Hiruko the Goblin

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.

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.

I found a copy of this film without the benefit of English subtitling, but was able to figure out the story... vaguely, anyway. I have been a fan of this director's work for many years, particularly the excellent TOKYO FIST, so I was very happy to find this obscure little film.

It seemed at first to be much more mainstream than the rest of Tsukamoto's films, but it did have its share of bizzare scenes... It is essentially a cross between EVIL DEAD II, THE THING, and THE CHURCH... but in Japanese. Mainly enjoyable, and a must for anyone interested in this guy's work. It is very strange indeed...

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.

I decided to purchase the film before seeing it. It was a "blind buy". was it worth it? Yes. That's not to say that the film isn't without it's faults however.

The story (like many people have already said) is somewhat confusing. I'm not going to go into the basic plot of the film, because you can look that up yourself...lol. I'll tell you that the plot IS interesting though, if maybe a tad to complex for it's own good.

I'm just going to point out what i liked and didn't like, so that you'll be able to make a decision on whether or not the film would be worth your time.

The effects were OK. This is obviously a low budget flick. That being said, there were only a couple really cheesy effects. Of course, the main gimmick is the whole "heads with spider legs" thing, and that's pulled off pretty well for the most part. I gotta say, they do look pretty creepy and some of them shoot large tongues out their mouths (reminded me of Uzumaki to a certain degree).

The film doesn't really know if it's serious or slapstick. Now by slapstick, i don't mean there's scenes like you'd see in "the naked gun" or movies of that type however. One of the main characters runs around with quirky inventions made of household items. he carries a can of aerosol spray that evidently the goblins don't like. There's a lot of tongue in cheek events and scenes in this one...but there's some good horror elements as well.

in fact, there's actually quite a few scenes that gave me goosebumps. there was also 2 or 3 moments where i actually jumped a little bit. it's just too bad that it seems like the last 3/4's of the film loses the "horror edge" and makes the film seem like a bad Japanese Indiana Jones ripoff in comparison to what we see earlier in the film.

Oh yeah, there's some pretty violent scenes in this as well. so if you aren't a fan of gore and blood...then this might turn you off. however, the violence isn't "shocking" or anything that would upset the squeamish.

The premise is interesting, but i honestly think this would have been a much better flick if it was straight horror...and dropped the goofy comedic tone found in many scenes. Overall though, it's a pretty fun ride...and there's really not much out there that has the feel the film has. I'm a big time horror fan, and it floats my boat and was worth the blind purchase.

RATING: 7/10