Hiruko the Goblin

HIRUKO: THE GOBLIN (1990) Surprisingly fluffy supernatural adventure film from the director of the TETSUO movies, Shinya Tsukamoto, perhaps done to prove he could apply a mainstream touch to lighter material. As such, it's still got his trademark bodily aberrations and spurting blood. An archaeologist uncovers an burial mound he believes to be some sort of an appeasement to ancient gods, but he and a student are killed by the critters within.

Meanwhile, his colleague (Kenji Sawada), now conveniently a goblin hunter, teams with the man's son to seal off the tomb under the mound before more deaths are caused by the free-roaming goblin, which looks like a human head with spider legs and hypnotizes its victims into a state of tranquil bliss that makes it much easier for them to saw off their own heads. Speedy fun, played with just enough tongue in cheek. Based on a book by Daijirao Moroboshi. I watched the R2 British edition of this. I give it an 8.

Unlike every other Tsukamoto film I've been able to hunt down (the two TETSUOs, GEMINI, and ROD BOY,) this film seems to be nothing more than a silly popcorn film. Nothing wrong with that, certainly, although it does raise some interesting questions about Tsukamoto's style as a director. The sped up POV running towards a character thing he did in both TETSUOs, for example, looks like an EVIL DEAD rip off here, despite the device having a completely different effect in the Tetsuo films.

This feels less like a Tsukamoto work than anything else he's done, even the slowly paced art film GEMINI. Beyond that, it's basically a straight horror flick: characters find themselves in a bad situation, and spend the entire film's running time trying to get out of it and/or fix it. The elements aren't original by any stretch of the imagination (there's even a crusty, crazy old man who knows more than he's telling,) but Tsukamoto's handling of them still feels new. When someone is attacked by a goblin, the victim flashes to a peaceful, serene, but nonetheless threatening dreamworld, which (as we discover) more often than not leads to suicide.

Much, much fluffier than anything else the man's done, and curious for his fans, although the uninitiated will just see a straight horror flick, albeit one better done than most. Fun stuff.

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.

I saw an article titled "Insane Horror Movies You Have To See" and I liked almost all the movies on the list (MANDY, POSSESSION, HOUSE, NIGHTBREED, SOCIETY, etc.) but this film and TITANE were the only two I hadn't seen. I'd heard of TITANE since it won the Palme d'Or, but I'd never heard of this early 90s Japanese horror film. Don't associate this one with the late 90s J-Horror batch of films (RINGU, JU-ON, DARK WATER, etc.). This film shares a spirit much closer to Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD, mixing outlandish creatures, wild camera movements, and a general level of craziness that gets wilder and wilder as the film goes along. For the first hour or so, the film is a pretty transitional Asian horror film, featuring an evil spirit (a goblin) that's killing students at a private high school, but once a severed head with spider legs begins terrorizing students at around the 45-minute mark, that's when the film starts getting really good, building to a climax that to SOOOOO bonkers, I awarded the film another star. I was laughing out loud it was so outrageous! For fans of 70s and 80s Japanese horror films along the lines of 1977's HOUSE (not the William Katt film), seek this one out!

This has the stiff direction and sterile feeling typical of many Japanese films, pretty deadly for a horror movie, especially one that's intended to have a number of wacky and wild moments. The story is extremely confusing, missing even token explanations for many things; it's like it expects us to be familiar with the story from its original source. When it's not boring, it's extremely bewildering. Some of the special effects aren't bad for what was a low budget, but they tend to be derivative of other (and better) horror and science fiction movies. See how many such references to other movies you can spot, if you should decide to see this movie despite what I've said.