As I sat down to watch the 2014 Japanese horror movie titled "Haunted School: The Curse of the Word Spirit" (aka "Gakkou no kaidan: Noroi no kotodama"), I must admit that I was expecting a bit more of a horror movie than what this turned out to be.
Now, school is boring, granted, but did writer and director Masayuki Ochiai really have to transfer the boredom of school and attending classes to the movie? This movie was so unfathomably slow paced that it was hard to stay awake during the ordeal that passed as a horror movie. And little did it help that the storyline was just utter garbage. It is without a doubt one of the most unappealing and boring of Japanese horror stories I have had the misfortune of sitting through.
In fact, this movie was so boring that I just gave up on it with about 30 minutes left of the movie. But since absolutely nothing interesting or scary had happened up to that point, I just had my share of wasting my time, and called it quits on "Haunted School: The Curse of the Word Spirit".
And I can honestly say that I have zero intention of returning to watch the rest of the movie, because I didn't care one bit about the storyline, much less have an interest in the rigid and wooden characters that milled about with no purpose in the movie.
If you enjoy Japanese horror movies, you should do yourself a favor and wide "Haunted School: The Curse of the Word Spirit" a wide berth. This is seriously a waste of time to sit down to watch. And for a horror movie, then "Haunted School: The Curse of the Word Spirit" was just awfully devoid of anything even remotely scary, disturbing or creepy.
My rating of "Haunted School: The Curse of the Word Spirit" lands on a generous three out of ten stars, solely based on the production value of the movie, and the fact that the actors and actresses put on adequate enough performances, given the fact that they had literally nothing to work with in terms of script and characters.