Something lurks past the garden gate; do you dare to investigate?
All posts by Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies)
CHANNEL 366: JUNJO ITO MANIAC: JAPANESE TALES OF THE MACABRE (2023)
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DIRECTED BY: Uncredited
FEATURING: Bill Milsap (English dub)
PLOT: Twenty short, dreamlike horror stories from manga artist Junjo Ito, spread out over twelve episodes.
COMMENTS: A woman’s sneering face appears in a monsoon of psychedelic mandalas, singing along to the raucous theme song as various scars and deformities flicker across her visage. A nail-chewing boy in a yellow raincoat climbs out of an abandoned refrigerator and into the vertical-hold challenged stories playing on a TV set across the alley.
Those are the opening and closing sequences of “Junjo Ito Maniac,” and they set a maniacal tone that the content they bookend rarely matches. Not that the actual stories lack for deranged imagination; any anthology containing the tale of an angelic blond salesman in a bow tie who peddles mounds of deadly, addictive ice cream to children isn’t short on creepy inventiveness. But there are two basic problems with the series. One is the animation itself, which, despite the rambunctious promise of the opening and closing numbers, often isn’t really animated. It’s usually a succession of stills where only the characters’ mouths move. Ito’s images are often eerily beautiful, but the series comes off as too cheaply produced to do them justice. The other issue is that the majority of the stories, some of which run for just over five minutes, are often inconclusive, feeling like simple statements of surreal premises rather than fleshed-out horrors. Their brevity does, perhaps, makes them more dreamlike; their economy means they tend to serve best as bedtime snacks to fuel snippets of nightmares.
The biggest exception is the one must-see episode in this collection, “Layers of Terror.” At a mere fifteen minutes, this twisted psychological parable about a mother who longs to return her child to a state of infantile dependency delivers its meaty anti-moral through a grotesquely literal (and bizarrely impossible) metaphor. Other highlights include “The Hanging Balloon,” about an unlikely apocalyptic plague of floating heads with nooses attached, and “Tomb Town,” a story that starts promisingly with a trip to a neighborhood completely overrun by tombstones. The series assays an effective variety of horror moods, from the prominent surreal horror to stories evoking the spirits of Lovecraft (“Library Vision”) and Charles Addams (“The Strange Hikizuri Siblings”) to ironically cruel fables (“The Bully”). Even though few of the entries are solid hits, the diversity of textures coupled with the ultra-short format makes “Maniac” an assortment of poison bon-bons worth sharing with your best friend… or enemy.
As a bonus, the conclusion of each episode includes a few short spoken sentences of a continuing story about a man driven mad by bugs that seem to be… well, you can find out for yourself. Aside from that perk, the episodes can be watched in any order, or selectively skipped.
Junjo Ito is perhaps best known to readers here as the original author of the killer-spiral horror story adapted into the live action feature Uzumaki (2000). He’s a prolific manga storyteller in Japan, alternating between short story collections like these, longer works like “Uzumaki,” and collections featuring recurring characters (including the bewitching Tomei, who appears in one story here, and impish nail-chewing teen Soichi, who appears twice in “Maniac” and also anchors the closing segment.) “Junjo Ito: Japanese Tales of the Macabre” was created by Studi Deen, who had released a previous collection of Ito shorts in Japan, in collaboration with Netflix, who owns exclusive streaming rights.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
R.I.P. ALFRED EAKER
Late Saturday, I received sad word that our own Alfred Eaker had passed away. No further details were provided. I don’t even know his exact age; I believe he was in his early 60s.
Alfred’s contribution to this site, from almost the very beginning, was immeasurable. He was the first contributor here besides myself. Although he had scaled back his writing here to pursue other projects, he was still engaged with 366 Weird Movies; in fact, he had ambitions for a written series running through the entire video nasties list. He recorded this podcast episode with me (others were planned) a mere three weeks ago:
Alfred was the kind of guy who became famous (here) more for what he hated than for what he loved. But when he loved something—Ed Wood, or classic Westerns, or opera, or Chaplin, or Ken Russel, or Andrei Tarkovsky, or Mahler, or Picasso—his passions matched or exceeded his excoriations. Alfred’s loves were no more secrets than his hatreds. It’s just that his hatreds tended to draw more offended commenters.
