HIRUKO THE GOBLIN (1991)
With its clean synthesized music and its sentimental moments, is this really another Shinya Tsukamoto movie? Composer Chu Ishikawa is absent and a company called Makotoya gets top billing over the director’s own Kaiju Theatre label. It’s more pedestrian than anything he had worked on at this early career stage, perhaps as it’s a manga adaptation. Prior to this Tsukamoto had given high-school fantasy a shot with his experimental film The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo. But for whatever reason this often feels more like a ‘for hire’ project rather than something with that same kind of frenzied momentum. The story of a successful artist being lured into a deal with a studio is an old one. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t enjoyable moments in what is essentially a tale of a mad scientist and a teenager fighting evil. But does it have any sort of creative edge?
