The Boy from Hell (2004)

 

Director: Mari Asato

Screenplay: Seiji Tanigawa and Naoteru Yamamoto

Based on the work by Hideshi Hino

Cast: Mirai Yamamoto as Setsu/Dr. Emma; Mitsuru Akaboshi as Daio

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #38

 

One more brain transplant will save him!

Hideshi Hino, the manga author behind the source material, does not play the meek author in the opening of The Boy from Hell, an episode of the show Hideshi Hino's Theatre of Horror (2004). Hino is not like Junji Ito who, whilst having depicted himself in his manga as a man close to insanity, in real life is a meek man, as well as writing mind bending tales like Uzumaki (1998-9), who also wrote manga about his cats. Hino depicts himself here entirely on the cusp of the void, wishing his nightmares on a person in voice over, his manga written in a grimy apartment based on his real sins, as a young woman perishes in a doomed fate before the episode proper starts. Only the grotesqueness of his work, and a knowing sense of humour throughout, prevents this turning into Garth Marenghi, even if The Boy from Hell is a fun piece to introduce myself to his work.

The TV episode, nearly feature length, clearly has a sense of humour when said boy, the resurrected son of a female doctor, jumps head first into his own reflection at one point, and smashes his face into it, staring at himself confused afterwards. The set-up does not hide the absurdity of this, even if it becomes a grimly humoured work with gristly content. In a green screened car, the son named Daio reminds one why you never stick your head out of a moving vehicle when, cruising with his mother Dr. Emma (Mirai Yamamoto) and their elder male servant, he gets decapitated by a truck. Mrs Emma is informed by a random old woman at his grave that, if she uses the tusk the old woman has, slicing a boy's throat open onto the grave, Daio will be resurrected. One terminally ill boy in her hospital later, and Daio is resurrected. Unfortunately, he looks like a ghoul once he springs out the grave, with a similar ghoul's taste in human flesh.

Set to an almost Goblin-like score, barring the Theremin like synth, this low budget work is over-the-top, and one of the incentives as well is that this is directed by Mari Asato, one of the few horror films directed by a woman from the 2000s. Here she is playing with an over-the-top farce as, puffy eyed and fanged, Daio keeps escaping and eating the locals at night, as the film skirts between intentional and unintentional humour as a low budget TV production with a lot of gore. Some of this is exceptionally dark, as this has no qualms even off-screen of killing many children, but the humour is clearly there on purpose, with an idyllic scene of mother and son undercut, alongside him being in a wheelchair with his head entirely bandaged, by the shot of a pigeon having landed on his head. Nor the fact that the other main character cannot be ignored as anything else by intentionally farcical, a detective who can smell crime and the actor I noticed near the end has a giant fake nose on. Even his introduction suggests this, involving finding the old woman from earlier dead on Dr. Emma's doorstep, having crawled all the way there, and not questioning Dr. Emma for how the elderly woman got there.  

The film is helped, even in mind to its clear budget limitations, because of these tone, the gristly contrasting with the silly, all heightened knowing it is schlocky and embracing it regardless of the matter-of-factness of the ordinary locations. Hideshi Hino's work, looking at it, is very exaggerated and unrealistic at times just in character designs, which this looks virtually alien to, but he would have been proud of how this compensates for this in tone, such as including the most awkward birthday party ever when the birthday boy is chained up with a Hannibal Lecter mask on. Mari Asato does as much as she can with a limited budget, one of the weirdest moments reflecting its lack of budget by constantly referring to a superimposed nightmare hell, Buddhist Hell as depicted by way of early 2000s low budget computer layering. With a giant version of Daio imposed over actors in black undergarments being beaten, chewed on and crushed, it becomes more bizarre as the detective himself does eventually find the entrance there in a tunnel, when you presumed before it was just a reoccurring dream sequence.

It is an acquired taste, undeniably, but as part of this era, it follows my great taste for obscurer Japanese horror. Whether animated or live action, even something like this has an unique energy, coupled by the fact this still takes itself seriously, even here ending as a tragedy despite the fact this narrative has had an attempted brain transplant to cure Daio, which does not work, or the genre trope of glass jugs of dangerous acid which someone always gets in the face. Mari Asato has thankfully progressed on, making it her filmography to stay in horror cinema, even getting to higher budgeted work like Fatal Frame (2014), which is a good thing. As for Hideshi Hino, and his TV show, The Boy from Hell was defiantly an incentive to explore his work now; even with the absurdness of the initial introduction video, this stands out for depiction his lurid works.