Has anyone seen this movie here besides me?
Anyone want to discuss it?
I was horribly disappointed by the ending but I loved everything else.
I did have two questions:
1 .Early on in the film: Why when Kirie and her friend were walking down the hallway in the school was there a student standing outside each class with their head hung low?
Is this a Japanese thing or was supposed to be a creepy thing that no one talked about.
2 .Did they ever say what happened to Kirie’s father?
I’m not sure if there was one outside every classroom, but I seem to remember it being a fairly common punishment for misbehaving students to be sent outside the classroom and stand, not sit, there for an unspecified period of time. This might have been what you saw, except it was between classes (or at least quite busy) during the scene you’re mentioning, right?
SPOILER
During the “how they died” montage, they show a bucket floating in the middle of the lake. I think it’s safe to say that given the set up of the father going to the lake to get mud, with the same (type of) bucket, that he had drowned. Not a bad way to go considering.
Personally, I didn’t mind the ending to the movie. It felt a little cheap, but there wasn’t really any way it could “work out” at the end, IMHO.
Well, I remember being “impressed” by the kid who busted his head open. But overall, I found I had the same reactions to this as any other Japanese horror movie: 1)Wow, I’m getting tired. 2)That’s the END?!
I think it was just supposed to be creepy, but I have to admit I hadn’t noticed it.
Personally, I was really impressed with it.
This movie was mentioned in a thread a while ago and it sounded pretty interesting. Now, after reading a review online I’m really looking forward to watching it.
One question - is it subtitled or has it been dubbed? My wife’s native language is Japanese and I would be curious to hear her comments on how accurate the subtitle translation is.
I saw it subtitled.
I thought it was very good, the ending was the only way it could have ended and after seeing so many american horror movies chicken out at the end I was impressed that they actually did it.
In fact the story reminded me of Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space.
Wow, it took awhile but finally some responses! JAWESOME!
About the Father’s death: I assumed by the bucket in the lake that that was the implied fate of the father but it just seemed strange since Kirie and her boyfriend seemed so sure that he was in the garage or the Kiln room. And I felt they missed a huge payoff by not having the father IN the kiln at the end. You know, having baked himself into one of his Uzumaki pots.
The version I saw was subtitled, but there are two different versions of the Subtitles. A friend of mine saw it a long time ago and one of the things he liked most about it was that they never called them Spirals… just “Vortex Shapes”. Which is hilarious and was one of the reasons I wanted to see it. The version I saw they just said “Uzumakis” which if you blinked during the credits you would have missed that that means “Spiral”
One of the little touches I enjoyed was the way parts of the background would twist in and out of little spirals, but without any attempts to draw attention to the changes.
There might be three versions then, because the version I saw (Seattle International Film Festival) pretty much said “spirals” the whole time.
I agree.
As terrible as it sounds, I loved how graphic the movie was. The kid getting run over-- and I mean really run over? Gross, but I was impressed, too.
What part of the ending were you disappointed by?
I was disappointed with the ending because it didn’t END… it STOPPED.
Well, of course it did. Everybody was dead. 
And on a slightly less flippant note…
<SPOILERS>
No, really. As uplifting as the ending was, there really was nowhere it could go but down. Nobody but the newspaper guy even came close to figuring out what was going on (and even this was so obscure that even moron movie reviews from the Seattle Weekly couldn’t figure it out, but I digress) and after he died, pretty much all hopes of a happy ending died with him. (Hell, even if he had survived, any happy ending would have felt pretty cheap.) And though there were people still alive (well, sorta kinda) in the town, the fate of the news crew hinted that it was pretty much impossible for anybody to leave, so there was really nothing left to show but more people dying.
Or, if you’re open to marginally more cynical answers, they were leaving themselves open for a sequel. The manga (comic) the movie was based on was/is(?) still continuing in Japan, and though the creator of the manga had no qualms with the filmmaker adapting the story for a movie (FTR, I have no idea what may have been changed), the filmmakers may have decided to leave the end of the movie slightly open-ended, should the movie be well-received and/or the manga got a really cool ending.
Okay, the run-on sentences are over now. Sorry 'bout that.
