The citizen of the sleepy little town Kurôzu-cho are slowly going insane, becoming increasibly obessesed by, of all things, the symbol of a spiral. Kirie Goshima's father begins exhibiting starnge behavior, so does the mother of her boyfriend, Shuichi Sato. Soon the odd behavior turns sinister, with people tucking themselves into washing machines to commit the oddest form of suicide, to trying to gouge out their own cochlea's, a spiral like tube in the inner ear. When Kirie and Shuichi finally decide to abandon the increasingly sinister town, they find there is no fleeing. they are trapped in a spiral of time if you will. When they wind up back in Kurôzu-cho, they find things have become even worse than they could have imagined.
UZUMAKI is almost impossible for me to describe. Part Lovecraftian terror, part Japanese high school drama, and invoking the works of artists like Tim Burton (at his best), Mario bava, and Kyoshi Kurasawa, director Akihiro Higuchi's adaptation of the classic horror manga by Junji Ito is a candy colored psychedelic mind-fuck. An odd choice as far as art direction goes, since the Ito manga is drawn in fine lined black and white, but it works beautifully. I'm incredibly surprised that Higuchi didn't rise to the top of Japanese horror directors back when UZUMAKI dropped, since the romance of the J-Horror sub-genre was hitting really hard at the time, when foreign audiences obsessed with getting their hands on every title they could find, from RINGU to THE GRUDGE to EVIL DEAD TRAP. UZUMAKI, both the film and the graphic novel collections belong on the top shelf of any genre fan, and have a strange, off putting quality that is all too rare in the been-there-done-that realm of scarey flicks and comic books. I've been trying to dig up more information on Higuchi, but there doesn't seem to be much out there. sadly, he seems to have come and gone. A terrible shame, as his visual sense is jaw dropping. At least we have UZUMAKI, which is highly recommended.
~Sean Smithson
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