The Boy From Hell (2005)

Dir: Mari Asato

A demented Japanese gore film, based on a manga by the ever-crazy Hideshi Hino, tells the twisted story of a doctor (Mirai Yamamoto) who loses her son in a car accident (he is decapitated by a passing lorry while leaning out the window!). On the advice of a witch, she kidnaps a terminally ill child from the hospital and slits his throat with a giant fang over the grave of her own dead lad. This, of course, brings her beloved back as a hideously deformed zombie boy who develops a habit for eating his peers alive. Although loaded with inventively surreal imagery, as expected for a Hino adaptation, "The Boy From Hell" never quite takes off. It seems to strive for a blackly comic poignancy, kind of like a sick "Frankenstein" retelling, but the lack of substance (and occasionally even sense) lets it down. It's fast paced enough, with sufficient cartoon gore to hold the attention throughout some of the more derivative plot devices, but by the time it finished, I was left wondering what the point was. By Hino's standards, this is astonishingly tame too. **