Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God - Part I (

1986

)

We begin with images of disgusting, pulsating, quivering meat that occasionally vomits up a mysterious gelatinous substance. This is, of course, the titular monster, but in this initial sequence, it is almost impossible to tell just what the hell we're supposed to be looking at. Guzoo has no discernible anatomy, being little more than a writhing mass of tentacles and a massive gaping maw. Indeed, the creature's anatomy and proportions seem to shift and alter from one scene to another, always having as many tentacles as it needs to effectively menace however many schoolgirls are on screen. It is a wonderfully effective creature, invoking real feelings of dread and revulsion in the viewer. Hell, even a veteran gore fanatic like me gets a little uneasy looking at this thing. Few horror movie monsters have ever looked so disturbingly unclean.

From there we immediately cut to extreme closeups of a young woman getting ready to go out. The camera lingers fetishisticly on small details like how she applies her eye shadow, or how she clips her garter-belt. At this point, I assumed the film was making a point about the duality of sexual attraction. On one hand, you have the beautiful woman and on the other hand, a grotesque monster symbolizing, respectively, the more human and animalistic aspects of sexual attraction. After all, erotic love is nearly always fixated on more than just a woman's most beautiful features; we fall in love with more than just a woman's eyes!

Yet this interpretation falls short of explaining Guzoo, because as far as I can tell we will never see this particular lady again in the film's brief runtime. Moreover, we don't even see this type of girl ever again, as immediately following this the film shifts focus to follow four schoolgirls who are all very much on the cute side of the cute-sexy divide. They wear baggy clothing, sport minimal makeup, and give the impression that they probably haven't had their first kiss yet. They're not even fetishized in a creepy Lolita kind of way, coming off more than anything like a live-action cast of a "cute girls doing cute things" anime. Indeed, the sexiest thing these girls do is frolic in a pool for five minutes near the film's midpoint. It's not that they're unattractive, it's just that I cannot imagine doing anything more intimate with any of them than holding hands under the school bleachers.

Evidently, Guzoo agrees with me, as despite this being a movie about a tentacle monster attacking teenage girls, the titular Thing never molests any of them. Those looking for a live-action version of The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife or Urotsukidoji: The Legend of the Overfiend (1989) will certainly be disappointed. The closest it ever comes to something like that is when Guzoo rams a tentacle down the throat of one poor girl, but this seems to be less as a way to evoke oral sex and more of an excuse for director Kazuo Komizu to show the girl's chest explode in an admittedly pretty impressive practical effect trick-shot. The monster is interested not in sexual pleasure but instead in a desire to simply kill and eat the girls. It's about as wholesome as a sleazy, shot-on-video, tentacle-themed, gore-fest can get!

Not much is explained about the titular monster during the film's runtime, which is all for the better as a creature as gross and weird as Guzoo works better the less we know about it. All we know about its origin and nature is what we can glean from a cryptic opening text crawl and the striking title given to it by the film's name. It's ancient, it likes to eat teen girls, it can teleport through nearby mirrors, and it is repelled by the soothing sounds of an ocarina. Not much to go on, but the creature is weird enough and memorable enough that it doesn't matter and its obscurity heightens the mystery rather than just making it dull.

As mentioned above, the plot follows four teenage girls who are on vacation to the countryside. Minako, who is the daughter of a professor of archaeology, Yuka who is a bit of a crybaby, Kazuko/Kachin who fancies herself as a teenage super-sleuth, and Mayumi who lacks any real characterization. Presumably, the actresses are a bit older than the characters they are portraying but the Land of the Rising Sun is also the Land of Eternal Baby-Faces so a gaijin like me is only able to pinpoint their ages as somewhere between 16 and 36. The film features naturalistic performances from its, mostly, non-professional cast, giving the whole thing a feeling of authenticity. This is aided somewhat by the film's willingness to lavish long periods of its incredibly brief run-time (around 40 minutes) on humdrum, mundane activities. Seriously, about an eighth of this film is devoted to watching the girls play a card game!

Eventually, the girls check into an inn run by Kujo, a researcher who is working with Minako's father. How she wound up running an inn in addition to compiling her notes on a long-lost but highly advanced civilization is anyone's guess. Likewise, it's not entirely clear what this ancient civilization has to do with the shambling, extra-dimensional abomination that Kujo has locked up in the basement. At least we can deduce why she's left running the inn all by her lonesome, as presumably, she fed the rest of the staff to Guzoo, as it seems like she has every intention of doing the same to her four nubile guests. Though again for what purpose is anyone's guess, and even her actions in this respect are pretty contradictory, as one of her first actions is to sneak into the girls' room (a comically crowded closet with four beds that looks like nothing so much as a room you would rent in Final Fantasy V [1992]) and smash their compact mirrors. She does this presumably to keep Guzoo from attacking them through these mirrors, but as we learn later on she has mirrors scattered all over the property for the creature to attack them at its leisure.

Kujo is also absolutely awful at keeping her plans secret from the girls, with each escalation leading to a lamer and lamer excuse from her. When Yuka is attacked and cut in the pool, Kujo says it was probably just a Kamaitachi, a weasel-like yokai that flies through the air in a dust devil and occasionally cuts people with its huge claws. It would be like an American blaming a scratch on a gremlin or a fairy, not the sort of thing you would expect from a serious scientist. When Guzoo attacks Yuka again while she's out for a late-night snack, this time leaving a nasty gash on her cheek, Kujo says she must have been bitten by a mouse or a bird or something. When the girl persists and says she's pretty damn sure she was almost strangled by a tentacle, Kujo threatens to send all four girls home if they “keep making a fuss.”

When Yuka is finally killed by the monster, Kujo tries to play it off as no big deal, urging the girls to not call the police and instead just wait for Yuka to wander back home. This is the last straw for Kachin who has been suspicious of Kujo ever since she noticed a foul smell coming out of the locked basement, and she has the other girls tie her up when she goes to investigate. Unfortunately for her, Guzoo must be able to alter reality around itself because as soon as she opens the basement door she falls into a misty cavern, landing in the dingy basement where the beast is imprisoned before being promptly devoured.

Opening the locked basement door has freed the vicious monster and Guzoo will spend the remainder of the film's short run-time killing Kujo and then chasing down the remaining girls. This is unfortunately the moment where the rather impressive Guzoo monster looks the least dignified, and at times even begins to approach the sheer silliness of The Creeping Terror (1964). It was a grave mistake to try and make this puppet climb up a flight of stairs! That said when the main body of the creature is not in frame, the tentacles remain consistently revolting and disturbing.

Guzoo is pretty much everything I want from a 40 minute, Japanese horror movie. There is some incredible gore, some cute girls, a character that ineptly gaslights the protagonists about the obvious danger they are in, and some truly inexplicable events towards the ending that I can only hope are confusing to me because of a cultural disconnect (seriously what is the significance of the turtle?). It's a modest film with modest ambitions, but it goes the extra mile to achieve them. The short run-time is a blessing as well, I can imagine an alternate universe where Guzoo felt obligated to stretch out its run-time to an hour and a half, and as a result, became just another snooze-fest with a few cool death scenes.