Ero-Guro Puke-a-Thon: Three Japanese straight to video shockers

Watching these scuzzbucket straight-to-video Japanese scary tales will make you want to wash your eyeballs in the best way possible. The sparse no-fi presentation make these short and sweet horror movies seem like demonic transmissions beamed from another dimension. The mysterious origins and production history create an air of danger, the forbidden. Who buried these cinematic boundary pushers deep in the internet for adventurous terror freaks to behold?

Curse of Kazuo Umezu

Full Movie: https://youtu.be/-TWqwKQngyI

I have a pretty low tolerance for anime, but The Curse of Kazuo Umezu actually spooked me in a way that only a junky janky kind-of-scummy early '90s horror cartoon from Japan could! The character designs are typical Umezu bug-eyed kids animated in a choppy fashion that almost makes The Curse look like some perverted outsider art made by a grown man with an eye for high school girls. But the monster designs are outta this world grotesque: gigantic mouths crowded with rows of needle teeth, heads sliding off shoulders in fountains of blood, rotting ghost visages sagging with scars and wrinkles.  Brrr! I can't even picture a live action movie nailing this rough yet inventive splatter style. 

An anthology, The Curse’s scary tales unfold with a patient, restrained pace that really slithers under the skin and spreads like a nightmare of inherited vampirism. The Lovecraftian horror of being too petrified to confront your darkest fear but also too consumed with perverse intrigue to run or look away. Repressed trauma builds until it overflows and eats you alive in the most gruesome marrow sucking way imaginable. A girl plagued by grotesque nightmares finds a truth bearing videotape that she’s too terrified to watch. A haunted house ensnares the same panicked teens night after night until fantasy and reality blur. I wish there were more amazing Umezu adaptations! Peep his work and this movie if you want to see what kept baby Junji Ito up at night.

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Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God

Full Movie: https://youtu.be/Ztsuv1Iuzj0

Guzoo feels like some filth encrusted home video voyeur’s personal jackoff tape pulled from a cobwebbed crate of splatter bootlegs. The natural lighting, sparse set, gauzy image quality, and amateurish performances make the movie feel like some forbidden verité object. A static camera leers at extended gore set pieces where tentacles burst from chest cavities and serrate flesh. For such a low budget, the monster design looks as impressive, elaborate, and dripping gross as anything Hollyweird pushed in the ’80s.

A sparse and menacing House riff, Guzoo focuses on a teen girl and her friends visiting her father’s cabin in the countryside. However, the house hides a malevolent bloodthirsty creature ripped straight from the pages of weird fiction. Guzoo whips raw with buckets of blood, pulsing behemoth orifices, and prolonged sequences of high schooler dismemberment. A movie so otherworldly disgusting, yet clinical and removed, I could feel it seep stinking into my bones. I needed a shower once the credits rolled.   

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Mermaid in a Manhole

Not the torture porn shlock horror so many scaredy cats led me to believe!

If anything, Mermaid in a Manhole feels mournful and almost poetic in its lingering gaze on a decomposing muse/past. A painter finds a dying mermaid in a sewer.  Remembering her from his youth swimming in a river, he drags her back to his apartment to capture her portrait. However, removed from her natural environment, the mermaid festers and rots until boils swell and flesh peels. The painter grasps desperately to a former sunnier life ’til he chokes its very memory and worms crawl. The tone never feels malicious or perverse, and the whole movie works as a meditation on grief and letting go that so many elevated modern horror mannequins posture like hip new threads nowadays. No matter how he tries to ease the mermaid’s pain, the artist can never make her whole again. He can’t restore the pollution choked sewer to a river or remember his youth without it turning to ash between his fingers.

Did I mention I’m a sucker for blurred SOV late ’80s Japanese cramped nowhere apartments? And Cronenberg’s The Fly has about the same level of egghead gore? Ignore the exaggerated splatter infamy and let this sad meditative festering dirge wrap its tail around you!