I agree with KKBattousai. Having watched a lot of Japanese horror movies as of late, they all end very, very dismally. It seems to be a pattern with them that horror movies don’t have happy endings. I recently saw Kairo, or Pulse, in which the end has pretty much the entire world falling victim to a “Ghost plague,” so to speak. They all just end with sad, depressing endings, and to change that up and make it happy would just cheapen the effect.
I really liked this movie, it was definitely creepy and left me with some funky images to get out of my head while trying to fall asleep two hours later. The shot of the professor’s face while watching the news and mutating into a slug…damn.
As for her father, I could have sworn there was a scene with him looking through a kolydascope (however you spell it), and then there’s a really creepy squishy noise. In the end credits, they show him sitting in his shed with his eyes essentailly gouged out by the thing, creating little spiral patterns in his sockets (or his eyes, hanging out of the tube, one or the other, it’s been a while).
My only question is, what happened to Kirie? She starts off as a narrator, but at the end, it seems to be implied she died, unless she killed her boyfriend and got away. We see his body, but not hers.
Overall, this movie was great. A lot of scenes reminded me of the way video games were shot when they first came out with the technology to record people into the storyline (i.e. her conversation with the fruit vendor was very Sega CD). It had a very comical type of filming style which just made the creepiness even more effective. Wonderful film, if you haven’t seen it and can get a hold of it, check it out.
That was the cop not the dad and it was the barrel of his gun that he saw the spirals in.
I saw the similarities between video games as well. Especially the framing and POV shots.
The implication that I got was that Kirie escaped because we saw her boyfriends body and not hers…but how?.. I still wanted to know what would happen to the town… would the spirals continue to spread out over the country…the world? Or would the town be sucked up into the sky? I’m not looking for complete answers…just hints. Knowing that the comic is still going in Japan makes me really curious.
You should watch Dark Water done by the same guy (whose name eludes me ATM) who did The Ring. I won’t say anything about the movie (other than that it’s an excellent horror flick), but I thought the ending was superbly managed.
As for Uzumaki, I had the feeling that Kirie escaped from her BF, but really didn’t survive long thereafter. She was narrating the story - the words we end the movie with were the same that the movie started with, forming a narrative spiral, of sorts - so in this way it can be assumed that she lived through the subjective time of the movie.
As for the spreading of the spirals, I’ll have to watch it again (if I can ::shiver::), but I think the answer might have been in one of the news articles - the one about the serpent cult in particular - but I got the impression that the phenomenon of the spiral was limited to the town. (On second thought, maybe I’m getting this from some of the stuff Kirie’s BF had said.)
Okay, I just finished reading the English-language version of the two Uzumaki graphic novels. An end is nowhere in sight in the books, so can anyone tell me where I can buy a copy of the movie version Uzumaki, English-subtitled? I’m drawing a blank on both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. I NEED to see this movie.
Can anyone recommend any other Japanese horror movies, and where I can get them either dubbed or subtitled in English and/or French?
I saw the first Ring movie, and I’m waiting on my amazon.co.uk shipment of the other two films. Any other good ones?
Two thoughts:
Thank Og for regionless DVD players;
I am missing out on so much incredibly cool stuff by not being able to read or speak Japanese.
ratty, Kairo, which El Elvis Rojo mentioned (and started a thread about, recently) is a good, scary one, though it gets a bit wierd at the end.
Some others I thought were interesting:
Seven’s Face, not so much horror as gruesome mystery/thriller. After several bizarre murders, the police find a whole bunch of suspects, but can’t pin any one person to all of the crimes. The only lead is a website that seems to know the details of each murder before they happen.
Another Heaven, sci-fi/horror/mystery.
Soseiji, also called Gemini was interesting, but really weird.
Just my opinion, but I wouldn’t bother with Tomie and Inugami, the first was pretty amatuerish and predictable, while the latter was just dull as dirt.
So… what was the deal with all them spirals, anyway? I assumed some sort of Universal Spiral Force had just concentrated on the town and made everything all swirly.
The mirror what’s-his-face’s dad found (remember the washing machine?) released some ancient evil some old serpent worshipping cult used to worship. At least that’s what I got from the article the reporter guy found.
I got that idea, or that the spiral is really a symbol for serpent worhship, that was somehow coming to fruitation.