Discover Akiro Higuchi's groundbreaking film, Uzumaki (which means &NFi;vortex&NFi_;), an aptly named masterpiece about a town gripped with fear because of the menacing march of an otherworldly force that threatens to destroy the area and turn its residents into ghastly snails. Can a young girl, Kirie (Eriko Hatsume), and her paramour, Shuichi (Fhifan), save their homes and neighbors? Or are they the next victims of the unstoppable force?
Adapted from a horror comic by Junji Ito, this debut feature from Japanese music-video director Higuchinsky begins eerily but doesn't take long to descend into silliness.
Ultimately the, yes, snail-like pacing and lack of thematic resonance make the film more silly than scary, like some sort of Martha Stewart decorating program run amok.
Succumb to its creepy charms, and you'll never see inner-ear anatomy diagrams, umbrellas, or escargot in quite the same way. You might even hand over laundry chores to someone else.
It might have amused me as as a random story in a comic book, just a weird little invention by some cartoonist but as a movie... it don't play - for me anyway.
Lovecraftian concept by way of some Fulci and japanese esoteria thrown in the mix. The entity here is not a monster, or a serial killer, but a "concept" eating an entire town, slowly, little by little. It has it's flaws for sure, but i liked, and found it out far more effective than dozens of so called "horror" flicks
made in the last years. It's more disturbing than scary, and as a doomsday story it works very well, how do you stop spirals? You can't, you could stop a virus, polution or zombies, but spirals? Good luck with that.
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