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Hey, remember Uzumaki? Remember how awesomely weird it was? Marionnier here is by the same guy. Said guy being Junji Ito, of whom I have seriously become a fan. Not the same director though, so instead of going all weird and cartoony with it, we've got this odd faded out of focus look, which makes the whole thing look like someone's home movies from the 70s. You know how modern Japanese movies actually look really nice? Yeah, apparently that doesn't go back all the way to 2004. Also? This movie is insane. In pretty rapid succession, we have someone having their hands and head severed with wire, a wacky date scene ending with someone turning into a puppet, crazy fast motion tooth brushing, and dinosaur puppet theater. Do I officially have a section in the archives for movies that have ADD yet? Because this is making the list. I mean, this doesn't so much resemble a horror movie as one of those wacky hidden camera shows from a miscellaneous foreign country where it's all just, someone does something weird! Now we speed up the film of the victim being mildly surprised. I'm... I'm not actually sure if there's any sort of plot or characters in this movie. I mean, I THINK maybe we're going for some sort of anthology thing? Maybe?
This is seriously one of the least coherent things I've ever seen. It's like whoever was doing the editing was blindfolded or something. Oh hey, here's something resembling plot! OK so this guy tried to rape this girl in an alley, but suddenly a puppet snuck up behind him with a cartoony lasso,and then some dude came by why he was suspended by weirdly cartooony looking ropes and smashed his joints with a sledge hammer before leaving him hanging there like a puppet. And... then the next morning the girl goes back and sees this and is all awesome! I'm bringing you home and hanging you on the wall. Now here's two girls shopping for antique dolls on eBay! OK, yeah, this really is not doing much for any effort I might be making to talk up Junji Ito. At least when it comes to writing screenplays. Of course, most of the problems here can be blamed on the director. I mean, you know what this movie is like? This is like watching a local cable access channel. I would not be at all surprised if suddenly we just cut away to a bright blue screen with some local high school's schedule of upcoming events written on it for 10 minutes.
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I mean, I get the distinct impression that there IS a plot. There's a summary of one on the disc sleeve here, and it's your standard crazy weirdo kills people and turns them into evil animated dolls and they go do stuff, but this movie is making no effort at all to bring this across. It's just... showing a bunch of totally random scenes which all cut off to something else before reaching a point where it makes sense to move on. These subtitles kinda have that vibe of being written by someone who doesn't speak Japanese OR English too. They're all just minimalist near gibberish. Oh and do boobs count when they're technically made of wax? What if they're on a wax doll that was whittled down from a crinkley wax dead girl who was just a regular dead girl before being dumped in an evil magic swamp?
Lalala, incoherent random flashbacks with goofy music... hey, would you mind if I just talked about some Junji Ito manga instead of trying to describe this creepy stalker bloody tooth brushing scene? Oh hey, here's a random bit of someone doing a puppet show adaptation of Uzumaki. I'll take that as a sign! OK, so, in addition to a lot of one shot horror manga one-shots, there's 3 long-running series Junji Ito has done. First of course there's Uzumaki, and I was totally wrong about the movie being true to the ending. The actual manga has like two dozen generally self-contained short stories about different ways for spirals to be creepy, but then it gets into this whole deal of growing a long-form plot getting into the history of this creepy town and the grand unifying horror behind it and stuff. Then there's Gyo, which is about spider-tank-robots powered by the gaseous emissions of whatever is strapped to them, usually dead fish. It has one of the most unsatisfying endings I've ever seen but wow is it a fun ride up to that point. Particularly how the first fishbot encountered is smashed with a dresser then tied up in a garbage bag to be taken to experts, but its corpse gasses fill the bag and then it strategically pokes holes in the side to fly away to freedom. Also the bit where the main characters are hiding behind their couch trying not to make any noise until the shark walking around their yard goes away. Seriously, that's just awesome.
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Anyway though, Gyo in particular I've really been pushing on people for a few months now, and at the back of the last volume there's a couple bonus one-shots, one of which is just this incredibly silly thing where some guy somehow managed to get pinned under the main support of his house and nobody can really focus on how serious a danger this is because they're trying to get him to explain, seriously, how the hell did he end up under there? The other though is this legitimately creepy thing about a landslide revealing all these human silhouette shaped shafts running through a mountain that people are compelled to walk up to and slide through. What's significant about THAT is how the inherent weirdness and memorability of it seems to be turning into a new internet meme. I'm vaguely proud to be kinda responsible when I see, oh, the Spongebob Squarepants variation crop up in a random image wad. It's just such an OBSCURE in-joke to keep seeing.
By the way, this here random manga talk? Yeah, you're getting exactly as much summation of Marionnier's plot from this as you would if I were still trying to describe what I was seeing. There actually was one really nice scene of a little china doll with an actual human eye in it and a few other bits of actual horror flavored weirdness but we keep shifting away from it into flashbacks of driving a van down the street and such. The weird bit is, I'm familiar enough with Junji Ito's writing style that if I squint and peer through the gibberish I can get little peeks at what you'd have if this were an actual movie and not just a random wad of variable film speed washed out unfocused 5 second clips. I mean, these two are clearly supposed to be the main couple, that room is supposed to be the bg reveal of a tangled mass of bodies, here's the person who we eventually reveal has just gone full on madness embracingly psychotic, there'd be a scene of wacky cartoony humor stuck in here just to really make you go WTF, that one doll there is something that just totally works, we'd have a lot of fun with all the myriad ways dolls and puppets can be made creepy... instead though, we just have this here incoherent mess.
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So yeah, the third long-running manga series he did is still being translated by internet weirdos but it's basically the second Futurama OAV as a horror series. And I don't just mean the whole extradimensional planet-monster coming to say hello. I mean it's got that same whole retro-sci-fi aesthetic going on even. It's weird. Mainly because when you read the first chapter, you figure, there's no way this is something that can actually be continued, but hey, you're wrong it turns out. Oh hey, here's some proper evil puppet monster person action going on. I mean, we really do have a handful of isolated scenes in here that totally work. They just need to have an actual movie wrapped around them. And... OK, goony puppet girl just kicked her shoes off with Raimi-cam action on it. I'm actually really starting to warm up to this. I mean, the first hour is complete dead air, but the last 20 minutes here turn into something respectably interesting. We've just got these two girls in fancy dresses with a big axe trying to escape from this dungeon of varied puppet horror... and dear gods, the Wannabe Final Girl here just turned into a Soul Calibur character. Now it's just pure low budget insanity. Like, director's ambitious student schlock film sorta stuff. I still can't recommend anyone ever watch this, but once it gets its act together and tries to be an actual horror movie it actually is a pretty good one.
So let's see, we've go Final Girl fleeing psycho through the uh... wedding dress dimensiion I guess, while meanwhile all the evil doll girls have gotten bored and decided to resurrect their evil doll puppet messiah. With whom they then make out? And yeah, this is totally the elemental plane of wedding dresses. Also, turns out evil doll messiah is totally not evil and hates Mr. Psycho, so she appears on the plain and gives Actual Final Girl a knife to kill him with. Anyway, I guess the moral here is, stalkers get freaky magic powers, but things still don't work out for them in the end. There's a happy ending though! The main character takes all the evil doll versions of her friends and family home with her and they live happily ever after. Well, for 2 months anyway, then they come to life again and puppetify her. And... then we have the implication that thi whole movie is just psycho's elaborate puppet play he's puttin on for his own amusement. Then come the credits with the sexy lingerie doll photo shoot. And here's the part of the credits explaining how the weirdo director is personally responsible for all the incoherence, and Junji Ito really just contributed some cool visual stuff here and there. Yay, vindication!
