recognize the original sources for "Huster" and "Tsatugua" and the other Mythos names, and instead tried to phonetically transcribe the Japanese versions of these names back into English.

I've seen a couple of reviews of Misa that referred to elements of nudity and lesbianism, but none of that appeared in the print I watched. (Although it was clearly implied that some of the girls in the drama group were romantically involved.)

Well, for starters, most of what was on the screen was barely visible. Misa has some of the darkest film footage known to man. My best guess is that the director was looking for a "noir" look, but instead ended up with indoor scenes that seem as if they were processed in black coffee. At moments where you're supposed to be terrified, you're instead going to be saying "what's going on?" since you can't make out the black shapes moving around on the screen.

Problem two would be the unsteady camera work. While the outdoors scenes were pretty well done - they actually had a kind of dreamy quality, with lots of soft focus and slight overexposure - many times the camera movement detracted from the moment because it was so unsteady. While this may be a desired effect when monsters are giving chase, there's no real reason for it when the girls are simply standing around talking.

The third downfall: audio. The voices on the Japanese track were unintelligable at times. (But it's not a defect of the DVD. It seems to have happened during the actual filming; most likely it's related to the movement of the actresses away from the microphone.) It happens often enough in conjunction with poorly lit scenes to become truly annoying. After all, you don't buy a movie only to read the subtitles. (Which by the way, are hardtitled onto a black bar which takes up the lower quarter of the screen on the subtitled version. Yuck!)

The voices on the dubbed track fared much, much better -they were loud and clear actually - but they were a little too "hyper-americanized-anime" for my taste.

On the plus side, considering the source material, Media Blasters did the best they could with the DVD. Having both versions -English and Japanese- was great (think back to all those "newly" released Jet-Li DVDs which only had the god-awful English tracks!!!) The photo gallery was also pretty nice (though it kind of makes you wish that whoever shot the stills had done the DP work on the movie).

In the end, unless your a real big fan of not-so-scary teenage sorcery horror fests, pass this one up, or if you curiosity is eating away at you, rent it before you buy it.