School-Live!

Please note: This review comes from an avid horror fan; this film is my first interaction with the School Lives! franchise and my opinion is based off seeing this as it's packaged - a zombie survival action-horror and without any prior knowledge. This review contains spoilers.

I knew upon starting this zombie survival horror that it was going to be a little worse for wear around the edges. The cast are a Japanese idol girl group - already I know that this is going to be cliched and a little cringe-worthy. That's nothing on the girls - it's just how they always end up type-cast a majority of the time. Something to take into consideration whenever you watch idol rookie-actor lead films.

I honestly thought this was a horror-comedy, maybe something satirical that was taking the mick of a lot of tropes within horror movies. The surprise when I checked the page to find that this was being pushed forward as a fully serious film was painful.

Every time a zombie shows up, the girls fluster, fall over, freak out, etc and don't seem to have any ability to defend themselves. They way they've survived as long as they have is an utter mystery to me. Not surprising, again, with cute and innocent Japanese idol leads, but disappointing none the less - they could have still done this with grace and professionalism that showed the actresses as cute and sweet, but with some semblance of realism. Some of the girls deal with mental issues that would be common in an apocalypse - PTSD, being unable to accept reality etc, and this is a really interesting part of the film. Of course, this part of the film they barely developed and had pop up a few times and that was it.

With another cliched goodbye scene nearer the end, this film gets a tick for every possible trope they could have used, and ruined themselves with. Cliches are relatively normal in Japanese horror, don't get me wrong - but this is just taking the mick.

I feel like this is meant to be a feel good horror movie,...