Summary (No Spoilers):
Kidan Piece of Darkness is an anthology horror movie containing ten short stories, each one with a different director (all averaging about 10 minutes runtime).
In-Depth Review (Spoilers Ahead!):
Overtaking
The start of this horror movie is pretty typical setup, a group of friends driving in a car and trying to spook each other with ghost stories and the like while driving around and passing through a tunnel (which made for pretty cool lighting and mood).
And then it gets really silly with the girl with long dark hair walking along the road barefoot, like... why are they so scared of her exactly?
So they drive by her at a literal crawl for some reason, and then the funny stuff happens because this spooky girl starts hauling ass after them, literally levitating in the air and moving at the speed of the car. And they just freak the hell out over it.
Kinda silly and fun start, even if it wasn't anything that impressive, so I give this one a 3/5.
Shadow Man
The movie starts out a little boring, just a housewife looking after her sleeping kids, and then it starts to get creepy when she begins hearing this loud banging sound further away in the house.
Obviously the housewife goes to investigate, but that's when it gets creepy because like... what the hell is that thing at the window? No, seriously, it's like this big dark shadow, and when it oozes its way inside, it kind of has some features, like hair and a face maybe, but it's all obscured by how like... lacking in features this shadow person is. Creepy! And then the shadow person starts trying to shove its fingers up her nose or some weird shit and is only stopped by the phone ringing, which creeps shadow men out apparently.
Thankfully she wakes up from that bad dream to her phone ringing and gets a call from her daughter, who wants to come over... Except then the poor woman's nose starts bleeding so... wait, was it a dream?
But the daughter comes over to share some stories about her kid, so yeah whatever let's ignore that. And then they talk a bit about the nightmare, just saying it could be a stress thing or whatever. And then those creepy as fuck loud banging sounds start up again, like someone's trying to break in through the window, and they both just... sit there in fear instead of doing anything about it, like calling the cops about a home invasion or anything sensible, but like wow the mystery of it all because they never knew who it was! Wow!
For the creepy imagery of the shadow man and the sounds, I'll give it a 3/5.
Tailed
This story starts on a rainy day with a high school girl and her friend chatting before they went separate ways, at which point the girl passed a park, only to notice a man with some really odd posing about him.
The man slowly turns, like so very slowly like it's the dramatic chipmunk video, and stares at her with this creepy look on his face, like his eyes look super blank and he's just so empty. It's like he's a TV with no signal, just that little DVD symbol ping ponging around.
The girl runs off quick because she gets scared and tells a nice old man there was a creepy man in a park just staring at her, like that makes him an axe murderer just because he has a problem with soul-sucking staring, though... well, maybe she was right to tell someone, considering that freaky face.
The old man runs off into the park to yell at him, pushing through all the foliage in the way, which obscures the view long enough for it to finally show some feet dangling, so if you hadn't guessed it, yeah, the creepy man hung himself from the tree with a rope, and on he goes, dangling.
The old man runs off to tell the high school girl to get on home while he calls the cops, you know, before it traumatizes her, but it feels a little too little too late at this point because she definitely saw him hanging all loosey-goosey up there.
The high school girl runs home while some really loud, almost painful music plays over it, and this really does start to feel like there's a pacing issue, not to mention how very nothing a lot of it feels like for the subject matter, and then she finally gets home, only to find out... well, guess who's here!
Yeah, that creepy dead guy and his mile long stare followed her to her front door to... you guessed it... stare! It's very yuck and maybe a little creepy in the sense of the jumpscare factor, but mostly it's getting old, so let's end this now...
It ends with this little voice over explaining how sometimes she sees men who look like him and gets relieved when they pass her by, but some of them don't seem to move, so that creepy guy has decided to stalk her for the rest of her life for no clear reason after their stare-off, like uhh...
It reminds me a bit of that video game The Closing Shift, like the way this is laid out with its weird and eerie but strange pacing, especially with a creepy, staring man's face looking at some poor girl.
This story did try to do something for sure, and it did creep me out just a little bit imagining it, but it leaves a lot of questions and not too many answers, so this is a 2/5.
Looking Together
The story starts out following a school teacher, who runs into a fellow teacher in some state of distress since her hair's a mess and she's got that crying face on. She tries to talk to him and he straight up ignores her, like he can't even admit she exists, which is such a dick move in every sense.
A bit later, there's a scream from a student who saw something super distressing, so it's pretty obvious where this story's going... in a similar direction to the last one.
Yeah, the teacher in distress from earlier is hanging from a jump rope, which is all tangled around her neck, and the teachers rush in to try to cut her down with scissors, slowly lowering her already pale and dead-looking corpse onto the ground, trying to resuscitate her out of shock or something, but it doesn't work because she's long dead. They try to close her eyes, but they slide open anyway.
The teachers all freak out a bit, but quickly try to explain it away as rigor mortis as the other teachers leave the asshole teacher with the corpse of the teacher he ignored so coldly just a bit before. He kneels down to close her eyes again and leave the room, which feels like a weird choice since a student just tried to sneak in a few minutes before that during the heat of the moment, and then he looks in through the door and sees her head facing his direction, eyes wide open.
Apparently that's simply too much for the jerk teacher because he heads off into another room to calm down, opening a window and looking out to watch some students playing ball. But oddly enough, he sees the teacher corpse down there, just standing around under the bright sun, which is a pretty funny image. He freaks, obviously, but then she disappears, so yeah, whatever. Guilty conscience maybe.
And then suddenly there's the sliding of the adjacent room's door opening, the one with the corpse, and he turns around to see nothing at first... but slowly comes walking the corpse teacher, one of her shoes missing and everything, as she approaches him with the speed of a determined slug.
The jerk teacher gets freaked out by this and turns away, trying to ignore her as she creeps further onward, but his method of pretending the ghostly corpse of the woman he coldly spurned a bit ago does zilch, because she rests her hand gently on his shoulder, at which point he loses his temper and reveals what is behind all this.
Yeah, no shock there that the two of them had some kind of affair, but it was a one night stand to him, so he was just being a dick to this poor woman about it. Like that's real stellar maturity in communication there.
The woman stands there with her hand on his shoulder for a long time until he snaps and yells at her, walking away to go help with the corpse he just left in a room for any student to peek in at since he's an awful teacher, but he has to keep brushing her hand off, which is honestly super funny. Like he deserved this.
It's hard to tell if this was genuinely supernatural or just his guilt leading to some kind of mental breakdown, which is what made it feel like a 5/5 for me.
The Woman In Red
The story begins with some girls playing sports, only for them to stop and look up at a strange woman's silhouette up above. She's obscured by the shadows, but the unsettling part is this creaking sound that she emits with every move, like her bones are creaking at all times. It feels like that must be seriously painful.
The girls try to walk away from it and hang out with some other students, but the woman starts coming down the stairs, and she's like covered in red with hair in her face, like maybe it's blood all over her clothes. She seems in need of serious medical attention, but the students all freak their shit.
And then it turns into a different conversation told outside between two other high school girls, making it clear they're telling some sort of ghost story about the Red Woman, which sounds pretty familiar as one of those urban legends to give me some paranoid creepin' spookin' feels.
The girls head off to one of their friend's houses, and there are like three other girls there with streamers to surprise one of the girls because it's her birthday, yay! They run around throwing streamers at each other, and then when the night comes, there's that typical teenage girl night time stuff: ukelele time. Like okay, yeah sure, I always did that with the girls at the slumber party.
The little music corner is quickly interrupted, though, when the girl who first told the story tells her friend to regale it to the rest of their little group, at which point they all settle down to have the same story rehashed, so yeah, creaky bones and red and women, got it. They all get a little creeped out, but not for long because then they throw a little dance party right after. Typical.
There's some creepy bits here where the radio gets all distorted and then the woman screams at them to "Shut up!" because she really doesn't want the attention and they're being super rude, so they kinda deserved to hear it. Don't piss her off.
The girls get a bit scared by this, especially when they start hearing weird noises downstairs, like someone walking around, so four of them decide to leave one of the poor girls behind upstairs to investigate, thinking maybe it's the one girl's mom or whatever.
That leaves the girl left alone upstairs vulnerable to shenanigans, and shenanigans she shall receive, as a certain woman in red shows up banging on the window, which did scare the fuck out of me and apparently the girl too, because she freaks out, and then all the girls show up and they freak out, and it's a mess that ruins all the party vibes, so they decide to just... head home, abandoning that poor girl to her now haunted home or whatever. That's just what happens at a party with teenage girls.
