REVIEW: VISITORS

• Director: Ken’ichi Ugana
• Writer: Ken’ichi Ugana
• Stars: Ryûta Endô, Saki Hirai, Haruki Itabashi

REVIEW

Visitors is an extraordinarily gory and goofy film with a blood red streak of humour.

The film has been described as an anthology, but I don’t think that accurately describes it. Taking place over a full year, Visitors, starts with Nana, Haruka, and Takanori driving to Souta’s house, a bandmate who has become quite the hermit. After being let in, the three friends notice the strange behaviour and almost squalid living conditions, when one of the girls (not named for spoilers) investigates the rest of the house, she awakens a demonic entity and from this point, it is a gory, whacky and at times bizarre film, that wears it’s influences (Evil Dead, The Exorcist just for a start) on its sleeves and eventually comes to make an excellent point about human beings and our actions.

Whilst the influences are easy to see, Ugana still has his own style. Expanding on his short of the same name, Visitors is still only just about sixty minutes long, and that’s absolutely long enough for the point of the film to emerge, without overstaying its welcome. The demons screeching gets very grating especially in the last segment of the film, when it is almost constant, but the effects are great with bottles of green vomit, heaps of blood and some violent and outlandish injuries.

Visitors is not for everyone, but it is worth checking out even as a curiosity.

Visitors – streaming now on Screambox.

Ryan Morrissey-Smith