For every reference to “Mango Mussolini” or such you read in Alfred’s essays, be sure I edited out at least one other. But although I didn’t always agree with whatever outrageously elaborate insult Alfred drifted into whenever he sensed the presence of Trumpists, evangelicals, or assorted “constipated critics,” I let him say it, because it came from the heart. Alfred annoyed a lot of readers, and admittedly he earned the site a hearty handful of hate-clicks, but whatever broadsides he launched were aimed at what he honestly viewed as cultural threats.
Over the weekend, I culled through hundreds of pages of Alfred’s writing to select a few of my favorite gems below. (If printed, Alfred’s contributions to the site would take up several volumes on a 366 bookshelf). This is, I think, the best tribute I could give him: to let him speak in his own words. Please enjoy.
“I rarely set out to push people’s buttons. I just don’t give a hoot or a holler if I do, and I believe it’s an artist’s ethical responsibility to have the balls to write without inhibition and to always take an attitude of saying to hell with the status quo (and everything has the potential to develop its own status quo, even weird movie aficionados).”–Alfred Eaker on a decade of writing for 366 Weird Movies
“… essentially a 21st century update of Animal House… a bodiless set of redneck testicles.”–Alfred on Avengers: Infinity War
“When I saw that 366 Weird Movies’ readers had topped themselves in sadism with this year’s summer blockbuster picks (a video game, a Disney, AND a comic book movie) you can understand why I, Continue reading R.I.P. ALFRED EAKER
SATURDAY SHORT: STREAKS ON THE CHINA (2011)
A vaudevillian sings about “streaks on the china.”
CAPSULE: SKINAMARINK (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Kyle Edward Ball
FEATURING: Dali Rose Tetreault, Lucas Paul, Ross Paul, Jamie Hill
PLOT: Young Kevin and Kaylee find themselves in the house alone late at night, hearing bumps, seeing poltergeist activity, and eventually conversing with unseen voices.
COMMENTS: Everything you’ve heard about Skinamarink is true. Yes, it is made up of often-silent, oddly-framed, static-fogged shots of doors, lamps, and Legos. The sparse dialogue is occasionally inaudible. Items move mysteriously and gravity is briefly reversed, but the liveliest action comes from public domain cartoons. There are no clear explanations, and some of the information we do receive is contradictory. It’s boring, and it’s mesmerizing, and it’s tedious, and it’s terrifying. Even its most ardent defenders will likely concede that, at 100 minutes, it’s unjustifiably long. It may be best conceptualized as unedited, jumbled security camera footage from a child’s nightmare.
Skinamrink defies analysis. It puts you into the point of view of a child dealing with a nighttime world that’s simultaneously familiar and strange, your mind coping with your lack of understanding by filling in details. As much as any film we’ve ever reviewed, Skinamarink invites you to create your own narrative, whether you view it as a supernatural haunting, a metaphor for abuse, or simply a feature length immersion in childhood fears. If you’re looking for clues, perhaps pay attention to the first line of clearly spoken dialogue, which occurs twelve minutes in—although even that nugget of information is capable of multiple interpretations.
I can’t unconditionally recommend Skinamrink, but I can’t deny its power, either. As with all experimental cinema, your results will vary in proportion to your disposition, your patience, and the amount of work and imagination you’re willing to put into it. I will say that, if you’re not frightened off by excessive minimalism and the idea of murky visions, whispered conversations, and twisted nostalgia for a time when you were frightened of the boogeyman and monsters under your bed appeals to you, then you should definitely seek out Skinamarink.
Skinamarink got an unlikely theatrical run for a microbudget film, generating good word of mouth, bad word of mouth, and bitter arguments among horror fans. Though falling well short of inciting a Blair Witch style audience mania, it’s safe to assume the project has more than earned back its $15,000 budget.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: