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'Shrill Cries of Summer' is the live action movie of the anime 'Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.' I've been looking for this movie for a long time now, and last night, my friend told me he apparently found the download link for it about a month back (still surprised I wasn't able to find it, probably because I didn't realize they had used a different name for the movie), and he sent it to me. I downloaded it immediately, and watched it today.
The basic concept of the anime and movie comes down to this:
A teenage boy moves to a small town called Hinamizawa with his family. He makes friends with 4 girls at his school. They show him around the town, play games together, etc. He has a lot of fun in this town for a while. He then meets a photographer who tells him about a mutilation murder that took place in this town. When the boy asked his friends about this incident, they denied it happening or avoided the question.
On the night of the Watanagashi Festival (Cotton drifting Festival), he is told by the photographer and another women about the dark history of this festival. Every year, on the night of the festival, someone is always found dead and another person goes missing. People say it is due to the curse of their God they call Oyashiro-sama to people who have angered him.
As time goes on, he learns more about the curse and realizes that his friends may be hiding things from him.
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Now, I loved the anime, so I was very eager to watch the live action movie to it, and from the trailers, I was expecting a lot from the movie, especially since it is based on the first arc (my favorite one).
And to tell you the truth, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. I thought they did a great job keeping together some of the great scenes from the first arc. The scenery and town looked great.
It did have its flaws to it, though. Some of the acting could have been better, but it didn't destroy the movie, so that was okay. They changed a few things in it that I would have preferred they didn't, but they added in pretty much all of the good scenes, so that was good. They over did it at times with the fog machine, though, maybe they did that on purpose, I don't know. And, the last one I can think of was that, in the movie, the actresses are Rika and Satoko look older than what their age in the anime was supposed to be, but they didn't have large rolls in here, anyway.
Movie didn't have any scary scenes, of course, but it did have some good 'weird/creepy' moments to it.
There will be a sequel to this movie released in theaters in Japan in May, so hopefully, I'll be able to get my hands on that one too eventually.
Overall, I was pretty satisfied with this movie. Definitely a good watch for fans of the series. I think I'd give it an 8/10.
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