|
UZUMAKI (2000)
Huh? Here's a Japanese horror flick that'll never, ever get a Hollywood remake. What makes me so sure? It's about people turning into snails. Well, that's only a small part of it. A man grows obsessed with spirals, and the power of his obsession at first just alienates his family, but later it turns people into snails. I know, I know. I don't understand the Japanese and I sometimes wonder if I ever will. Uzumaki is made more to be weird than spooky - now, I know the Japanese can make them spooky, and they're always making them weird anyway, but this one is just weird. It's mostly the plot, but I was also distracted by random moments of seemingly unconnected strangeness (one shot of somebody walking backwards, another shot of kids in a school hallway, standing at regular intervals against the walls, heads bowed). Where Uzumaki worked best for me is in the consequences of its characters' madness, like the man's wife who becomes so determined to keep spirals out of her husband's life that she gruesomely removes her fingerprints and has to be kept from seeing certain revealing anatomical diagrams, lest she want to remove some other parts too. Like Audition, I get the feeling I'd warm up to this a lot better if I was, y'know, Japanese...or at least lived there for a while. This one seems like it's trying to show us something about Japanese teenagers and their cliques and their family obligations, but I'm just not in on the conversation. But if you want to see a teenaged boy covered in slime, slooooowly sliding into class, with a priceless look of somehow perfectly snail-like contentment on his face, this is where you'll find it. (c) Brian J. Wright 2006 BACK TO THE U's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |