review time again: UZUMAKI (2000)
Ol' BattleMonkey
always, the review is archived, along with some pictures (all I could
get before the batteries on Snappy died), on Teleport City. And as
always, SPOILER ALERTS ARE IN FULL EFFECT!
http://www.teleport-city.com/movies/reviews/horror/uzumaki.html
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UZUMAKI
2000, Japan. Starring Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Ren Osugi, Hinako Saeki,
Masami Horiuchi, Taro Suwa, Eun-Kyung Shin, Sadao Abe. Directed by
Higuchinsky.
I love fairy tales. Not the happily-ever-after Disney stuff that makes
you feel good about yourself. Not the safe and sanitized nonsense that
has come to represent the fairy tale in our more recent history. NO, I'm
talking the black stuff. dark and twisted, meant more to terrify
children into sleepless nights than to lull them into a soothing night's
slumber. Tales where the kids don't outsmart the witch, where they do
end up in the oven, and no one lives happily ever after.
Given our increasingly crass and cynical society, I would seem, at
first, that this sort of twisted tale would be popular, but as they
often require some degree of imagination and appreciation of both the
subtle and the fantastic, most people would simply rather watch shit
blow up or get the classic Disney ending. When someone does attempt to
carry that sense of the macabre over into a modern day fairy tale, it
can happen with mixed results. At their best, they come out looking like
Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb or City of Lost Children. More often than
not, however, they just come out looking Troll.
In our recent review of the classic Japanese horror film Tokaido Yotsuya
Kaidan, we talked about how, despite being a world away, Japanese horror
draws on very similar, almost universal, elements of horror to lay on
the scare. In a similar vein, there creepy fairy tale elements that
exist above and beyond culture and geography and become part of globally
understood and shared heritage. While in college, I was reading a book
simply called Japanese Tales, that was a collection of bizarre Japanese
fairy tales, and it struck me that, despite the fact that many of these
existed as oral legends at a time long before Japan was in regular
contact with the nations of the West, the stories were very similar in
tone. Everyone understands a witch luring innocent youths into the
woods, or monsters who take the form of humans.
My favorite was about a woman who struggled much of her life with a tape
worm. She managed to survive the parasite and eventually give birth to a
young son who grew up to become a tremendously powerful general and
leader of men. Great were his deeds, and he soon ruled the land. A
neighboring warlord invited the great warrior to his court one day for a
celebration of their new alliance. At the feast, the neighboring warlord
offered up bushels of walnuts (or was it chestnuts?) for all to eat --
it was, after all, the commerce crop that kept his province prosperous.
The great warrior, however, refused to eat the walnuts. When the host
warlord grew angry and felt insulted, the great warrior threw off his
helmet and exclaimed "I can't digest nuts! I'm my mother's tapeworm!" He
then promptly turned into a tapeworm and slithered off.
The best part of the whole weird story, however, was the final line,
which went something like "Back in his homeland, his family was
devastated and his province plunged into chaos. Everyone else agreed it
had all been a good laugh."
I bring this up because I feel the Japanese surrealist horror film
Uzumaki draws heavily upon the tradition of the creepy fairy tale. There
is something fantastic and mesmerizing about it all, and something
unsettling and distressing lurking just under the surface. I forgot
where I read it, perhaps in an interview with Clive Barker, but someone
said that the most effective way of creating a sense of dread is to take
something familiar and slowly transform it into something alien and
threatening. The best example I can think of is the closet monster. How
many times have you opened your closet to get something out? Your shoes,
perhaps, or an elf you've been holding prisoner? If you have a closet,
chances are you open it at least once a day, maybe more. It's a familiar
place. But let it get dark out, let it be pitch black and three in the
morning when you wearily gaze over from the comfort of your bed and
realize the closet door is open.
Suddenly it's not so familiar. It's a gaping black maw, noticeably dark
even in the dead of night. Suddenly what was once familiar to you begins
to take on a sense of dread. What if something comes out of there? A
monster, or a killer, or that damn elf? And what's that shadow? I think
it's just my shirt thrown over the vacuum cleaner, but it sure looks
like an ax wielding homicidal maniac.
I once spent an entire night scared witless as a youth, covers tight
around my neck as I stared in horror at what was most definitely the
shadow of Weird Harold from Fat Albert come to kill me.
Okay, so maybe not everyone gets freaked out in the middle of the night
by shadows that bear a vague resemblance to Weird Harold, but you get my
meaning. Nothing makes a person panic quite like suddenly finding
yourself in a strange situation when you thought you had everything
under control.
