Kagewani 03: Underwater Horror

EPISODE 3: Return

A young couple goes snorkeling in the sea. While underwater, they spot a fissure on the seabed. The girl signals to the guy to explore it but the guy wants to go back up. While the two are distracted, something grabs the girl from inside the fissure and takes her. News of the missing girl spreads just as a typhoon is poised to hit the island community. Banba-sensei is called to the place by a colleague who shows him a picture of a dead tentacled sea monster. Meanwhile, another tentacled sea monster shows up on the beach, leading the young man to go after it with a trident. He "kills" the creature and later sets it on fire. Banba-sensei goes to talk to him, telling him that the creature he just killed could be the very girl he was looking for. He then shows the young man an x-ray of the sea creature, where it is revealed that the creature has fused itself with a human body. The young man refuses to believe him. That night, the authorities impose a curfew to prepare for the incoming typhoon. A man notices that the burned corpse of the sea creature had disappeared. In the house of the young man, he hears a strange noise coming from outside. But when he opens the door to investigate, he finds it is only one of his friends. The girl tries to sympathize with him but while they talk, the young man notices the sea creature appear behind her. He leaps towards it with a knife and stabs at it, all the while denying that the sea creature could be his missing girlfriend. He is taken aback when he sees a vision of his girlfriend inside the sea creature. While he is distracted, the sea creature takes him and together the two of them fall into the sea. The next day, two dead sea creatures are washed ashore.

COMMENTS:

I've long stopped trying to figure out the overarching plot of this show. Maybe there is no plot and it's just one monster story week after week. I'm not complaining though. Each episode is too short to merit nit-picking. The episode entertains enough as it unfolds. While I am not wowed by the story each week, I am nevertheless fine with watching and blogging about it. Anyway, it's just seven minutes.

This week, they've chosen to entertain us with a tentacle monster. But instead of giving us the titillating story of the fisherman's wife, they decided to make a straightforward horror story of a girl inside a monster. We're supposed to feel for the young man, who has to find out the hard way that the monster he hates so much is the very same girl that meant the world to him. And the way the story ended lends it a sort of poetic justice. But it's all ham-fisted and shallow and I felt that the story could be told better.