Death Cash (2016)

First, if you're a fans of AKB48, this drama isn't worth of your time. But you can consider to watch this drama even if you're not a fans of AKB48.

The main reason why I can't give this drama a higher rating is the story. The story was plain, and easy to guess. I don't mean to spoil things, but this is a drama where everyone died just because they use the cursed money. It's kind of Final Destination, in Japanese version. But don't worry, despite the drama cover, there aren't any ghosts in this drama LOL.

What I like : The cast, they're good. Their acting was good too.

What I dislike : The story, it was plain.

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The only reason I picked this up was because of the cool poster, and the only reason I kept watching was to know how bad it could get. Fortunately it never gets truly awful, but it doesn’t do anything quite right either.

The first part of this fairly short drama has a very predictable plot with many common horror elements: there’s a young group of friends, there’s a curse, there’s some gorey deaths (think Final Destination)…but it did such a terrible job at building up suspense you could actually see every “twist” coming from a mile away and worst, some of the deaths were just laughably bad, like standing in the middle of the street for no reason and getting hit by a car or my personal favorite death by noodles (god I wish I was kidding).

For the second half of the show, they were running low on people to kill off so the story change gears and suddenly the ml is framed for murder and has to run away from the police, leaving the fl to deal with the curse on her own.

That aside, my two biggest problems were related to the supernatural elements of the drama: the fl’s visions and the curse itself.

The female lead has the ability to see a tragic event that is about to happen, and you think “cool this is going to be handy once the curse begins to unfold”, except her visions never really become an integral part of the story. Maybe that’s why the show never even bothers to explain the nature of her “gift” or how exactly it works. At first her visions seem to work when she’s directly in front of the person who’s going to die, so she has a few seconds/minutes to save the person, but she also has premonitions at random moments and even watching a video of someone can trigger her visions. And listen, I don’t need every little thing spelled out to me in a fantasy/supernatural setting, but there needs to be at least some consistency on how things work, otherwise it’s just bad worldbuilding. But apparently none of this really matters because by episode four or so it becomes so irrelevant you even forget that she had a special ability to begin with.

Regarding the curse, it’s established early on that the “death cash” is somehow summoned by people who yearn money so desperately that they suddenly receive the cursed money, and once they spend it a horrible death awaits them.

The targets of this curse are the fl and her group of friends plus one of their college professors; one by one they start dying in very gruesome ways. The common link between these characters is that they were all desperate enough to use the death cash, even if most of them knew the consequences; so in the end it was their own choices that turned against them.

The message of the show could be that money is the root of all evil and humans are inherently selfish/greedy, so the curse was only made to bring out the worst in people. Except that this falls short once the show later reveals that the curse itself fabricates the circumstances in which these already desperate people are pushed to the brick and have no other choice but to use the money even if it means a sure death.

The horror of the curse isn’t people “choosing” the death cash, it’s how the curse actively stacks the cards mainly against people already living in poverty. Among the victims of the curse we have a young athlete going through a rough patch who realizes that the only people advancing in his field are not doing it for their skills but because of their access to better training programs and such; a college dropout being the sole caregiver of her mentally ill mother and young brother; the last victim we are shown is a homeless woman and her child both on the verge of starvation. It’s especially sinister considering that the curse was born from the grudge of a woman who starved to death along her two young daughters after being ostracized by her entire village.

So, despite its origin, the curse aims specifically at people in their most the most vulnerable state. Basically, being poor usually summons the death cash. Thus we can’t really talk about their moral bankruptcy as something inherent to them. Since whatever flaws these characters had and no matter how they acted, one way or the other they were already playing a losing game. …poor people aren’t morally bad because they’re poor and there's no other outside influence. Maybe that’s the ultimate message of the show, but I sincerely doubt it.

TL;DR: a mediocre drama that tried too hard to deliver a dark and intense horror story, but fell short almost from the beginning….nothing the show offered was particularly new or interesting enough imho; the acting at least was on the good side, but really the only thing worth mentioning is the Ost, especially 金の愛､銀の愛 by SKE48.

All things considered, I wouldn’t really recommend this; there are other better dramas out there… but if you’re curious enough, try the first three or four episodes and then skip right to the end, perhaps that way you can actually watch a semi-decent drama.

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