Next up was this Japanese horror movie. So a bit of backstory here is that Jess had asked a group of her horror-loving friends for a recommendation for me specifically, based on the requirement that it be as weird as possible, and apparently this is what came up.

So I was pretty excited by that, but also not sure how weird it would really be. Answer: pretty friggin’ weird!

To the extent that I was expecting anything specific, I was thinking it might be kind of like Ugetsu, with a kind of ghost story thing going on. And I guess it does have a ghost story, but it’s nothing like the quiet of Ugetsu, it’s full of manic, chaotic energy that reminds me of nothing so much as Věra Chytilová’s Daisies.

Visually, it’s wacky: Scene transitions are super-weird, abrupt or surreal or using special effects in strange ways (including a picture-in-picture thing that seems like it would have been hard to do in 1977). It has some of that not-quite-a-sketch-show feel of Daisies in that respect. But really, you can go beyond transitions to just say that it’s visually weird all around — hyperkinetic and hyperstylized and full of random artifice (like matte-painting backgrounds of a landscape that then the camera pulls back from and they’re just a random billboard in the middle of a real field).

But then, why stop at the style? It’s also tonally weird, jumping from slapstick to creepy horror to gore almost moment by moment. The characters are weird, a bunch of teen girls with nicknames that encapsulate their personalities (“Prof” is smart, “Gorgeous” is pretty, “Melody” plays the piano, “Mac” eats a lot and is fat except they forgot to cast someone fat in the role so you only know this from dialogue, etc). There’s a weird cat with glowy eyes. The girls die in poetically-appropriate ways like they were in a chocolate factory.

Stripped down to its basics, the plot is actually kind of straightforward and familiar, but… there’s just no way you can ignore all the many very strange trappings around that normal core. This movie is just really very distinctive and strange.

I went into this knowing nothing about what it was, and so spent almost the entire runtime bemused. I don’t know if this movie is actually good as such, but it sure as hell is memorable, and I suspect I’d be up for watching it again someday. (I can’t help but think that this would also be an amazing movie to have a RiffTrax of.)