Psychedelic cult Japanese horror that's part Salvador Dali, part Twin Peaks, all Absurdism. Sort of a reaction against the proliferation of high-modernist Asian genre-horror, director Higuchinsky (yet another former music video maker) pulls out all manner of visual eccentricities to enlighten us on small-town evils, populated by Lynchian character archetypes (the pubescent female object of innocence, the sexually repressed Hardy Boy, the demonic father-figure), possessed by supernatural Marshall Macluhan vortexes.

The storybook dialogue, sporadic symbolism and pseudo-surrealism creates an appropriately banal facade which Higuchinsky wastes no time breaking through – the characters, however, are a little more oblivious to their compounding fates.—Tim Wong

» Higuchinsky | Japan | 2000