Somewhere in Japan, some mad (or ignorant) fools have built a school on top of an ancient tomb where the ancient god Hiruko lies. Much sillines follows.
After his archeologist dad and his crush disappear investigating something at the school over summer vacation, teenager Masao (Masaki Kudou) enlists the help of some mates to go look for them. I'd list them, but it'd be pointless as they almost immediately behead themselves with a variety of implements (and a strong gush of arterial blood). While running around in terror, he encounters his uncle-in-law Hieda (Kenji Sawada), who explains that Masao's father contacted him to help with the investigation.
Soon they're being chased around by the decapitated head of Tsukishima, Masao's crush (Megumi Ueno), which skitters at high speed on six spiderish legs, and dodging the school groundskeeper (Hideo Murota), who may or may not be hunting them down as well.
There's a lot of flailing around, some pretty unfunny slapstick, and infodumps that try to explain what's going on without the story ever cohering into something interesting.
Yeah, in case it wasn't clear, I didn't really enjoy Hiruko the Goblin much. The action is pretty one-note and the plot is both simple and overcomplicated enough that it never felt worth engaging with.
It's a shame, because I love mythology-drenched stories like this one. But it's got a lot of problems- some common to the genre, such as the bone-headed decisions the protagonists make at every turn (starting with not going to the police immediately when they find the first dead body). The other problems are more specific to this sort of anime-damaged film: Bad acting and poor and tropey characterization. Cheesy music. A slightly formulaic feel. Broad comedy, camp, and kistch.
Most damning is the lack of variety in the weirdness on offer, and a turgid plot which fails to do much with its yokai-adjacent story. The menace for most of the movie is Tsukishima's spider-legged head, and while the monster puppet is well made (cheesy, but the right kind of cheesy), it gets old quickly.
The film itself looks slick enough; Director Shin'ya Tsukamoto is most famous for The Tetsuo: The Iron Man films, but this is a would-be mainstream film so he unfortunately curbs his penchant for madness and experimentation. The downside being that it's just not an interesting-looking movie, except for a few bits where he gets to apply some energy, borrowing Evil Dead 2's flyover camera to chase his protagonists (here, because it's a skittering spider-demon, it sticks low to the floor, sometimes jumping onto walls and ceilings; nice).
Most of the humor consists of exaggerated mugging at the camera, but a couple of the jokes land; I liked one where Haeda realizes that a yokai-detector-type machine was off the whole time because he forgot to plug a cable in, and another one where... um, wait, no, that's it.
There is some blood, and a couple of juicy decapitated bodies, but just that. They do feel a bit jarring because the rest of the movie almost feels aimed at children. The effects are endearingly clunky, and some shots look bad enough to be fun. I guess that counts for something?
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