Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God (1986)

directed by Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu

Japan

40 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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(This is a review “from the vaults”, so it might not be up to my current quality standards. Forgive me, but I’m too busy to write anything new again this week.)

This movie is a little short to get an entire review, but the myriad of excellent splatter films from Japan that came out in the 80s and 90s deserve recognition despite very few of them ever reaching close to an hour of run time. I don't think anybody is watching these things for the plot, and more often than not, the plot is simply a ticking clock counting down to the tentacle stuff, but in this case the monster's backstory is genuinely interesting, and even quasi-Lovecraftian. If we suppose that in this context there is a God who created all life, imagine a creature that evolved outside of God's purview, that God turned his/her/its/their back from: this is Guzoo, our unholy tentacle monster du jour. And it lives inside a summer house guarded by a mad scientist who keeps it at bay by playing a special song on a flute.

The creature design here is just miles above what I expected. This is the very definition of a typical Lovecraftian shambling monstrosity. It has very few defined parts - no resemblance to an Earth life-form, no discernible eyes or nose or a countable number of limbs, just snapping amorphous jaws at one end of a large, sticky, fleshy-looking body covered in unsettling protrusions and whipping tentacles. The size is perfect: it's not big enough to dwarf the humans, but it's not tiny enough to be silly. It’s just about the size where, if a dog that big came at you, you'd be really terrified. 

There's a specific frame towards the end of the film where two surviving girls are running through the house, trying to escape Guzoo, and for a second we see the girls and then Guzoo peeking through the doorway in the background, and I don't know why, but the way the whole sequence is shot is just beautiful to me- Guzoo feels so present, so there.

This isn't even a direct Lovecraft adaptation and it gets the whole "squirming tentacle monster" thing down in a way that makes said monster feel far more directly threatening than they typically are. For a splatter film, this veers far more towards dread than the gross-out effect most of its contemporaries go for. It doesn't feel like the intent here was just to make us lose our lunch. There's a distinct ominousness to Guzoo. Its appearance isn't just scary because it looks gross. There's something about Guzoo that conveys a sense of it not being right.

Everything just kind of fizzles out at the end, Guzoo turns into a harmless turtle (?) and the remaining girls limp off into the mist.  People got eaten, property was destroyed, wounds were dealt. But we'll never forget Guzoo, and we'll never stop hoping that maybe, just maybe, 39 years later, somebody with practical effects experience and a love of shot-on-video splatter movies will take up the Guzoo torch and bring the world a very belated sequel.