Like the proverbial breath of fresh air, a horror movie wafts in from Japan and reminds us we are not alone in the downward bound cinema-cum-comic book universe of amateurish, teen-oriented scream/slime/slasher self-indulgence. Uzumaki, which translates from Japanese as "Spiral" or "Vortex" and, adapted from Junji Ito’s homonymous manga, is the feature film début for former music video director Akihiro Higuchinsky.

Although press handouts speak of the "hottest trend" of Rising Sun J-Horror picking up the torch from popular Asian chop-socky action movies and following "great . . . and longstanding traditions" (Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Blue Velvet are cited, as are Tim Burton and William Friedken), this ninety-minute effort more clearly resembles the oeuvre of Ed Wood. It fails even to rise to the level of its countrymen’s laughable monster movies.

For some inexplicable reason, the film is divided into four chapters introduced by subtitles. It opens with teenager Kirie Goshima promising to "tell you of the strange things that happened in Kurozu-cho, where I was born." This framing device is at once forgotten and rendered useless, for there is no balancing concluding frame, and, indeed, one is unsure and unconcerned whether the girl even does finally escape. (Were the story in any way subtle, one might consider the whole as simply having occurred in her mind.) In this drab working-class town, dun colors nestled among drab mountains, the middle-school students are wrapped up in mundane matters of examinations, boyfriends, peer popularity and hairdos, while the adult world centers on work, housekeeping and law and order.

The motherless Kirie’s lifelong friend and now boyfriend, Shuichi Saito, insists several times that there is a curse hanging over the town. The strange, silent boy ought to know, since his father is one of the first to be affected. The senior Saito videotapes snailshells for hours, steals springs and spiral beauty-parlor signs, twirls his bulging eyeballs, grows angry over vortex-patterned fishcakes in his miso soup and is infatuated with potter’s wheels, mirrors and ominously spinning washing-machine drums. (Many of his obsessions are hilarious, unintentionally so.)

Soon enough, others in the town are afflicted, as related spiral patterns show up all over the place—staircases, ceramics, shattered windshields and bodies, hair curls, bed-climbing centipedes, smoke from a crematorium, inner ear and fingerprint whorls, concrete tunnels, gun barrel riflings—while both town and film centripete inward, downward, out of control.

Fellow students supposedly metamorphose into damp snail-like beings, though all we see are corkscrewing limbs and dripping slime that unfortunately resembles overheated Clearasil^® daubed with Vaseline^®. A cigarette-smoking TV newswoman and a chain-smoking reporter, the voices of rationality, are disposed of, the latter most conveniently so, for he searches in books and discovers the answer but cannot reveal it.

Uzumaki is filled with red herrings, e.g., Kirie’s threatening would-be suitor, and its few potentially suspenseful scenes, such as the slow approach to an eerily lit basement washing machine or dark concrete garden walls illuminated by moving headlights, are ineffectively handled. Special effects can be tastefully managed even on shoestring budgets, but here they are merely ludicrous. Terror need not always be resolved or explained—witness The Birds—but this film’s supposedly menaced characters do not capture our sense of horror or evoke sympathy or caring; they simply exist, and barely so at that. If such films truly represent the new wave from Asia, the bright future of the horror genre, then it is high time to go back to the past. 

(Released by Viz Films; no MPAA rating available.)