Though he is little known on these shores Kazuo Umezz is a giant in the Japanese manga world, an enormously popular writer of horror stories who has stayed at the top of the heap for years. So when word got out that a series of live action adaptations of his work was being prepared for Japanese television there was an enormous surge of interest there -- not unlike the initial buzz around the Masters of Horror series here -- with legitimate A-list talent lining up to participate. At the top of that list was acclaimed genre auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa who, with the help of scriptwriter Sadayuki Murai (Millenium Actress) and actors familiar from Casshern and Samurai Fiction, took on the adaptation of Umezz's House of Bugs. That adaptation is now available on these shores as part of Tokyo Shock's first Kazuo Umezz's Horror Theater release.
Much less a true horror story than it is a supernatural morality tale of the sort Rod Serling used to specialize in House of bugs tells the story of a seemingly perfect couple. Young, attractive, financially secure, they seem to have everything they could need. If not for the wife’s strange reluctance to leave the house everything would seem picture perfect but as soon as you scratch the surface here you realize it is just a thin veneer covering hidden secrets and desires.
While House of Bugs is significantly different from Kurosawa’s main body of work it is also abundantly clear why he would be attracted to this particular story. House of Bugs is a story of repression, hidden desires, and most of all, the flexibility of ‘truth’. With several key scenes repeated several times from several perspectives Kurosawa shows us how we tailor our own memories to our best advantage, how we gloss ourselves over not just to convince the world that we are better than we really are but also to convince ourselves. This is a marriage gone bad with both partners completely oblivious to their own faults, seeing only the faults of the other, but united in their urge to maintain the image of respectability. “Wait!” you’re thinking, “but this is a giant bug movie!” Well, yes and no. There is a giant spider and a few other crawly things here but Umezz and Kurosawa use them as metaphors rather than vehicles of carnage. The bugs represent the hidden worlds of the characters, their secret desires. Kurosawa has long been known for subverting genre convention to address more universal concerns and that is very much the case again here, so those looking for his take on Them! will leave very much disappointed.
Shot on a very small budget and evidently on HD House of Bugs looks every inch a television production. Though the transfer is excellent and anamorphic the film itself has that distinctive, flat HD sheen throughout. Lighting and effects are both, likewise, on the minimal scale that you would expect for a television production. While it is a worthwhile endeavor this is very definitely not a film that you would confuse with Kurosawa’s theatrical output. Also included on the Horror Theater volume with House of Bugs are Tadafumi Ito’s adaptation of Diet, a making of doc – where it is very obvious that Kurosawa is a huge fan of Umezz’s work – and a brief interview with Umezz explaining his work.