The Snake Girl and The Silver-Haired Witch (Hebimusume to Hakuhatsuma)

 Sandwiched between Gamera movies (four before, four after), you can easily imagine The Snake Girl and The Silver-Haired Witch was director Noriaki Yuasa's (unsuccessful) attempt to escape from Kaiju purgatory.

 I've had it recommended to me several times over the years, and now I've seen it... I am ultimately underwhelmed. Which is a shame, because a movie where a villain rips a toad in half and then throws the remains at an adorable moppet's face really does sound fool-proof in paper.

 Came in expecting some craziness and yeah, there is some (see above); But apart from some mild what-the-fuckery, it's a disappointingly pedestrian family-friendly adventure where some plucky, saintly kid untangles a Scooby Doo mystery.

 Young Sayuri (Yachie Matsui) is reunited with her biological parents after one of those mixed-up-babies-at-the-hospital incidents had her put away in an orphanage for ten (or so) years. Oops!

  The problem is that the kid she was mistaken with, Tamari (Mayumi Takahashi), is still living in the house clandestinely, cooped up in the attic. Once that's cleared up Sayuri is delighted to have a sister, but that quickly curdles as Tamari turns out to be a complete bitch set on making her life hell.

 Also, she may be a snake disguised as a human.

 To further complicate matters, there's a crazy, murderous witch running around the house who also seems to have it in for Sayuri.

 At first it looks like things might get good at some point, as the movie threatens to become a sort of Yokai movie, but no such luck - this is one of those films that deploys crappy explanations to deflate any sense of mystery it managed to develop. It doesn't help that the plot really is Saturday-morning-cartoon fodder, full of plot holes and hilarious 50's B-movie scientific 'explanations'.

 The script seems terrified of losing its audience, to the point where Sayuri doesn't just often talk to herself to explain her actions, but also engages in some off-screen narration as well. Other characters mostly serve to spout exposition, and one of them kills what could have been a melancholy ending by telling us exactly how we're supposed to feel about it.

 It's mostly well staged and acted, with handsome but not striking black and white photography. The visual storytelling is pretty good, too, if a bit basic and more than a little corny, which makes it all the more disappointing when the plot turns out to be a bit inane.

 The effects range from laughable to pretty cool (a late-movie maquette is pretty impressive) but unfortunately the craziest scenes are limited to a couple dream sequences, clearly marked by heavy filters and superimposed kaleidoscopic spirals. They feature lots of papier maché puppets, goofy masks, floating objects with clearly visible wires, that sort of thing. You know, fun! Something that the rest of the movie sorely lacks.