When Yuri Aina (Asuka Kurosawa), the owner of a small rural art school discovers a large lump of clay buried near her atelier, she thinks nothing and adds it to the pile of materials her students are due to use. Unfortunately for her and her class... it's haunted. Soon it will be eating people alive, consuming those who would shape it and transforming them into flexible clay/flesh puppets.
Unfortunately for us -or for me, at least, since most of you degenerate heathens seemed to somehow enjoy Battle Royale- to get to the good bits we need to trudge through some seriously tedious Japanese teen melodrama. The students, you see, are trying to prepare for the entrance test to a prestigious Tokyo art school - and the teacher is dealing with some rote drama of her own, too, which she takes out on her students. Morale isn't high. There's some rivalry, some supremely underwhelming romance ("oh no, I prepared a bento box for him but he's eating with that other hussy!") and... ugh.
In between the shallow character beats, there's some mild mayhem as the protean clay blob - which at first seems content to play very basic pranks on the students - picks off the students one at a time, and then uses their shapes to go after the rest. It's a simple premise, but as a story it's an ungainly mess that keeps juddering to a stop only to slowly start shambling towards multiple unsatisfying ending.
The film's saving graces are its practical effects, which include tons of makeup effects, stop motion, and a little puppetry. Some of it is great, and everything looks very hand-made - I particularly liked a scene where they show someone from the inside out using some cheekily cheap papier maché innards. The bulk, unfortunately, features too many scenes of actresses flailing some half-clay-eaten limb unconvincingly.
The monster keeps shifting shapes, but when it settles on its true form it looks like a frigging mascot - I think it's supposed to mimic one of those mannequins artists use to model the human form? Not very scary at all.
The script, by director Sôichi Umezawa, seems a bit more inspired by the body horror of Junji Ito's work than on more traditional J-Horror, but it completely misses the point and over-explains everything, giving the monster a backstory that's simultaneously banal and nuts, unloaded in yet another exposition dump that stops the story dead on its tracks for a while.
I wanted to like this, I really did... and in very short spurts, it does achieve the sort of absurdity that could have made it special. But then it winds down to focus on its boring-ass characters or its inane plot and fuck that, I'm out of here.
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