Kazuo Umezu’s Horror Theater: Present (

2005

) ½

I fell into horror manga the way most Westerners do, by reading the major works of Junji Ito. I was immediately captivated by his macabre tales that while they were grotesque remained nonetheless romantic. Having exhausted the Ito works available to me, I noticed that nearly every biography of his listed another mangaka as an influence on Ito works: Kazuo Umezu. I made an attempt at reading Umezu's best-known work, The Drifting Classroom but was forced to abandon it almost immediately. The translation I'd found was obviously the work of someone with a limited understanding of the English language, but the problems went deeper than that. Umezu's artistic style was immediately off-putting. His characters, even the normal humans among them, all look like grotesquely misshapen dolls. His perspective is all over the place, at times looking more like a medieval painting than a modern artwork. Still, when armed with a better translation of his work, there is something deeply compelling about Umezu. His work has a sort of insane dream logic governing it that is at once consistent and completely inexplicable. He is very much one of those extremely bizarre Japanese auteurs (I have yet to see a photo of him where he was not dressed like Where's Waldo) along the lines of Hideo Kojima, Sion Sono, and Swery. The eccentricity of those latter examples may be feigned to a certain extent (especially Sion Sono) but in Umezu's case, I'm convinced that it is 100% authentic, if only because he predates the trends marketability by a couple of decades. Consequently, Umezuo's vision is a bit easier to take in when it's filtered through an artist who is not stark raving mad. As a result, I get a lot more enjoyment out of adaptations of his work like The Curse of Kazuo Umezu (1990), The Drifting Classroom (1987), or today's film a rare Japanese yule-tide horror movie.

Now obviously, Christmas is not celebrated the same in Japan as it is in the West. Since Christians in Japan comprise a tiny minority of the population, there are no religious overtones to the festivities. The holiday is effectively a Japanese equivalent of a hallmark holiday, bearing the most resemblance to Valentine's Day. In addition to gift-giving, general good-cheer, and fried chicken (thanks to a preternaturally successful KFC advertising campaign in the 1970s), Christmas in Japan is considered a romantic time for young couples. That's why Yuka and her two friends have decided to invite a trio of male paramours out for drinks and then a quick roll in the hay at a local Love Hotel designed to look like a European castle (hey, I've heard of stranger and more elaborate love hotels). Yuka has plans to bed a certain guy, a slightly more thoughtful youth than his friends named Ryosuke, by playing the part of the innocent virgin. She manages this with such skill that neither Ryosuke nor the audience suspects a thing until well after the deed has been done, despite the fact that on the surface her actions are hardly those of an ingenue. Hell, she even tells Ryosuke point-blank in her Christmas card that his present this year is her!

Of course, Santa isn't going to accept a bunch of horny teens defiling his holy day in such flagrant fashion. So as soon as their misdeeds are consummated, Old Saint Nick appears and starts to chop the kids up and feed them to his two reindeer (the relative dearth of reindeer, two instead of nine, is either the result of a budget shortage or a genuine misunderstanding about Western Christmas mythology). Why Santa is going to such lengths to target these teens is beyond me, surely they can't be the only people having premarital sex in the world. It's also a little baffling to see Santa (at this point effectively the secular/capitalist face of Christmas) mentioned in the same breath as the day is sacred. Wouldn't Christ be the one a bit more peeved at some illicit fucking on his birthday? Evidently, Santa has been training with ninjas, because instead of the usual knives and tire irons, his weapon of choice is a hybrid between a shuriken and a kusarigama, with which he easily carves up most of the teens, killing two off-camera and taking out another before Yuka and Ryosuke even know what is going on. This happens around the 20-minute mark, and the kids will spend most of the remaining run-time (minus the time devoted to the surreal twist ending) running for their lives.

From the very start, the film feels surreal. Part of it is the garish neon lighting that wouldn't look out of place in Mario Bava's Kill, Baby... Kill! (1966). Every interior in the movie for the movie is illuminated by some combination of blood-red, putrid green, and electric purple. But the oddness doesn't stop there, no even the very shot composition is bizarre. Mundane conversations are filmed with eccentric Hitchcockian angles that seemed designed to make the audience wonder just what the hell is going on here? Scene transitions are odd affairs that don't so much as elucidate the surroundings as catapult the viewer into new and uncertain landscapes. The fact that the film opens in a night club, filled with various Asiatic religious icons (mainly Buddhist and Hindu, at least when judged by my un-discerning eye) only makes the impression of oddness stronger when we're reminded that this is an explicitly Christian holiday. Once the killing starts things only get odder still, with different characters claiming to see a different figure pursuing them, with one of the girls claiming that it is a woman chasing them while Ryosuke recognizes Santa as his father. Then there's the pretense of the dream within a dream narrative that suggests everything we're seeing is somehow the dream of a child Yuka on the night of Christmas Eve while she's impatiently waiting for Santa to come. If that is really the case then her parents really need to stop letting their daughter binge on late-night splatter movies, because Yuka's dreams contain things that no girl young enough to still believe in Santa should be familiar with. Besides the sexuality of her dream, there's also plenty of dismemberments, disembowelments, and wanton cruelty. Seriously, the practical gore effects in this movie are surprisingly sophisticated for such a late and low budget entry into the genre.

Indeed, while it is far from the best Christmas horror movie, Present is certainly in the running for the goriest. This really comes into play once Yuka is trapped in Santa's prison/execution chamber. Up to this point, Present has merely been a gory horror movie, but here it jumps across the line into the territory of disgustingly gory horror movies. Those who associate early 2000s J-Horror with subtle psychological thrillers like Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) and Ringu (1998) are in for a bit of a surprise; the old splatter tradition of Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment (1985) was alive and well at the same time. Fingers get snapped off, organs get cut out, and limbs are chopped off. If most horror movies could cram as much violence into their entire run time as Present packs into its TV drama time slot they would probably be doing alright. For me, the sheer amount of gore is a bit much, and when I finished the film I felt a bit queasy. Obviously, I'm getting a bit more sensitive to these things as I'm getting older, probably as a result of my increasing awareness of my own mortality. I remember watching films like this as a teen and shrugging it off like so much water off the back of a duck. If anything this is a welcome development, as it means a larger percentage of horror movies are now genuinely thrilling and disturbing to me, rather than just holding the usual academic interest. It's going to be interesting to see how I react to a film I found genuinely disturbing as a youth when I revisit it now, maybe after the holidays, there will be time to re-watch Cannibal Holocaust (1980).