On the way home, the two girls at the start of the story are talking, and it's finally explained by the birthday girl that the story has to be told to others for protection, as otherwise the woman will kill anyone who heard the story if they don't pass it on, which starts a very fast and gruesome montage of all three of their friends being brutally murdered by a woman who crawls like a goddamn spider and creaks all over the place, like it was kind of frightening how fast the bitch was, and then...
Birthday girl gets her just desserts as she's grabbed by the woman next since she heard the story as well, and she gets dragged off behind a car to get munched on as that leaves only one girl left.
And with that happy birthday massacre out of the way, this is an obvious 5/5 because I love gruesome urban legends and evil teenage girls, like what's not to love?
Empty Channel
This story begins with a boy in his room late at night listening to the radio, where a woman's voice can be heard talking through it like a diary. She's really pissed off at a fake friend of hers. And it feels really weird he's even listening because this stuff is clearly personal, and this woman is clearly not that mentally stable from the get-go.
Then the boy goes to school and tells his friend just that, how this is disrespectful and not right to be listening in on, so he gets a little bit of a point for that, but his friend doesn't give a shit and seems to find it funny, so a whole lot of nothing gets resolved. Man, teenage boys can be jerks.
The radio talks seem to get less mentally stable as they continue on, as the jerk friend gets even more invested while making freaky excitable expressions like he's a streamer to an audience of his bedroom stuffed animals, and the worst of it is when the woman starts talking about how she had a man's baby and delivered it to him... in a box. Uh... girl... that's not...
At school the boy is really upset his friend won't listen, even though they're both in this together at this point so it feels a little less impactful than it would be if he did something else with his night time hours, like study for his classes or read a book or something.
And then he sees his friend become distorted in a strange way, like there are eyes on him that should not be there and there's this overall strangeness to his image, but it's gone shortly after, which is pretty freaky, especially because he goes in a field to talk with another friend and that friend says he hears a baby crying sound around the guy, which feels really strange since somebody was talking about delivering a baby in a box recently.
They are still listening to the woman on the radio that night, so they both get their just desserts according to scale of insult, as the friend gets scared shitless as the woman lets him know she wants him to keep listening, which spooks him enough he literally slides on the ground like a scared worm, and the other friend... gets murdered while that woman laughs her creepy laugh. Sort of? Word is he committed suicide, but context clues imply he definitely got hung by the radio woman.
This was a fun use of a simple medium of the radio, and it had a lot of creepy static noises and overall ambiance that reminded me a little bit of Persona 4, so I liked it enough to give it a 5/5.
Whose Kid?
There's two teachers at school together late at night, as the last ones in the building. The older teacher explains to the younger teacher how the school has had a lot of strange things happening, but doesn't really give a lot of details on what. There's some creepy noises in the building, and that spurs the older teacher to rush downstairs and out the door even when the younger teacher cries for him to wait up. It is kind of funny as the younger teacher watches the older teacher get in his car and bounce, leaving him all by his lonesome.
The younger teacher gets his things ready while quietly cursing the older teacher for leaving him alone when he looks up and sees a girl with some very interesting makeup choices (a very powder-y pale face and red lips, which looked pretty terrible) peeking out at him. He questions her on what the hell she's doing here and she ignores him to run off giggling, so he chases after her only for her to start doing a little dance and pirouettes for him, which he only questions more. Their chase continues, and it's pretty funny honestly because he's so baffled by the whole thing.
The older teacher is in his car when he realizes he forgot some papers he had to send, so he calls the office, but the younger teacher isn't the one to pick up as he's answered by the young girl. And then she appears from the shadows in front of his car, where she becomes this ooze-y black substance covering his windshield and eventually covering him. He freaks out the whole time but does literally nothing to stop this at any point, like... he doesn't even try to get out of the car or anything.
The window gets covered in many faces, and they are a little weird and creepy-looking, though they also kind of looked like the face in the mirror in Shrek. It does make me wonder if this is the ghost of a young girl or some sort of spirit wearing the face of a young girl.
The younger teacher is still chasing that girl, and he finally finds her on some stairs, but as she steps out of the shadows, her face is a little scarred up on half of it, and for some reason this freaks him out immensely, so he runs right out of the school and into the older teacher, where they cower together while there's a massive shadow of a girl over them. And that's a wrap!
This story was pretty funny and silly, and I did like how this ghost girl felt more mischievous than outright dangerous, so it felt like a solid 4/5 to me.
Let's Carry On
This story begins with a bunch of elementary school kids who decide to start playing a game at the graveyard, which seems to consist of a lot of shouting of things like "Retribution! Ancestors help me!" which feels a bit serious to me, but maybe that's the translation making it sound more intense than it is.
This has a pretty simple formula throughout the story, which more or less involves kids falling and getting hurt each time they lose the game, which the kids comment on as their retribution, but what really made this story funny to me was how they reacted. They literally accepted this and kept playing, so a kid dropped every round, said they had to go home no matter what the head wound was (some of them even doing so with a smile!), and they'd just keep going.
This kept on until there was only one kid left, at which point there was something pretty creepy with a voice telling him to keep going, and then it got worse because there's just this bloody kid covered head to toe in blood and gore running at him and telling him to keep playing. Like that's so creepy!
This clearly psychologically impacted the poor kid, because apparently after a point he just stopped talking. And that's the end of the story.
This story was pretty simple, but it was also very funny and had a super creepy ending, so I give it 5/5.
Thief
This story centers around a strange woman with many kids in a small village, which seems to make her the subject of rumors and mockery from the other village women, who are super fixated on her weight gain because they insist she's not "just fat," as they believe she's pregnant.
The rumors only get worse when the woman loses a lot of weight very quickly, at which point the rumors shift directions to discuss how she probably birthed a hidden child and how sad it must be for her. These gossiping women are just awful, like in what world is this any of their business? Go do a sudoku puzzle instead.
The teenage daughter stuck overhearing all this clearly thinks the same, but then she has a strange encounter with a little boy who was playing with her brother. He told a little tale about his mother throwing a baby down a storm drain, but the subtitles made this super hard to comprehend, and about how the child is alive but dead apparently. A lot of it is lost on me.
The teenage daughter decides to ask the woman about it as the kids run around playing in creepy masks, including one kid who has a bunny mask that looks like it was ripped straight out of Silent Hill in creepiness factor, and the woman is weirdly evasive about the topic, but it feels like this was definitely a strange abortion situation.
The story ends with some baby crying sounds and the teenage girl being scared of the storm drain.
All this story has done is leave me with more questions than answers. Why did the woman choose to give birth to the baby, have a living and crying baby in her arms, and then dump the baby down the storm drain? And how is the baby alive but dead? Like is this Schrödinger's baby?
Since the story had a lot of issues with translation, and it felt clunky and awkward, I'd give it a 1/5.
Sealed
This story begins with a young woman on the phone with her ex and getting very upset he keeps dragging his feet on picking up the box of his things.
Her closet keeps opening by itself, and it creeps her out, so she decides to deal with it by using a ribbon from her box of chocolates to tie it shut.
The woman talks on the phone with her ex-boyfriend, and it seems to be pretty heated as she talks about how he was cheating on her. And behind her is the perfectly framed closet, where the ribbon slowly starts pulling in one direction, like something inside is opening it.
The woman notices after her phone call with her ex ends, so she pulls open the closet wide to look inside, and then a long-haired ghostly woman crawls out of the suitcase, so the woman slams the door shut on her in a panic.
The woman calls up her ex again and demands he come to pick up his dirty suitcase.
The ex arrives to pick it up later and mentions how he never opened the suitcase after buying it. Like is there a dead body in there? He struggles to get it open, so the woman offers him some tools from his box of things, and then when the ex finally gets it open, a hand reaches out from within and drags him inside of it, like all of him except for his hand. He begs for help from the darkness within the suitcase.
The woman reacts in such a funny way by grabbing his hand and pulling off every individual finger until he gets sucked inside the suitcase, at which point it snaps shut again. She seals it up with as much tape as she possibly can and wheels it out of her apartment with all of his old junk. And then she leaves it at the corner to be picked up for trash with this really satisfied look on her face. "Go to hell," she tells it.
Guess that's one way to deal with a shitty ex-boyfriend.
This story has such a fun way of focusing on a mundane evil, and the creepy spirit in the suitcase was very funny to me, along with the woman's attitude about it at the end, so I give it a 5/5.
Movie Rating: 3/5
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