Writers: Takeshi
Kimura, Shinichi Hoshi, Masami Fukushima, William Hope Hodgson (story “The
Voice in the Night”)
Now I’m going to spoil this movie for you, so if you plan to
see it for the first time (which I seriously DON’T recommend), then get lost. Spoilers
starting from the next paragraph.
OK, then: Some Japanese people find themselves on a
mysterious island after a shipwreck or something and they turn into mushrooms.
End. Not much of a story, as you can see, but the bigger problem is that the
movie hardly contains much of anything.
First we are treated with a really long and boring boat sequence where we get
introduced to a bunch of completely uninteresting characters, followed by a
really long and boring sequence of island exploring, where we find out that
something is very very wrong there. After that, there’s a really long and
boring obligatory sequence where those unmemorable characters fight each other
for some reason and then, finally, there’s a short (but equally boring) part
where they turn into mushrooms.
This kind of body horror could have a great potential, but
this movie is never scary or disturbing. If anything, it’s just psychedelic
(particularly near the end). If you’re going to turn into mushroom, you have to
have your body slowly disfigured over time, with numerous disturbing
discoveries (“Hey, what is this stem doing over my left eye? Haven’t noticed it
before!”), but in this movie we just notice that people occasionally go missing
and later see some really large mushrooms (or, rather, collections of
mushrooms) and we have to conclude it’s them. Well, screw that! Someone should
hire Yoshihiro Nishimura to remake this.
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