I’ve persevered with Kazuo Umezu’s Horror Theater partly out of curiosity about this oddball manga artist. Japan regards "Kazz" fondly as someone roughly equivalent to Roald Dahl, but he's a writer who can draw his own illustrations – a one-man Dahl and Quentin Blake combined.
Kazz's manga have been published in Japan for over 50 years now, mostly in shoujo manga (manga for girls). Children experienced the vivid intensity of emotions and horror situations of his comics. Maybe this is the reason the comics made such an impression that they haven't been forgotten.
This widescreen TV series attempts to visualize some of his stories. It has a fairly low budget and a shot-on-video look, but they are at least original, thought up long before the current clichés in the Asian horror genre came along. Volume 2 contains two stories where each director has attempted to closely follow the visual style of the original manga comics, rather than reworking and modernizing them. Presumably these are two of Kazz’s most famous.
The first is called “Snake Girl.”
Yumiko is a young schoolgirl getting hate-mail e-mails. After witnessing a particularly nasty murder at school, she is sent away to the country to stay with her indifferent aunt and uncle. They seem to be obsessed with snakes. Yumiko finds it easier to befriend their two daughters.
After meeting an old local mystic, she gets a nasty snakebite - not from a snake, but a snake creature. Also, local people are getting bitten. It seems that ever since Yumiko arrived in the village, there has been an outbreak of snake problems.
I was keen to see this story in order to discover if it had anything in common with the 1968 Japanese movie adaptation, Snake-Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch. The spine of the story is the same (same skeletal outline and some of the same incidents - like Yumiko discovering snakeskin in her bed one morning), but the ending is very different and this is far less claustrophobic.
Kazz has also updated it with an Internet sub-plot. I’m still more impressed with the old movie because of the higher production values and the successfully nightmarish mood.
The lead actress is outstanding and the snake creature is imaginatively designed and portrayed with an excellent CGI 'money shot,' though some of the close-ups are too close (I think you can see the actress’ white teeth visible behind the yellow fake teeth).
The narrative is rather confusing - like the zombie villagers thrown into the mix. They are so lackluster and unthreatening that it only adds to the ‘bad dream’ feeling, but a little girl’s bad dream is hardly strong enough stuff for the rest of us. Compared to the extreme gore of a later episode, this almost feels like children’s television.
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