Meadhall of the Comitatus

Well, Japan is sure . . . interesting.  Kind of.  I figured this year I’d like to hit another Japanese horror flick after the epic win I nailed last year.  This year?  Not as much.  Uzumaki (either “Spiral” or “Vortex” in English—my subbed version kept using the word Vortex, but I’ve also seen this listed as Spiral, so who knows?) isn’t a bad movie per se, but it’s really not that good either.  And don’t worry, despite the name this movie isn’t just another version of The Ring.  I’m just not sure what it is.

I do know one thing, though. This is probably bad.

Premise:  2/5

In Japan, high schools exist.  Annoyingly, this is most of what the first half of the movie informs me of: see, there’s girls, cliques, unrequited love from nerds, exams to study for, and—oh, pardon me, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.  Why does Japan care so fucking much about high school life?  Why does director Higuchinsky think we need to spend soooo much goddamned time there in a horror movie? Fuck!

Well, anyways, I guess once we get past most of the high school bullshit that weighs down the first half of the movie, we can move on to where things start getting really strange.  In all fairness, there’s some weird stuff that happens during all the “Wonder Years” garbage, such as our heroine Kirie finding her almost-but-not-quite boyfriend Shuichi’s father filming a snail on a wall, utterly oblivious to anything else around him but this snail and its spiral shell.  That’s weird in a kind of innocuous way, but less innocuous by far is the kid in Kirie’s school who takes a five-floor swan dive through the center “hole” of one of the school’s spiral staircases, splattering blood and brains everywhere.  Shuichi’s dad keeps getting weirder, as do many of the other people in town—in fact, one student is apparently starting to devolve into a kind of human-sized snail, complete with his own slime trail and spirally-hump back.  Shuichi’s dad eventually ends up killing himself in a washing machine (how I’m not sure, but it can’t have been pleasant based on all the snapping and tearing sounds we hear) so that he can finally become just like those spirals he’s all in to.  And things just keep getting more and more fucked up from there.

SPLAT!

Okay, so the movie’s pretty light on plot once it realizes we don’t particularly care about the high school BS (apparently the movie is based on a 20-issue manga, so I guess that explains the first half of the movie feeling like a live-action teenager anime).  When the movie starts really going off the deep end, it actually becomes kind of entertaining, if not exactly scary.  I mean, yeah, gross stuff happens to a lot of people, but it often gets undercut by the next scene where something silly (and I guess supposedly “comedic” to the Japanese audience) one of the characters says or does deflates any real sense of dread or creepiness.  But then the ending leaves pretty much no doubt at all that this town is about as screwed over as it gets due to the “curse of the vortex.”  But even the final scenes of the spiralpocalypse are shown in a way that’s less disturbing than absurd and kind of farcical.  This, more than anything, took me away from the weird and unsettling stuff and brought the movie down.  I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Uzumaki was a long joke that I just didn’t get—whether that’s because it was lost in translation or because it was never that funny in the first place.

Black hole suuun, won't ya come, and wash away the raaaainnnn . . .

Cast: 2/5

Overall, I can’t complain about anyone in the cast.  I particularly liked Eriko Hatsune, who played Kirie—not just because she was cute, but because she did a good job bringing empathy to a movie as bizarre and ungrounded as this one.  Fhi Fan, who played Shuichi, was a bit lacking in some key scenes, but overall did a respectable enough job.  Those were the two main characters, so everyone else was pretty much just support, but I can’t particularly think of anyone who didn’t do a fair job—the ones who went over the top could always just be assumed to have fallen under the “vortex madness.”  In fact, that’s kind of an ingenious way to make any performance work: just chalk everything up to otherworldly insanity and BOOM, you’re good.  Well, it at least worked in this movie.

Oh my god, you killed Reed Richards! You bastards!

Technical: 2/5

Right under this category I think we have the most awesome moment as well as the most lame and embarrassing moments.

For the pros, some of the gore/mutation/whatthehell scenes really were awesome.  The human snails crawling up the side of the high school was pretty freaking creepy, and the car crash that took out Kirie’s weirdo little stalker and the reporter who was just about to give Kirie and Shuichi some information on how the town got cursed was nicely gory.  The sound effects were pretty much all perfect (the snapping and tearing sounds in the aforementioned washing machine incident, and the part where a giant centipede starts crawling into Shuichi’s mom’s ear to get to her brain were particularly gruesome) and did a lot more for the less-than-stunning other effects than I would have expected.  This movie has got a definite John Carpenter influence, which shows both in the cinematography and the soundtrack, and it does a pretty good job aping one of the true masters of horror.

These creepy bastards also moan and stuff, which gets slowed down by the sound guy to come out even creepier.

The downsides?  Well, I can’t even tell you how retarded some of the CG effects were.  There was a scene where Shuichi’s dad’s spiral collections had been thrown away by Shuichi (and boy was he pissed about that), so he decides to show his family that you can even make a spiral with your body—so he starts spinning his eyes around really fast in a manner less terrifying than reminiscent of Daffy Duck getting whacked on the head by a mallet.  A weirdo glam girl at Kirie’s school goes vortex crazy, so that her hair starts curling on its own and animating in a kind of spirally-Medusa kind of way, and not only is that gay enough in itself, but the way the effects look go well beyond terrible.  There’s a whole shopping list of bad effects in this movie, which is too bad because the good ones are actually kind of great.  And please don’t make me go into how much I hated the slow and boring first half of the movie again, because I might cry if I have to.

Gaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy.

Popcorn Factor: 1/5

Meh.  I like a lot (though definitely not ALL) of the weirdness in this movie, and there are some unique scenes that are pretty effective, but the movie’s just too uneven to support itself.  The first half (yes, I’m harping on it again) is entirely too long and uninteresting, and never succeeds in really making me feel like these are real people that bad stuff is happening to, or getting me all that invested in the so-called plot.  In some ways, this feels a bit like Japan trying to do a Lovecraft movie, which sounds more promising than what you’re actually left with when all is said and done.  I can’t really recommend this on any level, sadly.  If you want to watch a good “world going cosmically mad” movie, I’d go with Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness instead—which is what I think Uzumaki wanted to be anyway.