Uzumaki is set in a sleepy working class town somewhere in the Japanese
countryside. There's nothing particularly weird about the place. Hell,
even though it's in Japan it's not that much different than a small
blue-collar town in America. It's downright idyllic, right up until the
opening narration that tells us of the unspeakable nightmares the town
contains. Director Higuchinsky has nothing on his resume before this
film, but he proves right out of the gate that he is a master of
subversion, taking a beautiful small town and immediately making you
anxious about it.
We then meet cute high school student Kirie, our narrator. She's a
pretty average schoolgirl -- a few friends, a few enemies, a nerdy
goofball who keeps trying to make her fall in love with him by employing
such tactics as jumping out and trying to scare her at every possible
opportunity. Her dad is an accomplished pottery artisan, and her
boyfriend is a moody teen who will one day join an emo band. The two of
them are hassled by a Barney Fife-esque local cop who has nothing better
to do than bluster at teens who ride two to a single bike.
En route to meet her beau, Shuichi, she spots his father crouching in an
alley. Attempts to get his attention fail, as he is intently videotaping
a snail slithering up the wall. Already things are weird. Shuichi is
acting weird as well, though not so weird as to be taping hours worth of
snail shenanigans in extreme close-up. But he seems afraid, and he talks
of running away, fleeing the town, which he feels has a rotten core.
Kirie is confused but also a bit excited by the idea of dropping
everything and running off with her childhood sweetheart.
At this point, the film is shaping up to be just another schoolgirl
horror film, the sort of watered down, one step above Goosebumps stuff
that has been big business in Japan for the last couple years. You know,
whenever anyone has the brains to make a movie for adolescent girls,
it's always a huge hit (remember Titanic), and yet people only seem to
remember to do it like once every ten years or so. You'd think by now
they'd understand that the girls are bored shitless and want a little
something thrown their direction.
Don't be fooled. Uzumaki is just getting started.
Kirie learns that Shuichi's father has become obsessed with spiral
designs, surrounding himself with them, dedicating his life to staring
at them and ranting about it all when he isn't bust videotaping the
spiral design on snail shells. His madness has reached the point where
it is starting to tear the household apart, and Shuichi suspects there
is a force behind it all that threatens the whole town.
At school, in the meantime, things aren't much more normal. When Kirie
isn't being accosted in the bathroom by the leader of the resident girl
gang, who sings the praises of being the center of attention, of being
the focus of the spiral, she's sitting in a science class attended by a
kid who only shows up to school on rainy days and is covered by a thick,
dripping goo. WHy they let him only come into school on rainy days is
less puzzling then why they would let a kid covered in gallons of
snotlike effluvia just take his seat. Hell, we didn't even tolerate the
kid who always had the gooey, unnaturally green ball of mucous clinging
to the very edge of his nostril. I know if I had showed up for chemistry
glass all dripping with goo, there would have been a good chance they
would have made me hit the showers, or at least that emergency eye wash
fountain for the kids too clumsy to not get iodine in their eyes.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, though, as Shuichi's father is
eventually overcome by his mania and commits suicide -- by cramming
himself into a washing machine and twisting his body into a taffy-like
spiral. This upsets Shuichi's mother, and the matter is made worse
during the funeral when the clouds from the crematorium spiral up into a
massive, misty whirlpool that also has a tendency to form a likeness of
the deceased's anguished face. Shuichi's mother breaks down, and soon
she too is obsessed with spirals, but with their elimination rather than
their collection. She begins by slicing off her own fingertips, and then
after a later midnight visit from a friendly neighborhood centipede,
realizes there is a part of her inner ear that is also a spiral. The
jagged shard of a broken vase can dig that out, though.
As Shuichi helplessly watches his parents self-destruct, Kirie begins to
notice her father too is becoming a nutcase, and the girl gang leader at
school has started styling her hair into massive swirls. A local
Poindexter teams up with Kirie and Shuichi to crack the sinister
mystery, but of course, just as he makes a huge discovery, he's killed
in a grisly car wreck. If the overall freakish atmosphere of the movie
thus far hasn't convinced you this is something more than schoolgirl
horror, the graphic gore might bring you around. While we're not talking
Dawn of the Dead here, the movie refuses to pull punches with the gore,
and when someone dies, they die horribly.
The bizarre events in the town eventually attract the attention of the
outside media, and a news van arrives to do a "can you believe this
shit" type of story that is made even meatier by the fact that the gooey
kid and his friendly neighborhood tormentor have just gone and
transformed into giant half-slug half-human creatures and spend the day
squirming up and down the side of the high school. The film crew meets
with an equally unsavory fate as they attempt to leave town, resulting
in some decapitation and a cute, perky newscaster left with her eyeballs
dangling by the optic nerves.
