A crazed, gory, wonderfully absurd and furiously kinetic piece of Asian supernatural horror hokum; it's a feverishly inventive, turbo-charged, hard-driving trash terror item that's deliriously overloaded with demented imagination, wild-eyed passion, devilishly frolicsome wit and rip-roaring flair to spare. In short, it's a real pip.
A brutal, lethal, nearly unstoppable all-powerful otherworldly force wreaks plentiful grisly havoc in a remote rural school, decapitating students and transforming their severed noggins into swift, deadly creatures which are jet-propelled by speedy, ultra-sinewy spider legs. Two teenage guys bravely attempt to thwart the wildly out of this world supernatural mayhem, with the expected madly disastrous full-throttle four-sheets-to-the-wind insane nerve-jangling and life-threatening results.
This baby's got it all: briskly efficient pull-out-all-the-stops virtuoso direction, handsome, hyperactive vertiginous cinematography (the quick, super-smooth scuttling POV shots of the killer heads on the prowl are great), an intense, ominous, flesh-crawling mood that gradually escalates into all-out pandemonium, a few breathtaking moments of serenely surreal beauty, frenetically headlong pacing, gorgeously slick high-gloss production values, some pretty pastoral visuals, and a funny, appealing oddball nonconformist bespectacled dweeb protagonist -- he's a rogue, family-tradition-be-damned archaeologist named Hiruko, to be exact -- who's undoubtedly the best scrawny, weak-kneed, chicken-hearted limp dishrag unlikely savior of mankind since Zalman King's sweaty, constantly twitching dippy hippie dropout from "Blue Sunshine" (Hiruko's shrill, girlish screaming is especially hilarious -- and the bulky suitcase full of ineffectual state-of-the-art technological hoodads is a nice touch, too).
The splashy, excessively nasty and explicit splatter f/x really deliver the ghastly groceries: Heads are messily ripped off so blood can copiously spew forth like a bright red crimson geyser, gruesome eviscerated corpses are strewn about the school's hallways, one character develops a burning (and smoking!) boil on his neck, a spider head tries to fatally French kiss one dude with its harmful elongated prehensile tongue, and other such gleefully grotesque stuff. The truly off the wall final, in which our bumbling, but stalwart heroes are attacked in a dark, dank cave by a murderous multitude of encroaching spider heads and do their best to fend off the vile beasts with cans of insect repellent (!), deftly walks a fine line between blackly comical bedlam and grimly apocalyptic horror; it induces both nervous giggly laughs and genuine scared shudders in equal proportion. A delectably deranged and enjoyably over the top gem.
A brutal, lethal, nearly unstoppable all-powerful otherworldly force wreaks plentiful grisly havoc in a remote rural school, decapitating students and transforming their severed noggins into swift, deadly creatures which are jet-propelled by speedy, ultra-sinewy spider legs. Two teenage guys bravely attempt to thwart the wildly out of this world supernatural mayhem, with the expected madly disastrous full-throttle four-sheets-to-the-wind insane nerve-jangling and life-threatening results.
This baby's got it all: briskly efficient pull-out-all-the-stops virtuoso direction, handsome, hyperactive vertiginous cinematography (the quick, super-smooth scuttling POV shots of the killer heads on the prowl are great), an intense, ominous, flesh-crawling mood that gradually escalates into all-out pandemonium, a few breathtaking moments of serenely surreal beauty, frenetically headlong pacing, gorgeously slick high-gloss production values, some pretty pastoral visuals, and a funny, appealing oddball nonconformist bespectacled dweeb protagonist -- he's a rogue, family-tradition-be-damned archaeologist named Hiruko, to be exact -- who's undoubtedly the best scrawny, weak-kneed, chicken-hearted limp dishrag unlikely savior of mankind since Zalman King's sweaty, constantly twitching dippy hippie dropout from "Blue Sunshine" (Hiruko's shrill, girlish screaming is especially hilarious -- and the bulky suitcase full of ineffectual state-of-the-art technological hoodads is a nice touch, too).
The splashy, excessively nasty and explicit splatter f/x really deliver the ghastly groceries: Heads are messily ripped off so blood can copiously spew forth like a bright red crimson geyser, gruesome eviscerated corpses are strewn about the school's hallways, one character develops a burning (and smoking!) boil on his neck, a spider head tries to fatally French kiss one dude with its harmful elongated prehensile tongue, and other such gleefully grotesque stuff. The truly off the wall final, in which our bumbling, but stalwart heroes are attacked in a dark, dank cave by a murderous multitude of encroaching spider heads and do their best to fend off the vile beasts with cans of insect repellent (!), deftly walks a fine line between blackly comical bedlam and grimly apocalyptic horror; it induces both nervous giggly laughs and genuine scared shudders in equal proportion. A delectably deranged and enjoyably over the top gem.