THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.
by Arpad Okay. The first thing you’ve got to know about Junk Head is that Takahide Hori is a madman. The film’s writer and director is also its cinematographer and producer, and a hundred other roles. The movie is stop motion, which allows for the (practically) one-person production team. Junk Head is a wild vision of dystopian collapse, mutant body horror, and the inextinguishable human drive to pitch in when others need help. Below the streets, deep in time, populated with monsters, and highly relatable.
Set in a time where humans live for centuries, a volunteer is sent from surface society into the catacombs below. His mission: to study organisms that still reproduce. The forgotten world beneath is alien strata, full of ghastly worm-human hybrids and friendly laborer creatures in societies divided by floor.
It’s Junk Head, so at the outset, the nice body attached to the head is destroyed, replaced by junk. The man inside the shell remains the same, but his series of increasingly desperate scrap robot bodies riff on everything from the contemporary video game hero to atomic-age tin wind-up toys.
The things that live in the world beneath resemble humans in perverse and unspeakable ways, like a collaboration between HR Giger and Jim Henson. A world of eyeless protruberances studded with claws and teeth, human traits melted into crab, a friendly face ringed with spider-legs. Glowing in the dark, extending red veins from their tunnel-caves.
Its epic-looking world is just as Métal Hurlant. Sweeping empty brutalist landscapes, shafts of arching industrial concrete walkways barely tread upon for eons. Endless hallways littered with entropic debris and demonic danger; I don’t know if Hori was playing Doom thirty years ago, but I was. Which is to say, with the attention he put into the character design, making the creatures extra repulsive, he’s also investing in the personality of the setting.
So Junk Head brings something Mervyn Peake and something Philip K Dick. Things have gotten really, really weird with time and isolation. And yet, despite the collapse of society, the routines are maintained. What a horrifyingly relatable thought: the end times come and go, and you’ve still got to show up to work on time. The black humor hits hard.
Junk Head has real heart. The other thing our hero, “Junkers,” has is hope. The drive that sent him underground to fix humanity’s problems is the same compulsion that makes Junkers help out the folks he meets in the deep, and what makes them help him. Human nature. All of it, above and below, related and connected, one world. For better or for worse. Both.
To witness such a fever dream of dark fantasy captured through a lens is a rare, breathtaking thing. I cannot overstate the visceral impact seeing this story unfold with your own eyes has. Hyperbolic compliments to the craftsmanship barely scratch the surface. Hori — mostly by himself — literally built everything in the world. Every person, place, and thing.
Honestly, there were more ideas in Junk Head than there was time for. The mummy hunters at the outset are more important than you’d think, but if Junkers is ever going to meet them, it’ll have to be in a sequel. I was expecting one hundred and one minutes of a Chris Cunningham music video, and instead (or maybe in addition to that), I got what felt like the first tankōbon of an Ursula K Le Guin adventure manga. A wanderer in the wastes. Optimism in the face of dystopia, choosing trust in a time of crisis. Not the whole story, but the first.
9 out of 10
Junk Head drops on Blu-ray on August 15. For ordering information, click this, or head over to Amazon.
Written and directed by Takahide Hori.
Cinematography by Takahide Hori.
Starring Takahide Hori, Atsuko Miyake, and Yuji Sugiyama.
Produced by Takahide Hori.
Not rated, with freaky stop-motion herky-jerkery and inventively horrific subterranean beasties.
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