Kirie and Shuichi want desperate to either fight against or escape from
the growing hurricane of spiral-related madness, but they don't even
know what to fight against or where to start. There is no creepy old
wizard living at the edge of town, or secret government lab, or anything
at all to give them the first clue as to what the hell is happening. As
she struggles desperately to make some sense of the chaos, Kirie's life
is completely shattered when Shuichi himself begins to exhibit rather
strange spiral qualities.
The end is a disturbing jolt to the system, to say the least. At first,
it will leave you sort of pissed off and thinking "what the hell?" kind
of like Blair Witch Project. Unlike the end of that film, however, which
gets stupider as time goes by, the final burst of gory insanity in
Uzumaki grows increasingly unnerving the more it sits in your mind.
Ultimately, the film ends with the same close-up and snippet of
narration with which it began, turning the film itself into one giant
spiral. It's a feeling not unlike the one you might get from a
particularly good episode of Twin Peaks, like the one where they finally
reveal Laura Palmer's murderer. It will confound and anger some, while
others will simply sit back and think, "Holy cow!" to themselves as they
realize the disturbing power of what they've just seen.
First and foremost, Uzumaki is a visual film, but unlike a lot of
current films that rely on slick visuals as nothing more than eye candy,
the surreal atmosphere of Uzumaki is a central tool with which to weave
the tale. It's not just thrown on for the hell of it. There is an actual
purpose, and Higuchinsky knows how to use the visual aspect of the film
with the deftness of a scalpel-wielding surgeon, and I don't mean Dr.
Giggles. Every shot, every set, every quirky pice of music, is perfectly
exploited to create a sense of lurking dread. Like a seedy circus
sideshow or run-down midway, Uzumaki is undeniably gorgeous and
frighteningly grotesque and disorienting. It is, as I discussed earlier,
a disorienting warping of the familiar, mundane world into something
threatening and dangerous. For his first time out as a director,
Higuchinsky is astoundingly successful. WHile Lucio Fulci always talked
about creating the feel of a surreal nightmare in his films, he was only
ever able to accomplish it in tiny bits and pieces. A moment here, a
moment there, then back to the tedium of watching Ian McCulloch intone,
"But that's crazy!" Higuchinsky manages to capture that same nightmarish
mood, but he sustains it throughout the whole movie and never exhibits
any of the slapdash qualities that undermined Fulci's own attempts at
such a mood.
Some of the scenes don't even strike you as bizarre until they are over
and you're going, "Wait, what the hell?" In a casual, offhand manner,
the film will just randomly throw in background characters who are
walking in reverse, or in a particular eerie scene that doesn't even hit
you as eerie at first, Kirie and her friend are walking down a hallway
having a typical schoolgirl conversation while, on either side of the
hallway, students stand at attention, still as statues, gazing off into
nothing. There is never any acknowledgement of these things, making them
even more intriguing, sort of like that weird hippie you can catch
sitting in the background of various episodes of The Young Ones. I
didn't even notice him until years later, but now that I know that he's
sometimes there, squatting in the corner, it's equally amusing and
disturbing. Watch the very first episode, Demolition, and you'll see him
during a scene around the television set. It's kinda creepy.
As far as the plot goes, it is simple but effective. The movie is based
on a series of horror comics by writer Ito Junji, a proclaimed H.P.
Lovecraft fan, and the influence of Lovecraft is obvious. Like his
inspiration, Ito's stories are difficult to translate onto film. They
are simply too far out there. This problem has plagued countless
would-be screenwriters and directors who took on the unenviable task of
turning brilliant H.P. Lovecraft stories into incredibly lame movies.
Consider that a number of Lovecraft's stories revolve around creatures
who are so intensely terrifying that merely glancing at one is enough to
drive someone mad. If you make a movie about such a beast, you either
have to show it -- which will inevitably be a big disappointment -- or
not not show it -- which would also be a big disappointment. Lovecraft
created a fear that simply could not be lifted off the page or out of
your own mind.
Likewise, Ito's stories often defied easy adaptation. To be honest, I
have never read the Uzumaki series, and I don't know if it's ever been
translated into English (I doubt it, though), so I can't comment on how
faithful a retelling of the events this film is. What I can say is that
it's a damn effective film that manages to communicate an intangible yet
overwhelming horror without ever having to show it. Lovecraft would have
been proud, I think. Sure there are kids who turn into creepy slugs,
people with weird eyes and hair that spirals up forty feet and
continuously swirls around. Sure heads are crushed, people are gutted,
and bodies rot before horrified onlookers, but these are all symptoms of
what is happening. In the hands of a lesser storyteller or director, the
fact that the film never reveals the nature of the seemingly
supernatural madness would be a big let-down, but scriptwriter Nitta
Takao, armed with Ito Junji's story and Higuchinsky's inspired
direction, uses the ambiguity to augment the film's nightmarish tone.
