Irish Death Note live action film poster by AMG Entertainment (Jan 5th 2016)
Well, this is exciting, isn't it? We all have our eyes on the Japanese Warner Bros Death Note 2016 live action movie, plus the US remake Death Note film, when suddenly a wild Death Note live action film appears from Ireland!
There has been no heads up about this at all, at least insofar as we've seen at Death Note News - and we like to think we have our finger on the pulse of all things in the franchise. Imagine our surprise then to return from seasonal holidays with the family to find a Death Note movie apparently plucked from thin air and doing the rounds of the Japanese promotional circuit.
This Death Note movie will be released in Japan by AMG Entertainment on January 5th 2016. It involves a black notebook within which the names of criminals are listed. They soon meet a sticky end in mysterious circumstances - some of which occur whilst the victims are incarcerated in prison cells.
However, that's where the similarity ends.
The story is set in Ireland (or Scotland - reviews diverge on the point) and the protagonist is a man named Six (Liam Cunningham). He appears as the Mysterious Stranger in a remote village, where rookie cop Rachel (Pollyanna McIntosh) is just starting her first night. Not a great start to her policing career. Six takes over the minds of anyone with a dodgy past and forces them to basically do gory things to themselves and/or co-operate in their own demise.
Neither Light Yagami nor the rest of the usual Death Note cast are in this story. In fact, it appears to have no official sanction or any other relation to the main Death Note franchise. At best it's a derivative work or some kind of extended fan work.
Or should that be merely a bad translation? It seems that this Brian O'Malley directed Death Note movie was originally called Let Us Prey, and that's how it's still listed on IMDb. Here is its rather gory trailer:
There has been no heads up about this at all, at least insofar as we've seen at Death Note News - and we like to think we have our finger on the pulse of all things in the franchise. Imagine our surprise then to return from seasonal holidays with the family to find a Death Note movie apparently plucked from thin air and doing the rounds of the Japanese promotional circuit.
This Death Note movie will be released in Japan by AMG Entertainment on January 5th 2016. It involves a black notebook within which the names of criminals are listed. They soon meet a sticky end in mysterious circumstances - some of which occur whilst the victims are incarcerated in prison cells.
However, that's where the similarity ends.
The story is set in Ireland (or Scotland - reviews diverge on the point) and the protagonist is a man named Six (Liam Cunningham). He appears as the Mysterious Stranger in a remote village, where rookie cop Rachel (Pollyanna McIntosh) is just starting her first night. Not a great start to her policing career. Six takes over the minds of anyone with a dodgy past and forces them to basically do gory things to themselves and/or co-operate in their own demise.
Neither Light Yagami nor the rest of the usual Death Note cast are in this story. In fact, it appears to have no official sanction or any other relation to the main Death Note franchise. At best it's a derivative work or some kind of extended fan work.
Or should that be merely a bad translation? It seems that this Brian O'Malley directed Death Note movie was originally called Let Us Prey, and that's how it's still listed on IMDb. Here is its rather gory trailer:
In short, though heavily marketed in Japan as a live action movie called Death Note, it's nothing to do with the manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. It's fundamentally the same horror/slash film marketed in Europe and the US, in 2014, as Let Us Prey. However, with its Biblical references and Angel of Death/Justice themes, it might appeal to fans of Death Note anyway.
