Had I seen Shinya Tsukamoto’s wonderfully bonkers Hiruko the Goblin when it was originally released in 1991, my 13-year-old self would have gleefully recorded it off cable and watched it incessantly throughout my Junior High years. I have no doubt it would have ranked highly among the weirdo flicks I was constantly on the lookout for, and would have fit nicely alongside my growing collection of late-night VHS bootlegs that included the works of Sam Raimi, Albert Pyun, Troma Films, and the many other mavericks of untamed low-budget madness. Thirty years later, some of that youthful luster may have faded, but the magic of Hiruko the Goblin remains forever evident.
The story centers rather haphazardly around a discredited archaeologist (Kenji Sawada), his nephew (Masaki Kudou), a missing girl (Megumi Ueno), a school built on top of a demonic Hellgate, and so on. I highly encourage you not to fret too much over the film’s confusing set-up, though, as its main function is to serve only as a framework and initiator for what we’re all here to see: creepy mutated monsters and wacky spider-headed blasphemies. In this department, Hiruko the Goblin offers some of the best results of the era, even if the practical and stop-motion effects seem childish by modern standards.
Director Shinya Tsukamoto and cinematographer Masahiro Kishimoto rely heavily on Raimi-styled camera work (think the fast movement along the ground in the Evil Dead movies), along with heavy doses of slapstick and absurdity in the vein of Troma’s Toxic Avenger series and the early films of Peter Jackson (1987’s Bad Taste comes to mind, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Hiruko the Goblin was an influence on Jackson’s 1992 masterpiece Dead Alive/Braindead either). Amazingly, these sometimes juvenile films still hold significant weight with me, making Hiruko the Goblin an exciting reminder of the kinds of movies that first got my attention as a kid. Is it high art? Of course not. Does that matter to me in the slightest? Hell no – especially when I’ve got a wild grin on my face for 89-minutes straight.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.