Hiruko the Goblin (1991)

After opening an ancient tomb discovered beneath their school, teacher Takashi Yabe (Naoto Takenaka) and pretty student Tsukishima (Megumi Ueno) fall victim to the goblins trapped within. With the help of archaeologist Hieda Reijirou (Kenji Sawada), Takashi's son Masao attempts to prevent the goblins from escaping into our world.Tetsuo, The Iron Man, Shin'ya Tsukamoto's nightmarish cyberpunk cult hit, found its audience with the art-house/obscure horror intelligentsia; I can't imagine the same crowd going quite so gaga for Hiruko the Goblin, which takes a far less visionary approach, borrowing much of it its visual stylings from Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead and John Carpenter's The Thing.The film's plot is just as incomprehensible as Tetsuo's—I hadn't a clue what was happening for much of the time—but Tsukamoto eschews the surreal for a far more basic, splat-stick style, with plenty of gushing blood, crazy creatures, and chaotic, over-the-top acting. It might not make much sense half the time, but with decapitated heads sprouting legs, a crazy archaeologist armed with homemade goblin-hunting gizmos, and a young hero who develops burns on his back that resemble the goblins' victims, it's hard not to enjoy on the most basic of levels.

A crazed, gory, wonderfully absurd and furiously kinetic piece of Asian supernatural horror hokum; it's a feverishly inventive, turbo-charged, hard-driving trash terror item that's deliriously overloaded with demented imagination, wild-eyed passion, devilishly frolicsome wit and rip-roaring flair to spare. In short, it's a real pip.A brutal, lethal, nearly unstoppable all-powerful otherworldly force wreaks plentiful grisly havoc in a remote rural school, decapitating students and transforming their severed noggins into swift, deadly creatures which are jet-propelled by speedy, ultra-sinewy spider legs. Two teenage guys bravely attempt to thwart the wildly out of this world supernatural mayhem, with the expected madly disastrous full-throttle four-sheets-to-the-wind insane nerve-jangling and life-threatening results.This baby's got it all: briskly efficient pull-out-all-the-stops virtuoso direction, handsome, hyperactive vertiginous cinematography (the quick, super-smooth scuttling POV shots of the killer heads on the prowl are great), an intense, ominous, flesh-crawling mood that gradually escalates into all-out pandemonium, a few breathtaking moments of serenely surreal beauty, frenetically headlong pacing, gorgeously slick high-gloss production values, some pretty pastoral visuals, and a funny, appealing oddball nonconformist bespectacled dweeb protagonist -- he's a rogue, family-tradition-be-damned archaeologist named Hiruko, to be exact -- who's undoubtedly the best scrawny, weak-kneed, chicken-hearted limp dishrag unlikely savior of mankind since Zalman King's sweaty, constantly twitching dippy hippie dropout from "Blue Sunshine" (Hiruko's shrill, girlish screaming is especially hilarious -- and the bulky suitcase full of ineffectual state-of-the-art technological hoodads is a nice touch, too).The splashy, excessively nasty and explicit splatter f/x really deliver the ghastly groceries: Heads are messily ripped off so blood can copiously spew forth like a bright red crimson geyser, gruesome eviscerated corpses are strewn about the school's hallways, one character develops a burning (and smoking!) boil on his neck, a spider head tries to fatally French kiss one dude with its harmful elongated prehensile tongue, and other such gleefully grotesque stuff. The truly off the wall final, in which our bumbling, but stalwart heroes are attacked in a dark, dank cave by a murderous multitude of encroaching spider heads and do their best to fend off the vile beasts with cans of insect repellent (!), deftly walks a fine line between blackly comical bedlam and grimly apocalyptic horror; it induces both nervous giggly laughs and genuine scared shudders in equal proportion. A delectably deranged and enjoyably over the top gem.

I got hold of this film because it was directed by the same guy who did Tetsuo, and after having my senses bludgeoned and rearranged by that freak fest I sat down to this expecting a similar fun filled tale of gory man / machine transformation, self mutilation and object rape. So I was disappointed with this film, but if I watched in with an open mind my opinion might be different.This film has more in common with the recent horror of Hideo Nakata than Tsukamoto's earlier work; you actually know what the hell is happening and you are actually given a chance to get familiar with the characters. If it had gone for this type of standard-fare horror it would have worked pretty well; but the story of decapitations and goblins sits rather uneasily beside frequent outbursts of slapstick humour and comedy. Again, this would have worked in the same way as the likes of Ghostbusters if it wasn't for the frequent outbursts of blood and gore, and severed heads walking around on spider's bodies (The Thing, anyone?). The music, to, sounded nice on its own but just didn't work with the film.So really this film is a case of ice cream on pizza. It has many good elements, but they really shouldn't have been mixed. I would have liked to see a gory Japanese horror about a school on the gates of hell. I would have liked to see a Japanese comedy / horror about a bumbling goblin hunter. This film does both of these very well, and for that it is worth a watch. But they should really be on the same piece of celluloid. You could watch it with an open mind, but defiantly do not expect anything like Tsukamoto's other work.

