VAMPIRE CLAY (2017 - Japanese)

Studio:       Monument Releasing
Director:    Soichi Umezawa
Writer:       Soichi Umezawa
Producer:  Soichi Umezawa, Yoshihiro Nishimura
Stars:     Kyoka Takeda, Momoka Sugimoto, Ena Fujita, Yuyu Makihara, Ryo Shinoda, Shigeru Oxe, Kanji Tsuda, Asuka Kurosawa

Review Score:

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Summary:

A creature made of cursed clay haunts the young students of a countryside art academy.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

After finding her Aina Academy studio in a state of disrepair, art instructor Yuri Aina opens a new classroom for aspiring art students in a countryside studio that once belonged to failed sculptor Minoru Mitazuka. While landscaping outside during a brief earthquake, Yuri digs up a buried box containing clay.

Yuri works with Kanji Yamashita, promising student Kaori Hidaka, Kaori’s friend Aiko Mochizuki, Kaori’s rival Reiko Tani, and newcomer Yuka Aoki on preparing for entrance exams to highly competitive Tokyo art academies. Because Reiko gave Kaori’s clay to Yuka, Kaori sculpts using the clay dug up outside.

Reiko becomes jealous when she and Kaori receive the same score on their first sculpting project. Reiko breaks her sharpening tool and places the broken blade aside. Later, a creature forms from Kaori’s unknowingly cursed clay and steals the blade.

The next day, Kaori cuts herself when she finds the blade embedded inside her clay, which absorbs Kaori’s blood. Kaori assumes Reiko deliberately tried to hurt her, but says nothing.

Outside, an older man becomes alarmed when he sees that the ground was disturbed where the clay was buried. Inside, Yuri expresses doubt that her students can compete against art academy applicants from the city and demands that they challenge their creativity. During the night, the cursed clay becomes sentient again and kills the classroom’s hamster.

Kaori finds a sculpture she made of her head defaced when she arrives for class the next day. Kaori and Aiko assume Reiko was responsible, but it only motivates Kaori to work harder on repairing it. Kaori takes the top score for the assignment, although she attributes her success to the unusual clay.

Yuri’s students despair that they aren’t good enough to earn admission into a Tokyo art school. Yuri flashes back to discovering that an art academy instructor she was romantically involved with had an affair with a student.

Left alone at the end of the day, Reiko pricks her finger on an exposed nail and bleeds onto one of the head sculptures. The head animates and bites Reiko’s arm. A mouse also forms from the clay and crawls into Reiko’s mouth. Reiko is ultimately able to burn the head off of her hand. Reiko then crushes the head after it crawls away.

Reiko tries calling 911, but her hands turn into clay. Reiko’s arms transform into a giant mouth that swallows her entire body.

Kaori, Aiko, and Yuri presume Reiko was responsible for the destruction then they find Kaori’s head sculpture ruined the next day. Still sentient inside the clay, Reiko futilely screams her innocence even though she cannot be heard. Kaori unknowingly tears apart Reiko by deconstructing what remains of her sculpture and discarding the clay scraps in a bucket.

The clay creature reforms by taking Reiko’s appearance. Reiko cuts Yuka’s hand, drinks her blood, and consumes Yuka outside.

After assuming Yuka’s form, the creature returns to the classroom. Left alone together, Yuka attacks Kanji.

Using Kanji’s appearance, the clay creature attacks Aiko next. Kaori enters during the attack and fights Kanji by slicing through his clay arm with a protractor. Yuri arrives in time to rescue Kaori from Kanji. Yuri deforms Kanji’s body with repeated blows to his clay head. Kaori and Yuri try crushing Kanji under a large wooden plank, but the creature reforms into sentient clay tentacles.

The man seen outside previously suddenly shows up with a portable torch that he uses to harden the creature. The man then stomps the clay creature into crumbled pieces.

While collecting the pieces afterward, the man tells Yuri, Kaori, and Aiko the story of sculptor Minoru Mitazuka. Working in an industrial waste factory by day, Mitazuka grew a reputation for poorly received works and difficulty dealing with gallery owners. One day, Mitazuka ran into a former art school classmate, Kyozo Fushimi, who was now a restaurateur. Fushimi made an offer to furnish restaurants with Mitazuka’s creations.

Mitazuka began sculpting his creatures like crazy, although no one bought them. Having become terminally ill from his toxic waste job, Mitazuka put his blood into the clay to sculpt one final creature he named Kakame, and whom he intended to be his alter ego after his physical death.

Mitazuka discovered Fushimi was cheating him out of profits, which led to a physical confrontation in the studio between the two men. Fushimi accidentally killed Mitazuka during the altercation, causing Mitazuka to bleed onto the Kakame sculpt.

Mitazuka’s bones ended up turning to powder from his disease. When Fushimi accidentally spilled liquid on the residue, the powder turned into sentient clay. Fushimi buried the clay outside and began visiting the site to pay his respects regularly. The man recounting the story reveals he is Fushimi.

Fushimi, Yuri, Kaori, and Aiko gather the dried clay for reburial. However, water from the ceiling drops onto a portion of clay, which reanimates to consume Kaori.

In Kaori’s form, Mitazuka’s Kakame creature attacks Aiko and drinks her blood. Fushimi manages to melt Kaori with a torch.

