Main cast: Horie Shun (Goro), Mizuno Risa (Koyama), Mineuchi Tomomi (Mari), Matsumoto Sara (Tomoki), Okiayu Ryotaro (Sonohara), Chikamatsu Takatsugu (The Ice Cream Man)
Director: Tagashira Shinobu
Oh, it’s two-in-one time. I guess they really want this season to go past quickly, heh.
The Story of the Mysterious Tunnel is about a young boy, Goro, who was accompanying his mother as they walked along a railway track leading to a tunnel years ago. The boy was distracted, allowing the mother to walk into the tunnel alone… and she was never seen again.
Cut to a few years later, when the tunnel returns to haunt him. His sister Mari begins inexplicably ending up in the tunnel, needing to be rescued all the time, and no one thinks of keeping a closer eye on her or even sending her off to stay with another relative for the time being. Needless to say, poor Goro has to keep making trips to the tunnel, with tragic results for everyone.
This one, on paper, far more effective than in visual medium. On paper, it can be a claustrophobic, scary story about terrifying things that lurk in the dark. This episode, however, boasts some pretty subpar animation and everyone’s face suggests that they either hadn’t slept in a week or they have trisomy 21. The scary things look hokey and dumb, and all in all, the whole thing could have been avoided if they had just stuffed that annoying, high-pitched little girl onto a bus ASAP.
Next up is Ice Cream Truck. Ice cream men and their trucks are staple horror tropes, often used as a stand in for PDF files and Reddit administrators everywhere, and this one is no different.
Every Saturday, a mysterious ice cream truck frequents the neighborhood that single father Sonohora and his son Tomoki have just move into, and the ice cream man hands out free ice cream to all the kids before letting them enter the truck for a ride around town. There’s nothing suspicious about that at all!
Sanohora agrees to let his son get a free ice cream and, later, a ride in the ice cream truck. It doesn’t seem so bad, as soon his son has many new friends and the boy seems happy. Just what do the kids do in that ice cream truck, though?
Similar to the earlier story, this one is all about the bad things that can happen to your kids if you don’t pay attention to where they are running off to or what they are doing with strangers. I wonder if the grouping of the two stories together is intentional due to the shared theme between them.
This one, though, is far more memorable segment in spite of it being the much shorter one, because it has a pretty memorable denouement. It’s not something new or exciting, as this particular denouement had been used a few times in ice cream- or dairy-related horror stuff since the publication of the source material, but the segment is better paced and doesn’t outlive its welcome.
Nonetheless, both segments never really create any visceral impact on me. I don’t mind watching this episode, but the whole thing is a pleasant kind of meh. I’m not sure if this were due to the painfully average animation, but at the rate things are going, I can’t help feeling that one is better off reading the source materials.