Hiruko the Goblin (aka Yokai Hanta – Hiruko) director Shinya Tsukamoto has said that this is "a film about a head". I'm not sure that's quite right, but given the relative inscrutability of the film and Tsukamoto's self-professed love of cryptic ambiguity--substantial enough that he has said to not know what certain scenes or films of his are about--I suppose that "a film about a head" will have to do.But actually, there's much more to Hiruko the Goblin than that, and at least on a surface level, the film is often almost pedestrian in presenting certain horror conventions. It's just that when you try to tie all of the scenes together, or when you try to figure out what certain more poetic and surreal dialogue and events have to do with what's going on elsewhere, the film's transparency for interpretation can harden into a block of concrete quicker than you can say "Ni"! But that's probably how Tsukamoto wants it, and if we're judging the film solely on how well it achieves its aims, we'd have to say it kicks butt. But that's not quite right, either, because a film could aim to suck, and if it does suck, we'd then have to say that it kicks butt. So we have to factor in how enjoyable/aesthetically rewarding the film is in what it sets out to do. On those grounds, I have to stick with a 7 out of 10, or a "C" here.But enough with trying to be as impenetrably dense as Tsukamoto. Here are the basics of the plot as well as I can understand it: Hieda Reijirou (Kenji Sawada) is an archaeologist who has a penchant for inventing odd gadgets using everyday items, often kitchen utensils. At the beginning of the film, he makes some significant archaeological "mound" discovery. Then we switch to Takashi Yabe (Naoto Takenaka) and the much younger and more attractive Tsukishima Reiko (Megumi Ueno), who are exploring some cave when an unseen force comes after them and makes them quickly dolly along with the camera for some comical close-ups of "terror", ala the opening of Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky (1977). (Did I mention that this is sort of a horror comedy?) Then we switch to three school kids, apparently classmates of Reiko's, the most important of which is Yabe's son, Masao (Masaki Kudou), who are searching for Reiko at the school. They see the scary janitor, Watanabe (Hideo Murota), then get involved in an interesting horror situation at the school, when Reijirou shows up with a bunch of gadgets for some reason. Eventually, Reijirou and Masao Yabe team up and try to solve whatever the mystery was--and it turns out to be fairly bizarre and poetic.That plot description probably sounds a lot more vague than it would have to, but in addition to the film being a bit confusing, I have to be careful to not give too much away. Maybe it would be better--since surely it's mostly horror fans reading this review who would be wondering if they should check out the film--to say that the first major section is kind of a combination of haunted house/slasher stuff, with a heavy Evil Dead (1981) vibe (Tsukamoto even uses Raimi-like fast hand-held "tracking" shots through hallways, weird angles, and even invokes a chainsaw at one point). The second major section turns into more of a supernatural/creature story--imagine David Cronenberg doing an H.P. Lovecraft film and you'll get the idea.All of this stuff is good on some level, even if it's pretty difficult to put together. Among the things that I was still bewildered about when the film ended were: What was the relationship between Reiko, Reijirou, Takashi Yabe, and the three boys? What did all of that religion/mythology dialogue have to do with the plot? Why did Masao Yabe have appearance and functional resemblances to his ancestor? Just what was the deal with Masao's back--why was that happening? If you like weirdness, and you don't mind a bit of derivativeness and confusion, you'll love Hiruko the Goblin.There were a lot of things I loved about the film. I loved Reijirou's gadgets. I loved the blood/gore/decapitations (part of why this is "a film about a head"). Tsukamoto sure knows how to get the visceral stuff right. I liked the humor. I loved some of the cinematography, even if Tsukamoto had his Raimi notes written on his palm while shooting. I loved the special effects, especially the Cronenbergish stuff (and this is another part of why this is "a film about a head"). I loved a lot of the music--especially the melancholy song that Reiko kept singing (which reminded me of some similarly-flavored songs from Suicide Club (Jisatsu saakuru, 2002)--I watched that only a couple weeks before seeing Hiruko). Some of the other music was a bit like generic 1980s "synth-horror" music, but on the other hand, some music that sounded close to that was interesting jazz fusion stuff. I loved the almost corny (well, maybe it just was corny) final scenes, one of which seemed like maybe Richard Kelly kinda stole it for Donnie Darko (2001).So there were a lot of positive points about the film. I just hope I'm not going to have to pass a quiz on the plot, themes or subtexts.