Not to be dissuaded by comas, kappa possession and curses, director Kudo (Shigeo Ohsako), assistant Ichikawa (Chika Kuboyama) and camera guy Tashiro (Koji Shiraishi) follow yet another viewer tape into trouble. First, an exploration of one of my favourite urban legends, Toilet Hanako, quickly leads into an epic, cheap and confusing tale of time travel and parallel dimensions. Then, our protagonist take on the curse of Oiwa.
It’s at this part of the Senritsu Kaiki File series where Koji Shiraishi truly hits his stride for me. Both films are jam-packed with a very Shiraishi mixture of off-beat humour, Japanese folklore and folk culture, weird history High Strangeness and scenes of people running around like chicken with their heads cut off (which also happens to be how you can travel through time, apparently). There are quite a few moments in here where the director/writer (and so on) seems to have feverishly scratched down a number of crazy high concepts and ideas, realized that he’d need a Marvel budget to actually get them on screen believably, and decided to just go with them as far as he can get with some ultra cheap CGI that makes parallel dimensions look surprisingly close to the animations in Monty Python sketches (and I’m pretty sure he knows this), a handful of locations and actors, and a whole lot of crazed enthusiasm. Despite Shiraishi actually being a technically perfectly accomplished director, there’s obviously very little that is slick about the resulting films, but they are wild, raw and energetic, full of ideas – good, bad and absolutely bonkers – and feel a lot as if they were made in the spirit of punk rock.
Rather regularly, Shiraishi hits on an image or a scene that’s more creepy than crazy, as well, adding some genuine horror into a series that’s otherwise more interested in the capital-w Weird. Which is not a complaint from me, either way.
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