A sudden earthquake causes clay dust to blow around the room. Fushimi unavoidably inhales the powder. Fushimi suffers horribly when Kakame violently rips out of his body.

Aiko offers her blood to Kakame to distract the creature from attacking Yuri. Kakame grows to an enormous size and moves to swallow Aiko when Yuri suddenly stabs it. Together, Aiko and Yuri repeatedly stab the creature before burning it. Kakame seemingly dies.

Yuri and Aiko put the clay in a cardboard box and take it to the Tokyo Academy of Arts with the intention of leaving it outside the school’s door. Yuri has a change of heart however and the two women instead bury the box in the ground.

A news report reveals that Kyozo Fushimi was found dead at Aina Academy and is presumed to be involved in the disappearances of Yuri and her five missing students.

Over time, the cardboard box decays and the area surrounding the burial site becomes a trash dump. Exposed to the elements and reanimated once again, Kakame mutates into a monstrous form bearing the heads of all the dead students. Kakame gradually morphs with surrounding vegetation until its far-reaching tree roots begin crumbling foundations of buildings throughout Tokyo.

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Review:

I wasn’t sure what to make of “Vampire Clay” before watching it.  All the intrigue anyone could want exists in its off-the-wall premise of cursed clay creating a creature that terrorizes a rural Japan art school.  Yet caution comes from the poster art, seemingly fresh from a Full Moon Photoshop file, depicting what looks like a child’s cherubic stick figure given 3D shape shooting tiny flames from its eyes.  Overhead sit three one-word pull quotes, all of which say the same thing: “bonkers.”  Don’t forget the groan-worthy tagline, “art so bad, it kills!”  Could that be a cheeky reference jabbing at the film itself?

The impression built in my mind was of a madcap midnight movie full of the kind of insanity and inanity that could only come from an unhinged Japanese wild man. E.g. something along the lines of “House,” “Tokyo Gore Police,” or “Meatball Machine Kodoku” (review here), except made with more moxie than money.  Mixed reviews from its festival run additionally conditioned me to expect an outsider effort that would be predictably polarizing for its irreverence, or worse, complete carelessness in considering a coat of professional polish.  In other words, “Vampire Clay” had the earmarks of a snarky amateur flick that would quickly drown in a DTV stream if it originated in America.

The eccentric experience I steeled myself for turned out to not be in step with what writer/director Soichi Umezawa’s first feature film delivers.  Oh, “Vampire Clay” is inarguably unusual, occasionally silly, and often cuts so many corners that teeth cannot help but grit.  But it also contains a precise pinch of organic oddness that sands down those rough edges.

Not too much needs to be said to summarize the story.  An art teacher who has effectively exiled herself to a countryside studio works with five students whom the odds are against for acceptance into a prestigious Tokyo art academy.  Bigger problems are en route when a landscaping errand uncovers a box buried outside.  Ms. Aina’s new studio once belonged to a strange sculptor, and the supplies he left behind should have been vaulted in the Curious Goods basement. Instead, the mystery man’s sentient clay has reawakened, and its ability to shift shapes means no one is safe from its bloodlust.

Taking all of the above into account, “Vampire Clay” sounds like it should contain just as much humor as it does horror.  After all, how can a movie featuring a cartoonish goblin assimilating struggling young artists into its stop-motion body be anything but a gory gag? Yet instead of being blackly comedic, the film plays every preposterous piece with a strictly straight face, and that’s exactly why it winds up working so well.

“Vampire Clay” achieves the rare feat of feeling like a throwback ‘80s B-movie without relying on self-aware winks, a synthesized score, phony film scratches, or any of the other artificial tricks films force to fit when looking for a similar texture.  “Vampire Clay” just naturally acquires a vibe akin to “Critters,” “Puppet Master,” even “Child’s Play” to some extent, by deliberately not overemphasizing inherent goofiness.  It has old school Charles Band charm without the same level of cheesiness in its cheapness.

Of course, DNA like that means “Vampire Clay” has its fair share of issues in terms of both narrative and execution.  Umezawa sets up a surprising number of subplots like a rivalry between two students or a romantic betrayal influencing their instructor’s career path. Then he either throws away these threads or allows them to unravel through curious scene arrangement choices.  Umezawa’s sense of pacing loses its place more than once, erecting road bumps where events like mistimed character deaths knock the story out of sequence.

Effects aren’t so hot either.  Discounting the main monster’s appearance, where a rudimentary design accounts for a large part of its unlikely appeal, choppy animation teeters the movie closet to the edge of having more silliness than it can handle. Presentation takes another ding from a flat color scheme to cinematography that makes murky darks incredibly hard to see.

Now that the cons have been itemized, we can return to appreciating “Vampire Clay” for its pros.  I maintain that by creatively incorporating a carefully calculated amount of weirdness, “Vampire Clay” hits a sweet spot of satisfaction between fun and freaky. Soichi Umezawa zips in enough zany directions that his movie gets somewhat muddled.  But sincerity in the absurdity adds stylishness that tickles memories of a time when meager monster movies made pure entertainment a top priority.

NOTE: The film’s Japanese title is “Chi o su nendo.”

Review Score:  75

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