I don't have a lot of experience criticizing Japanese horror movies, but Black Rat is one of the rare J-Horror films that just doesn't deliver the goods.

For one thing, it's surprisingly unoriginal -- six classmates get invited to a location, only to find themselves fighting for their lives against a mysterious killer. The location is the school where their mutual friend Asuka jumped off the roof to her death seven weeks earlier, and the time is midnight -- and they all actually show up. I don't know about you, but if I get a text message from a girl who killed herself seven weeks ago asking me to meet her at the school building at midnight, I wouldn't even consider going -- not even if the dead girl was smoking hot.

Curiosity can have the cat -- but it ain't getting me.

All Asuka wants is for her friends to join her in performing some traditional dance of the Seven Rats at the school's arts festival. Then, after they all initially agree to do it, they refuse to practice and pretty much just bail on her, even after she had spent all this time constructing a really cool rat mask to wear. I'm not really sure why all of these people -- who sort of represent the characters in the story of the Seven Rats -- are actually friends, as all of them except Asuka and one of the other girls are pretty much jerks in their own special ways -- and even the nice girl doesn't turn out to be the kind of person you really want for a best friend.

The thing with Asuka, though, is that she is always smiling -- even when her friends are totally dumping on her. From the audience's perspective, she's a very sympathetic character, which makes the fact of her suicide particularly tragic. She actually jumped off the roof of the school wearing the rat mask she had created. So that's the backstory, which is presented in a series of flashbacks as the movie progresses.

Back to the schoolroom that dark night, though, these other six kids who stupidly accepted the invitation to show up are greeted by a girl wearing Asuka's bloodstained rat's head, who uses flash cards to let the others know that she is going to kill them. Is it really Asuka's ghost underneath that creepy rat head? The film does a good job of really keeping the mystery of the killer's identity just that -- a mystery, throwing several wicked curveballs at the audience as the movie progresses.

There's not a great deal of blood and gore involved with the actual killings, but they are unique and some of them are creepy in their own special way, but it's really the question of the killer's identity that drives the story. Black Rat does deliver a deeper storyline that your traditional slasher, and the whole thing with the rat mask is pretty creepy, but it sort of feels like director Kenta Fukasaku was trying to invoke the atmosphere of an American slasher film, and I think that was a mistake.