It's truly a stunning feat to have pulled off.
The movie also never tips us off as to what actually happens to our
heroine, Kirie. When last we see her, she is in what is, at best, a dire
situation, but the closing repetition of the opening narration would
imply that she somehow cheated fate. If so, how? We never know, and
while that would be a weakness in some films, it's the reverse here,
like never finding out why the birds were attacking people in The Birds.
Is it possible that Kirie, who was teased about never being the center
of attention, was somehow the focal point of the spiral madness? Was she
the eye of the hurricane? Or was she simply insane, dreaming up this
whole bizarre scenario in her head? The film is constructed in such a
way than any explanation would fail to be as effective as no
explanation, leaving the viewer with a lingering feeling of chill and
glorious discomfort.
Higuchinsky also uses music brilliantly. The soundtrack is a combination
of sappy toy piano sounding "young kids in love" music and off-kilter
horror/carnival music. It works further to subvert the feel of the film
when you have this quaint and innocent scene of a young girl clinging to
the boy she's loved her whole life while dippy lovey dovey music plays
in the background as they ride the bike in slow motion. It's sweet tot
he point of being goofy, but it becomes heart-breaking in a way since
you know any second the creepy carnival music is going to start up and
no one is going to be very happy.
The cast is up to the task of fleshing out this bizarre world. Hatsune
Eriko is great and sympathetic as Kirie, while Fhi Fan as Shuichi is
moody, dreary, and detached. At first it almost seems like it's bad
acting, but then you start to think about how many of these
self-absorbed mopey guys you knew in high school, and you suddenly
realize the kid has nailed it. Unlike the mopey kids in high school, at
least this guy lives in a town that is cursed with a madness involving
lots of spirals and bloody deaths. Everyone else is basically there to
die horribly and go insane, and they all do it well.
The effects are great as well. Actually, the effects are somewhat
archaic looking in spots, but once again the director makes it work
marvelously for him, turning what should be a drawback into another
strength. Competently done but somewhat awkward computer effects serve
to embellish an increasingly alien and surreal landscape. The gore
effects are bang on, grisly and realistic, and the make-up effects to
create the slug people is also great. Unlike those twits who made the
updated version of The Haunting, Higuchinsky knows better than to make a
movie where there are effects for effect's sake, and they are the
central point to the movie being made. Higuchinsky wants to creep you
out, and he is smart enough to know that special effects are just one of
many means to that end and not the end themselves. Just like the stylish
direction, the special effects are not there just as eye candy. They
have a job to do, and they execute it wonderfully.
Uzumaki is a surprising film, and that makes me happy. Like a fairy tale
of old, it seizes you from the outset and pulls you deeper and deeper
into a world that is too weird to look at but too enticing to turn away
from. Even during the quiet moments and build-up scenes, there is enough
tension and uneasiness to keep the movie sailing along. When the end
hits, it hits hard, and I guarantee the whole thing will stick in your
mind a long time after you've finished watching. Of course, my guarantee
means nothing. It's not like I'm going to give you an oven mitt if you
find yourself dissatisfied. I only have two oven mitts, and I need them
both because one is always dirty.
The most refreshing thing about this movie is that it's not quite like
anything else I've ever seen. While you can place in the company or H.P.
Lovecraft and Twin Peaks, it's still quite different in many ways. It's
a movie that knows how to lull you into a sense of security, then spring
untold amounts of indescribably freakiness 'pon you. I love a movie that
keeps me guessing and thinking, and Uzumaki delivers on a cerebral
level, at least for a dolt like me.
Still, I'm a realist, and I know this is the kind of movie that will
just piss some people off. It's not that it's overly arty -- those
movies even piss me off. It's just weird. Really weird. Weird people
will dig it, but if your idea of clever horror was Scream or your idea
of a well-constructed story was, well, Scream, then this sort of movie
version of a Salvador Dali painting probably ain't gonna make you happy.
That's not a judgement, just an expression of opinion. If everyone liked
everything I like, I'd get pretty annoyed.
Uzumaki is a film for people who like to be fucked with, who like to be
unnerved, who like to get depressed and disturbed by a film out of
nowhere, days or weeks after they've seen it. You're sitting there,
thinking happy thoughts, and all of a sudden you start thinking about
the gruesome "slide show of death" that helps close the movie, and all
of a sudden you just feel creeped out. It's the sort of movie that will
be appreciated by people who also appreciate sinister carnival midways
and those ringmasters who speak of black things and always seem to have
midget henchmen dressed as Aladdin walking behind them playing the
accordian. It's a movie for people who just simply delight in the
torment of sheer weirdness and surrealistic horror.
It's my kind of movie.
--Keith