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All across Japan, people with the surname Sato die from various
unnatural causes, from suicide to murder to accidents, without anyone
having a clue why, and without the deceased being in any way related. Yet
this is a threat to Japan, as Sato is the country's most frequent surname, and the
Satos are dying by the thousands ... Though his surname is also Sato,
highschool student Tsubasa (Takuya Ishida) has other problems, like
evading school bully Hiroshi (Shunsuke Daito) - who's incidently also
named Sato but not related to Tsubasa. Tsubasa is good in ducking Hiroshi
and his gang, but enventually, Hiroshi gathers enough men to corner
Tsubasa - but when they move in on him to beat him to a pulp ... he
disappears and turns up in a parallel world where he finds himself on the
run from the monsters, killers sponsored by the all powerful (but
masked) Imperial who have the express mission to kill all the Satos ... Eventually,
Tsubasa meets up with his sister Ai (Mitsuki Tanimura), who's pretty much
an institutionalized vegetable in Tsubasa's world but pretty active here,
and she's the only one who can explain him what's going on: Seems
everybody in Tsubasa's world has his or her counterpart in this world, and
when someone in one world dies, he or she also does so in the other -
everybody but Tsubasa, because his mother new how to travel between
worlds, and while she was living (and had concieved Tsubasa) in this world
of monsters and the Imperial, she gave birth to her son in what Tsubasa
calls the real world. After much fights and chases, Hiroshi - who's
quite a nice bloke in this world and has become Tsubasa's best friend - lets his life to help Tsubasa and Ai
escape from the monsters, but ultimately, Ai finds herself defeated by a
monster, but she isn't killed but taken
hostage by the monsters and brought to the Imperial. Tsubasa is quick to
realize that trying to free Ai on his own would be a suicide mission, so
he asks sympathetic TV reporter Kaori (Rio Matsumoto) for help, and she
hooks him up with the Imperial via a private TV-channel. In their
conversation, the Imperial confesses to Tsubasa that he really is his
father and needs Tsubasa to attain absolute power - and when he unmasks himself,
he turns out to be the (pererse) Doctor (Akira Emoto) treating Ai in
Tsubasa's world. After their conversation is over, the Imperial is quick
to send all his monsters after Tsubasa, but just when they have him
cornered, he somehow teleports back to his own world - just in time to
save his Ai from the perverted Doctor. Tsubasa and the Doctor get in a
fight and in the end both fall off a roof to their deaths - which not only
kills the Imperial in his world (remember: who dies in one world also dies
in the other) but also saves this world's Ai from one of
the Imperial deadly contraptions (though I'm not sure how). But is
Tsubasa really dead? No, he has been teleported into yet another world
to fight yet another tyrant side-by-side with his sister, Kaori, and
(rather inexplicably) Hiroshi ... A film that starts out great:
People die in bizarre accidents for no reason other than because their surname is
Sato, a guy thrown into another world and chased by monsters in
particularly ridiculous outfits, a masked tyrant, an abundance of exciting
chase and fight scenes - all stuff cult flicks are made from.
Unfortunately, the film loses its drive about halfway through, when it goes
out of its way to explain the enjoyably bizarre onscreen goings-on, throws way too much
unnecessarily convoluted politics into the mix, and tries too hard to make
a hero out of Tsubasa ... and suddenly, a potential cult movie has been
made into just another routine genre flick. That doesn't mean The
Chasing World is a bad film, the first half is still pretty exciting
and exhilerating, but as a whole the film is hardly above average and
certainly not the must-see it at first appeared to be.
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find The Chasing World at adultvideouniverse.com
