Uzumaki Director: Higuchinsky Number of Items: 1 Format: Color, Closed-captioned Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Running Time: 90 minutes Studio: ELITE ENTERTAINMENT Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2004-07-06 Buy from Amazon

Customer Reviews: Total numer of reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 "twisted" i was a bit surprised with the amount of creepy stuff they put into this horror movie. with a few details that were off, i was almost impressed. this movie should be remade, as other japanese horror flicks have been, with a little larger budget and people who took a few acting lessons. the soundtrack for the mostpart needs to be redone. at times when creepy music should have been played, they chose cheery happy music which totally threw the intended mood off. this movie was very subliminal. they had spirals everywhere, in just about every scene you could possibly imagine. if the scene was slowed down on something that seemed unimportant, take a look around and you will see an uzumaki. overall, it was interesting. if you are into japanese horror, you probably already know what to expect. they have an unusual way of doing these movies, which makes them original and makes me curious. ""Turning and turning in the widening gyre"" The blurb on the disk for this film calls it 'groundbreaking,' but I'm not sure that I would give it quite that much credit. But weird and spooky it certainly it as it tells the story of a high school couple (Kirie and Shuichi) who are trying to cope with having reality pulled out from under them. Uzumaki means vortex or spiral - I prefer the former as it better describes what happens to the people of Kurouzo, starting with Shuichi's father, Toshio. The latter starts out collecting examples of spiral patterns and gradually loses his mind and then his body to the spinning gyres. Toshio's cremation is the pebble that sends ripples of strangeness through the tiny town. Soon Kirie's father is acting like a space cadet, people are growing snail shells, sliming their way up buildings, and cutting off the whorls on their fingertips. A journalist discovers hints of an older religion in the Kurouzo region. This ties together several fragmentary ideas (mirror and snake have different characters, but are pronounced the same). Something hidden has reawaken, and the people of the town are due to become its new worshippers. A fate that Kirie and her boyfriend struggle desperately to avoid. This is a noir story as much as it is a horror tale, with a vision of a horrible, unstoppable fate that 'slouches toward Bethlehem' (if you will let me borrow a line from Yeats). It is easy to oversimplify the rampant symbolism and seize on a singular interpretation, but lying below the obvious universals of transformation is an entire tier of Japanese legend and belief. 'Interpret at your own risk' should be stamped on every DVD.\ The acting is transparent. Eriko Hatsume and Fhi Fan do such a wonderful job of carrying over the nature of teenagers confronted with the impossible that often, the subtitles are unnecessary. There is some self consciousness in the work of others, but not that much, and the film's low key build to crisis is a refreshing change from the flying vampire sisters and similar effects driven work that we have come to think of a s standard fare. Indeed, Uzumaki glories in its low budget spirit. Effects are minimal, and hearken back to simpler times. Yet the suspense is real even if believability is occasionally sacrificed to the gods of whimsy. The end result is a film with an uneasy, almost documentary, style that leaves the viewer with the feeling that there is far more to be told. "Uhm....huh?" This film had a lot of potential. Beautiful cinematography, PERFECT mood settings, very nice acting (with the exception of this one crazy chick... who was incredibly over the top.) Even the music kicked. The story would've been a lot stronger with a little more explanation. "The Curse of the Vortex" tells me pretty much nothing. Who put it there? Why? What IS it?? None of these questions are really answer. Perhaps hinted at, but never answered. I know some things are meant to be open for interpretation, but this was just a bit too much. Plenty of crazy and bizarre stuff happens. But why? Because it's the curse of the vortex, duh. Gee, thanks. This could've easily been my favorite movie if it hadn't ignored the fact that it was leaving me completely freaking clueless at every turn. I feel the film may have been an excuse to make a lot of weird stuff happen and show off some nifty effects, of which there are many. If you like your movies to have good strong stories, stay away unless you like crazy stuff that goes unexplained. "What happened?!" I was a big fan of the commics. Read all three. I was excited when i heard there was a movie made from them! What i saw was a badly put together combination of some of the short horror stories from the comics. They didn't even bother to explain half of what went on. they just showed short scenes that made refrence to some of the creepiest drawn comics I personally have read. I was VERY dissapointed. "The Downward Spiral" "Uzumaki" is about Obession. Everybody has an obsession. We obsess over sex, booze, guns, cars, fancy houses, state-of-the-art kitchens. The degree to which we do so ranges from the innocently intrigued to the psychotically fixated. Those are the standard degrees of obsession, anyway. The villagers of the doomed town of Kurouzu have managed to develop a new degree, a level of obsession that travels well beyond fixation and brings an entirely new meaning to the phrase "body modification". I have a few of the more common obsessions, but my big one has always been whales. I am simultaneously compelled by and revulsed by them; terrified by their gigantism. Whales lumber beneath the waves; you can't see them, down below your yacht, but in the depths they slip along, dark Leviathans. I know, rationally, that whales are gentle beasts unless provoked---but the rational rarely intrudes on the Obsessive. When I was six, I was running across the playground of my school to get to class; it was early in a rain-swept, battleship-grey sky of a typical Oregon morning. The clouds were tearing across the sky; I happened to look up---horrors!