Eko Eko Azarak
Review by Jeffery J. Timbrell
Foul evil is afoot in Japan! Satanists are dropping steel girders on the heads of women! Sexual predators are running rampant at schools! Lesbian teachers are taking advantage of younger students! A dastardly villain is plotting to rule the world by summoning Lucifer and usurping his powers!
Who will save the day?!
Enter Misa Kuroi (Kimika Yoshino), mild-mannered exchange student with a dark secret…in reality she’s a demon-fighting super-witch using her powers for the forces of good! Misa has been following a blood pentagram across the city, where Satanists have been using random terrible accidents to sacrifice human lives as pin-points to set up the ultimate ritualistic summoning, a city-sized Star of David! This leads Misa to a high school stuck smack dab in the middle with plenty of dark secrets, where she develops friendships and attracts the eyes of classmates and evil-doers. Things take a turn for the worse when Misa is stuck with twelve of her fellow classmates in the school overnight for a make-up exam that quickly becomes a lesson in black magic and murder!
Cue decapitations.
Cue Satan.
Cue voodoo dolls.
Cue Armageddon.
The Eko Eko Azarak series has gained cult film status with its three sequels and campy TV spin-off, and a few critics have pointed out that Eko (which was originally a comic book in the early 90s) has some striking similarities to Joss Whedon’s acclaimed TV hit Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After watching Eko, I think there might be some validity to that claim, except Azarak doesn’t have Buffy’s characterization, acting, sense of humor, or plot.
Eko Eko Azarak would be best described as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s brain-damaged, perverted cousin, who married Uroksukidoji.
On one hand, I can understand the appeal of Eko Eko Azarak; the movie is totally bonkers. Eko shifts from sexual molestation to homeroom Degrassi Junior High Satanist discussions to voodoo choke outs to lesbian teacher/student shenanigans to hilarious 80s rocker hair like some demented kid flipping through cable channels on TV at three ‘o clock in the morning. On the other hand, if you’ve ever seen one of those naughty hentai cartoons from Japan, than the plot and execution of Eko Eko Azarak will appear pretty formulaic. Eko Eko Azarak has a few sequences where I was absolutely certain a teacher was going to transform into a giant tentacle-monster and then proceed to have demon-sex fun with the students. It never came to be, as the sex and naughty touching stayed strictly within the realms of human/human encounters, but you get the idea that if the director had a bigger budget we’d be seeing a whole lot of writhing demon penis on-screen.
The problem with Eko Eko Azarak (besides the fact that its plot is the average set-up for most Japanese animated porn) is that the film is kind of lame.
Azarak fits into a sub-genre of horror I like to call “Horror Bowling”, where ninety percent of the movie is a set up for the human pins so that the villain can knock ‘em down in various interesting ways for the rest of the running time. Horror Bowling isn’t so bad; a healthy body count and fun death sequences can make for a great horror movie (see Twitch of the Death Nerve).
Unfortunately, Eko Eko Azarak doesn’t have Mario Bava’s vision and besides a very creative head-explosion, its death sequences are resoundingly dull and predictable. For example, when you got the bad guy slaughtering half of the victims, all at once, off-screen, you can’t help but feel cheated. I know that there is the old saying that the less you see, the scarier the movie is, but this isn’t Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, this is a cult splatter exploitation flick whose selling point is “13 students locked in a school with magical, murderous Satan worshiper”. The audience isn’t exactly expecting The Innocents, they’re coming for squibs, special effects and hilarious moments of bombastic swearing. What they’re getting is a somewhat bloody episode of Sailor Moon.
I’ve heard a lot about Eko Eko Azarak over the years and I gotta be frank, I don’t understand its cult film status. Eko Eko Azarak has every convention that should make it a B-movie, bong-smoking, cheesy horror exploitation classic. It has sex, it has violence, it has Satan, it has girl-on-girl action, and somehow it manages to completely fail on almost every single count. My years of two dollar bargain bin movie marathons have taught me that “The Three Bs: Boobs, Blood and Blasphemy,” almost always equal a solid B horror movie. Eko Eko Azarak is the exception to the rule; the death sequences are a let down, the gore is pretty boring, the sex scenes are the strongest part of the movie but are never outright awesome, and the random wackiness is fun, but it’s nothing you can’t catch in better and more outright offensive flicks like Legend of the Overfiend.
There are so many movies with a similar plot, a similar hook and with better execution that to recommend Eko Eko Azarak for anybody other than a B-movie completist, would be a waste of time. I could list off dozens of crazy, demonic high school orgy splatterfests from Japan that deliver everything Eko Eko Azarak promises but doesn’t pull off.
Eko Eko Azarak is like that one attractive person who everybody says is great in bed, that turns out to be a star fish lay. You start out having fun but when it’s done you wish you’d just spent the evening playing video games.
Trust me, you can do better.
Popularity: 9% [?]
[ ‹‹ Twitch of the Death Nerve Wretched ›› ]
