Zombos' Closet of Horror Blog

The Last Supper (2005): A Japanese Horror Happy Meal for One

Issei Sagawa served time in a French jail for the murder of the Dutch student Renée Hartevelt, a classmate at the Sorbonne Academy in Paris. In June 11, 1981, Sagawa was studying avant garde literature. He invited her to dinner under the pretense of literary conversation. Upon her arrival, he shot her in the neck with a rifle while she sat with her back to him at a desk, then began to carry out his plan of eating her. She was selected because of her health and beauty, those characteristics Sagawa believed he lacked. In interviews, Sagawa describes himself as a "weak, ugly and small man" and claims that he wanted to "absorb her energy." --Wikipedia

I could not sleep. My ears woke me up around four in the morning. They stung and itched and--not sure why, exactly--made me think of how awful it must have been for Lon Chaney Jr. to sit through his Wolf Man makeup sessions with Jack Pierce. But unlike Pierce's painstaking application of Yak hair, strand by strand, I had to endure a painful, heavy-weight tag-team electrolysis smackdown on my ears' hair follicles, earlier that day. In a perversely skewed Newtonian Law of Equilibrium, my ears started growing hair when my scalp stopped doing so. 

I headed to the kitchen for an early breakfast. Not surprisingly, I found Zombos paging through Weekly Weird Asia World News as he sipped a hot chocolate. His insomnia, aided by Zimba's snoring, usually kicked in around this time of the morning. Chef Machiavelli stood by the stove, flipping one of his succulent pancake omelettes--with oyster filling, judging by the aroma. I flashed a deuce sign for him to make another one and joined Zombos at the table. He poured a cup of caffè corretto for me and slid the Sambuca over, but I reached for the cognac instead: I needed something stronger to quell the sturm und drang in my ears.

I picked up Weekly Weird Asia's Living section and thumbed through it. "This is interesting. Here's an article on Issei Sagawa, Japan's Celebrity Cannibal. He's opening a sushi bar.  My, my...guy goes and eats his classmate, gets off on a technicality, and becomes a minor celebrity. Tastes like tuna, he said."

"I giapponesi sono pazzeschi," said Chef Machiavelli, serving the omelettes. He snatched the ketchup bottle from my hand before I could uncap it. I reached for the pepper and waited for him to nod okay. He nodded.

"Yes, they are a crazy bunch at times," I agreed, shaking a little black pepper onto his culinary masterpiece. I wonder if he'll do that nyotaimori thing where they use a naked girl as a dinner plate to serve sushi and sashimi. Hmmm...that might not be a good idea for him, now I think of it. Maybe he'll--no, I doubt he'd go for that other odd trend of theirs, where a fake body is made out of food so you can operate on it  and eat whatever you find inside. The thing actually bleeds as you cut it and the intestines and organs inside are completely edible they say. Cooked I think. Wait a minute; that might be something for our Halloween party. What do you think? We could bake up a life-sized meatloaf zombie, with all the rotten--"

"Must you?" asked Zombos, a forkful of omelette poised at his lips. "You know, since you're up, you should finish that review for Bestial: Werewolf Apocalypse. Then perhaps move on to more pressing things like finishing the review for the Alone In the Dark Wii game, or maybe even Karloff's The Mummy Special Edition DVD review, or--and I'm brainstorming here--perhaps even tackle some of those Permuted Press books--that pile is not getting any shorter you know. Halloween is just around the corner and you'll need to pick up the slack a bit. Why, you might even try finishing that Bartholomew of the Scissors comic book you left out on the library table, you know, the one that scared Zombos Jr's wits clear to Sunday thinking it was an Archie comic, or maybe--and I am really going out on the limb of possibilities here--post that Sundays With Vlad review, the one you should have posted last September.

A forkful of omelette was now poised at my lips. Chef Machiavelli took pity on me and handed back the ketchup bottle. "Sure," I said, "I'll get right on it after breakfast. First things first, though."

Hiruko the Goblin (1991)

There's not much darkness in the world right now. Everywhere I go has lights, so it's getting harder for ghosts and monsters to hide.--from the interview with Shinya Tsukamoto 

"I'm not going and that's final," snapped Zombos. He folded his arms with finality.

"Me, neither," said Lawn Gisland. "Tarnation! That's one ornery, psycho-crazy film, and not to my liking." He folded his arms with finality.

"But no one else wants to review it," I protested. "You know I'm too squeamish to watch blood-oozing gore like that alone. I get sick at the sight of bloody body chunks flying helter-skelter across the screen. I fainted during the last one." I was desperate. No one wanted to come with me to see Saw IV.

"You're the high-falutin horror reviewer," said Lawn, "you go and have all the fun."

What would Roger Ebert do? Would he ignore a film just because he was squeamish? Sure, why not? I decided to review Hiruko the Goblin instead. Spidery goblins ripping off heads is so much easier to watch than that creepy Billy the puppet wheeling around on his squeaky tricycle anyway.

Jigoku 1960

Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place, poor theology student Shiro can't seem to keep from going to hell, and taking everyone else with him.

The Criterion Collection brings us Nobuo Nakagawa's 1960 surrealistic terror and damnation cult classic, Jigoku, to DVD. Like a nightmare, the film takes twists and turns that defy visual logic and story sense, plunging you--along with Shiro--into an absurdist world with no possible exit. Or is there? Before you  watch the film, I strongly recommend reading the superlative essay by Chuck Stephens in the included booklet, and watch the informative documentary "Building the Inferno" on the DVD. Jigoku is not a film to see on an empty mind.