---above me, stretched across the dome of the slate-grey sky, was a huge cloud in the shape of a blue whale, vast, terrifying. It would crush me. It would destroy me with its immensity. I think I screamed, and bolted shrieking for the radiator-warmed safety blanket of my 1st grade class. Now: the cloud above my Oregon schoolhouse was part of my obsession, but it couldn't harm me. Imagine a cloud that *could. Imagine that, and you have "Uzumaki", a warped, hugely creepy wallop of King Cobra venom left to percolate and then decanted by Higuchinsky, a director born in the Ukraine and carrying out his diabolic art in Japan. "Uzumaki" burrows in and gets right to work. Japanese schoolgirl protagonist Kirie (Eriko Hatsune, great at suspending my disbelief) is on her way to meet boyfriend Shuichi (Fhi Fan, equally good and totally serious to the bitter end) when she sees his father, Toshio Saito (Ren Osugi, who carries the role of crazed daddy like a champ and becomes something of a special effect himself not long into the flick), frozen in place by a fence, training his camcorder on something tiny that is affixed to the fence. Something fascinating. He is fixed in position, regarding the spot on the fence with his camera like a sniper, his attention so rapt on his subject that Mr. Saito is oblivious to Kirie's greeting. Kirie, uncomfortable and perplexed, stands this way for a few minutes, then moves close to Mr. Saito to get a good look at whatever subject could prove so compelling. It is a snail. Mr. Saito appears particularly consumed with the spiral pattern on its shell. Talking with boyfriend Shuichi (a childhood friend) later, Kirie learns that Mr. Saito has changed: he has become obsessed with the Spiral design. He has given himself over entirely to his new fixation: he has devoted his workshop, several tatami rooms, and his entire basement to artwork and artifacts designed in the shape of a spiral. Mr. Saito totes his camcorder all over town, filming anything with a spiral shape or form (which entails a lot of things: the snail shell, patterns in clouds, the play of water running across a street or sidewalk, the whorls that make up your fingerprints---and clouds, of course). He insists on eating nothing but miso soup with spiral-patterned tofu floating in it. When wife Yukie (Keiko Takahashi) runs out of her husband's favorite, he stirs his soup frantically with his chopstick until the liquid's oscillation sates him and he can eat. Dad, Shuichi explains with a firm grasp of the obvious, has changed. Indeed he has. And things are about to take a massive, goopy turn for the decidedly worse.For one thing, Shuichi's dad commissions pottery (formed into a spiral pattern, naturally) from Kirie's father Yasuo (Taro Suwa, who has bit parts in the original "Ju-On" and "Tomie"), meaning that Yasuo becomes a charter member of the town's growing Uzumaki fanclub. Soon Shuichi's dad decides to bond with the family washing machine, and one of Kirie's schoolmates kills himself by hurtling down the center of a spiral staircase. And best of all, the fun is just getting started.You know how crazy ideas are: they spread like a virus. We have a word for this nearly viral transmission of raw ideas: the Meme. Uzumaki is an idea with fangs, with teeth, with claws. Uzumaki, alarmingly quickly, is the Idea made Word, the Word made Flesh. Best of all, director Higuchinksy's style calls to mind an understated Tim Burton, darkly whimsical, and considerably more deadly, as if Burton were directing with a pocket full of razorblades. That said: the less you know going into "Uzumaki", the more you'll enjoy it. Higuchinsky and cinematographer Gen Kobayashi excel in making the most of both their miniscule budget, as well as tiny moments of horrific grue that speak volumes of horror in seconds of film. Consider Kirie's trip to the darkened Saito residence: revel in the long shot of the shadowy house and forested grounds, the brooding silence broken up every few minutes by Kirie's wheedling "anyone there"? Or take that scene on Saito's front porch; his glassy stare; his muscles and facial features taut and rigid and defiant with obsession and insanity: this alone is sheer perfection, but Higuchinksy takes it to the next level with Saito's eyes. There is more forbidden, infectious, invading evil in 2 minutes of "Uzumaki"---take the crematorium scene alone!---than in 5 conventional horror flicks. Stylistically "Uzumaki" plays like a Tim Burton flick gone rabid, that shucked off its gentle whimsy and went feral, first poisoning and then devouring everything in its path, and then eating itself like a fat, hungry sea-slug, chitinous tail first. "Uzumaki" has all the terror of a fever dream, and all the sincerity of war. This one will give you nightmares. JSG