Another weird Japanese horror movie. This time a strange take on a vampire story.
The story: when he sees a frightened man stab himself in the eye, Masuoka becomes obsessed with seeing what could have frightened the man and finds himself wandering in a giant underground city built by something that existed before man. Be learns of the Deros, strange humanoid creatures, and he finds a young naked girl who he brings back to his apartment. Except this girl he learns will only feed in blood. He begins to notice strange people following him. Lots of other weirdness: the girl goes missing but returns, strange phones calls, the ghost of the man who stabbed himself, a woman who says the girl is actually his daughter and...
Was it good?
Okay, I admit I didn't really finish the synopsis because I don't get the ending at all. Like a lot of Asian horror films, this one starts out with some cool stuff and then seems to decend into weird for the sake of weird with an ending that I don't understand at all. Maybe it's the fact that the Asian films don't seem to follow any rules (or at least not the ones us westerners are used to) that make them so fascinating, but it also makes them hard to love for a lot of us. Eventually weirdness for the sake of weirdness doesn't work and we need a little more explaination than these movies give us (and yes, there were people who liked the end to Lost, but there were a lot who hated it and the entire BS last season!).
There are hints that the girl/vampire is actually his daughter and that he killed his wife, which would make all this a hallucination. But is it? At the end he descends into the underground city and seems to experience terror, but I didn't really understand the what/why/meaning of it.
For me what worked was this descent into the underground city and the city itself, which was all fantastic. For that alone the movie is worth watching. And there are a lot of other things that make this worth watching -- the girl, the deros, the paranoia -- but as the movie moves from story into weird-for-weirds-sake it becomes less interesting and less meaningful and it feels less like the filmmakers are trying to communicate something powerful as they are floundering with a story that they don't understand/know what to do with.
Still, there's a lot of good here and for fans of Asian horror this is worth checking out.
*** RECOMMEND (mainly for first half) ****
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