VISUALS: I really can't complain about the art. I watched it in HD 720 and it looked really great. A lot of detail went into the settings; the dolls in the doll museum looked lovely, their hair very silky and fine, their skin smooth and white. Reds looked velvety and lush. A lot of nice outside scenes as well; crisp colours and believable textures. The animation was smooth and modern techniques were used, the CG wasn't obvious and nicely blended with the rest of the artwork.
AUDIO: I love ALI Project and all that they do but using them for the opening song wasn't the right choice for such a supposedly horror series. Some of the notes and tones do sound a bit halloween-ish but it still didn't mesh well for a horror/slasher series. Strangely enough I did think the ED Theme fit the series even though that was more of a melancholy song that scary. I watched the series in Japanese dub....no complaints, and none of the sound effects were scary.
STORY: The story was deffo a mystery more than anything else but instead of it being a “who done it?” it's more of a “who is it?” There is absolutely no credibility to this series at all, and that's because the story was a cliched trainwreck. Sure it starts out nice and slow—new kid in town, goes now new school. It later builds a nice foundation of mystery and suspense—weird behaviour from classmates, intriguing urban legends. Then you GASP: Shocking Death, first student dies in freak accident! Bloody! Horrific! And it's all shit from there! The behaviour and logic is unreasonable, if the urban legend has been going on for as long as they said it was going on...then what sane parent would send their kid to that school? Because not only do you run the risk of that poor kid in that class dying in some horrifyingly funny death, but you as a parent could die or your other children as their siblings could die, etc. I also found it ridiculous the reach of this so-called curse and how it attached itself to a specific classroom....yet it spans the whole town? why not demolish the classroom? Or keep assigning students to that classroom? Or better yet why keep that fucking old ass desk? And why is the faculty participating in this farce? Why is there not a Parent/Teacher conference about this? WTF is a countermeasures task force??? These people all seem to recover way to quickly from all these freaky deaths and that final scene with the hotel? With all that shit going down in that hotel, you have time to leisurely stroll about and politely knock on doors? WHO DA FUCK DOES THAT? And why doesn't such a big ass building have fire alarms or sprinklers? The deaths were hilarious, they were better than the deaths from the Final Destination series.
CHARACTERS: Nicely drawn characters, that's it. They were completely undeveloped, one-dimensional and stereotypical: Big-breasts, brainy chick, bitchy chick [tsundere], robotic monotone girl, air-head guy, meek guy, loud affable jock-type, etc.., then they each die a gruesome death.
VERDICT: Watch the series, it's great for a laugh, if for nothing else.
