Saturday, March 28, 2009

In short: The Curse of Kazuo Umezu (1990)

Two anime shorts based on the works of one of my personal heroes, Kazuo Umezu.

The first story "What Will The Camera Reveal?" is about high schooler Masami, who develops an unhealthy mixture of obsession with and fear of Rima, the new girl in her class. When she starts having nightmares of something terrible that visits her in the night and a strange mark appears on her throat, Masami comes to the conclusion that Rima must be a vampire. One of her classmates - a certain Umezu (unfortunately not wearing anything with red and white stripes) - suggests that she films what is really happening at night in her room. There are bound to be surprises.

The second story concerns a group of four girls, their visit in "The Haunted Mansion" and the unpleasant things that happen to them.

I had a surprising amount of fun with The Curse of Kazuo Umezu. Its flaws - really bad animation, stories without any depth whatsoever and the sort of plotting one would be hard-pressed to find anything more friendly than "serviceable" to say describe it, should be more than enough to make this OVA one to avoid, but in truth both shorts provide a kind of horror short film comfort food that is very endearing. They might be going through some very familiar motions, yet they are doing it with enough of Umezu's trademark sense of hysteria to have a rather loveable feel.

Also, the shorts allow me to use the words "endearing" and "loveable" when describing stories featuring dead children and dismemberments.

 

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