Longtime horror buffs will be able to tell you in a heartbeat that, if you ever see a painting that starts to leak blood, it’s a bad sign.  And considering that’ll happen within the first five minutes of Ghost Stories Volume 4, you know you’re in for a real crazy ride.

It’s generally the same story here–once again our wild, crazy gang of underage lunatics will be rampaging their way through ghost hunting and having a hilarious time doing it.

The strange thing this time around is that they will WILDLY deviate from the original Japanese.  This time around, just for the hell of it, I put on the English subtitles (which are, theoretically, a translation of the Japanese dialogue) and ran the English audio track at the same time.  What I got was almost two different movies.  The subtitle track is a lot more sedate, with actual, reasonable dialogue, while the dub track is a huge array of jokes on various points, including Ghost Stories’ favorite angle, weed jokes.

The anime by itself is pretty interesting, with a handful of good jokes and some spooky moments, but when you kick on the English language track, what you get is a wildly different piece that focuses much harder on the laughs.  And I mean MUCH harder.  It’s actually sort of disconcerting to watch an anime that’s essentially two different pieces at the same time–the first a fairly normal one with some laughs and scares, and the second one a wildly outlandish laugh-out-loud comedy with some scares, but at the same time it’s a spectacular value.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale hands Ghost Stories Volume 4 an eight out of ten for managing to be two movies in one, and an incredible value besides.