This early film by Shinya Tsukamoto, the Japanese provocateur behind the Tetsuo films and such other arty shockers as Bullet Ballet and Tokyo Fist, switches gears here for a more lighthearted (but no less violent) style kaiju picture. If his other work often gets compared to David Cronenberg, this film might be his tip of the hat to the early work of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson.

Set mostly in an abandoned (for the summer) high school campus and the woods surrounding it (I've already got you thinking about Evil Dead, don't I?), Hiruko the Goblin is a malevolent spirit that is buried beneath the campus that is currently causing those who straggle around the campus to lose their heads. As the film begins, professor Takashi Yabe comes across something mysterious in a cave.

Or maybe it's not so mysterious, because soon after he and Tsukishima, a young student glimpse some kind of creature in the cave, they're attacked pretty quickly. (I have to admit, Tsukamoto doesn't really set up what the young girl's relationship is to the other characters until a little later in the film, and for a while there this gives these early scenes between the professor and the young girl kind of a creepy feeling ... as in, why are this old man and this really young girl hanging out together ...)

From there, you could say all hell literally breaks loose, Before too long, young Masao, the professor's son, is hooking up with Tsukishima, though maybe not as he wanted to. Because while she was the object of his affections when the movie begins, now she's basically coming back as a kind of severed medusa head with a long tongue that would just not be very pleasant to French kiss. (Visually, she reminded me of Norris' severed head in John Carpenter's The Thing after it sprouted the spider legs.) One of the professor's former students, Hieda, shows up bearing all sorts of ghostbuster gizmos, and soon he and Masao are roaming around the halls on the run from demons and a seemingly posessed janitor that seems a little to hell-bent on protecting the school grounds.

Masao also begins the movie with several friends that don't survive for too many reels. This gives us two things, a steady, gory body count at the start of the movie and a chance for the faces of the dead kids to mysteriously burn themselves into Masao's back. Apparently Hiruko wants something from Masao ...

Soon our two intrepid heroes find the cave where Masao's father disappeared with the young lady, and a seriously grotesque case of the crabs ensue ... or rather, they discover a den of creatures that look part crustacean, part insect, and part fish (whoever decides to make another H.P. Lovecraft movie needs to look up the effects crew from this fim) and Masao's father makes a return appearance (for the gore shot that adorns the dvd cover) and let's just say wackiness ensues from there.

One thing that struck me about the film is the goofiness of the humor. While a great deal of black humor runs rampant through most of his other films, here Tsukamoto works with a lighter touch. In the interview with him that is included on the dvd, he states that he wanted to make a film in the tradition of the monster shows he watched on tv as a kid. Although I wouldn't exactly call this a movie for kids, the mood is a pretty damned daffy.

Media Blasters and Fangoria, two distinguished brands in the horror film world, have teamed up to bring us this dvd, the debut title in an upcoming line of "International Shockers" which will include Paul Naschy's Rojo Sangre, Takashi Miike's One Missed Call and Deadly Outlaw Rekka, and Choking Hazard (trailers for all of which are included on the dvd, in addition to Hiruko's trailer). Judging from this dvd, the rest of the line should be pretty impressive.

The transfer is good, considering that most Japanese horror films from the last twenty years were shot on some kind of heavy blue-washed film stock and Hiruko is no exception to that tradition (which might be why Tsukamoto works so much in tinted black and whites on so many of his other films)

Other extras besides the trailers and the Tsukamoto interview (in keeping with the lighter tone of the movie, he seems pretty happy talking about the movie) include an interview and demo footage with the fx designer (in a segment titled Goblin Creation) that is pretty informative, if a little dry, and a photo gallery of stills and publicity materials.

Hiruko The Goblin is a fun little movie, and even though, as I said, this isn't the kind of movie you'd show a little kid, it did remind me in a way of the Godzilla movies I watched as a kid, so I'd have to say Tsukamoto was successful in his intentions. But using the quality of his other work as a yardstick, I'm not surprised.