Shishûgoku: Ki no hen (2017) Reviews

• My, Mr Amano, what a big nose you have...

  BA_Harrison2018-10-13

  This strange Japanese horror, based on a manga by Makine Muroi, kicks off in fine trashy style: a young woman is chased through the woods by three men who tear open her top before chopping off her leg with an axe. That's nudity and gore in the very first scene! The film then follows a group of four female students and their teachers as they travel to an isolated village to study folklore. Of course, this being a horror film, when they arrive, they discover that the locals are more than a tad strange, inducting the girls into the village with a bizarre 'foot amputation ceremony' that involves their leader Mayor Amano wearing a mask that makes him look a bit like Noseybonk from UK kids show Jigsaw (if you don't know what I'm referring to, give it a Google - it's seriously freaky!). After some more weirdness, a sex scene between Dr. Ashihara and his buxom assistant, and a gruesome dream sequence, it eventually transpires that, for hundreds of years, the villagers have been preying on visitors, eating the men and using the women to bear children. Realising the danger they are in, the girls try to make a bid for freedom, but with the locals blocking the roads, a run through the surrounding woods is their only option. Will they survive? I guess that is to be seen in part two (which I will give a watch if I happen to run across it, but which I won't go out of my way to find).