ANI-MOVIES, *Feast Of Amrita

Feast Of Amrita is a scarcity among other horror anime movies. For one, the entire thing was done by a single animator, Saku Sakamoto who had previously worked on Ghost In The Shell 2, and it was also a prequel to a full-length production he made a few years earlier titled Aragne: Sign of Vermilion which itself was a surrealistic horror. This slightly shorter production took him about 3 years to complete after the original and later combined both into a single compilation named Nightmare Bugs. Feast Of Amrita like its predecessor is a genuine J-horror movie which is something most anime horror tends to skip out on. There is a very real dread of the unknown and things crawling around in the dark here, plus coupling that with a cross between Hellraiser and Groundhog's Day makes for an intense ride for being an adequate 48-minutes long.

Near the end of their senior year, a trio of high school girls: Takumi, Yu, and Aki decide to spend one of their last days together riding a train all the way to the final stop. Once there, they notice someone falling from the top of an abandoned apartment complex. Takami runs in and her friends enter the inner ring of the building where Yu is killed by a man-sized insect monster. Aki eventually finds Takumi who was also being chased by big bugs, but then Takami is captured by a skeletal humanoid which she quickly dispatches with some shears, although she finds Aki has been absorbed into the body of a giant centipede. Takumi then gets flashbacks of things that had happened and glimpses of what might happen, which is followed by dozens of dead versions of herself falling out of the sky. She realizes that she is stuck in some sort of time loop where each attempt she tries to escape results her dying hundreds of times with each try getting that much closer to escaping. Takumi believes though she would rather stay with her friends in this insect hell not knowing that their places have now been filled by three former denizens who are now free in the human world.

Feast Of Amrita goes between gore flick to sci-fi thriller during its short run time and delivers both splendidly. Saku Sakamoto blends the 2D animation with the limited frame rate used in the CGI making for an intensely creepy feature reminding some watchers of old Playstation survival games. This is a perfect movie for a Halloween party, not too long or short that delivers shocking twists and gut-wrenching terror in one insidious scare package.