Uzumaki (2000) Years ago, I was a faithful viewer of David Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series. It was different than anything else that was then being shown and I
eagerly awaited each week's installment which would theoretically drop more
clues as to the identity of who killed Laura Palmer. Eventually that mystery
was solved and the show moved on to other things, but I remember about half way
through that story arc that I quit trying to keep up with all the clues and red
herrings because I came to the conclusion that it all really made no sense and
there wasn't any logic in any of it (this would really prove to be the case
later in the series) and there was no way in hell I was ever going to be able
to solve the thing on my own.
I still enjoyed what transpired, but probably not as much as if I thought there
was any coherent realism involved. When they finally revealed that it was her
dad who did it and he was possessed or something, I was interested as a
bystander, but it wasn't the thrill it would've have been if it all followed
logically from everything I saw before. I go into all this (and you may think
I'm about as bright as the rest of the people on public assistance in my
trailer park - heck, I ain't going to lie to you, I couldn't ever figure out
those Encyclopedia Brown mysteries I read as a kid) because I found myself
feeling the same thing the longer I watched this movie. Visually arresting and with an abundance of creepy atmosphere, it leaves you
with this vague feeling that you've been hoodwinked by a master showman who was
able to submerge the meagre story beneath layers of stunning effects and weird
characters. When it's all done, you'll first think, "that was pretty cool" then
if you think any further about it, you'll have this sneaking suspicion that you
never did find out what it was all about. 
Kirie is always late for class, so she's hauling ass to get to class when all
of a sudden this freak jumps out from somewhere and asks her if he "scared the
hell" out of her. This would be her teen-age stalker whose name I can't quite
recall. It doesn't really matter, because he doesn't really figure into the
plot other than to periodically pop up to scare her and generate some cheap
menacing thrills and a pretty sweet suicide scene. She pushes him out of the
way and goes on her way.
Eventually she meets up with Shuichi, a bookish dude that seems to think a
perpetual non-expression regardless of what is transpiring, is somehow the
equivalent of characterization. That's okay I guess because everyone else in
this movie is a total spaz. From his dad to her dad to the cop that constantly
yells at him for riding too fast on his bike with Kirie on board (wouldn't it
be nice if that was the fuzz's biggest problem in your town?), everyone in this
town is - how do I put this delicately - nucking futs. That may have something to do with the fact that they all live in a town that's
named Kurouzu-Cho which means "the black spiral" in Japanese. And no, I haven't
squeezed Japanese lessons in between watching Wheel of Fortune and cruising around the Hy-Vee parking lot looking at college girls (don't
bother cruising Aldi's - it's just single mothers there), I got that from a
French web site. I leave the translating duties to the professionals. You know,
like French web masters. They also tell me that the word uzumaki means spiral
as well. Now I don't know about you, but I kind of figure that you get what you deserve
if you find out the town you live in is called Black Spiral and you don't
immediately move to someplace like Davenport. I mean, there are some towns that
I would never, ever live in, no matter what. They include any town named Salem
or Dunwich; Intercourse, PA; Black Spiral and Kansas City (Kansas or Missouri). In any event, Shuichi has this father who has gotten himself this strange
hobby. It first comes to light at the very beginning of the movie when Kirie is
running to school and pushing suicidal stalkers around. She happens upon
Shuichi's father, Toshio who is shooting some digital video or something in an
alley. And no, he's not shooting the latest music video for J-Pop sensation
Ayumi Hamasaki - he's video taping a snail moving around on the wall. Do you
get the idea that there ain't a whole lot to do in the supernaturally cursed
sleepy town of Black Spiral? Toshio just isn't one of these snail fetish freaks that gives the Internet a
bad name either. Oh, you can bet that he's probably got a dresser drawer full
of the hottest and nastiest mollusk videocaps, jpegs, and shells that he tells
his long suffering wife is really just for his job as a, um, what was his job?
Oh, yeah, he quit it to obsess full time on vortexes.  This is the gimmick of the entire movie. The power of the vortex to drive
people insane. Of course these vortexes (or maybe there's only one and it gets
around a lot) cause a lot of really cool and awful stuff to happen. Toshio
though is the first one to hitch it up to their bandwagon. He accumulates a
large collection of vortex related memorabilia. He's got rooms full of pretty
looking things with spirals on them and his son Shuichi is starting to wonder
why his dad isn't like all the other dads in Black Spiral. Like why for
instance he spends his meals spinning his soup around to stare at the vortex
instead of reading about whether the Black Spiral Carp kept pace in the
wildcard race.
As the movie goes along, he gets more and more whacked out. Soon he draws
Kirie's father into his mania. Yasuo is her father and he's a pottery maker.
Toshio comes over and sits transfixed as the potter's wheel spins round and
round, the clay spinning and taking shape as Yasuo molds it. I was hoping this
wasn't going to turn into one of those Ghost-type scenes between Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, but all Toshio wants from
Yasuo is for him to make him a nice plate (hey, that's okay) and he wants him
to put a really bitchin' spiral design on it (dang!). Back at Black Spiral High School, things are spiraling (did I just do that?)
out of control with any number of strange events. You've got this fat kid that
shows up to school only when it's raining and when he does show up he's covered
with all this transparent glop. He also moves really slowly. Okay maybe that's
not so odd, because I recall having slow gooey fat kids at my high school, too,
but when he gets to class, the teacher kind of watches as the cool kids trip
and gang-stomp him. Then this nasty goop splatters on one the cool kids and we
see this spiral shape pulsate through the back of the fat kid's shirt. If I was
that cool kid, I'd be hoping that Pudge wasn't some type of slimy Incredible
Hulk. There's more madness at school. A girl with long curly hair, who is obsessed
with being the center of attention starts behaving strangely. Soon she is
leading around a bunch of groupies as she prances through the halls with
gigantic curls that defy the laws of gravity. Then there's also the kid that
took a header off the spiral set of stairs in the center of the school. Sounds
like this school could use a pep rally!  The weirdness continues to pile up. Toshio puts himself into a washing machine
or something and spins himself into the great hereafter. He even makes a little
pre-wash video tape! So they have a funeral for this freak and cremate him and
the smoke from the crematorium rises up into the sky in a plume. There the
clouds swirl about into a giant vortex and eventually forms another plume going
straight down into the city lake.
Later Kirie sees her dad out late at night all muddy. He's carrying two buckets
of sloppy mud and she asks him where's been. He says something to the effect
that Toshio wanted him out at the lake collecting mud. At some point Kirie and
Shuichi discuss the possibility of leaving before they too are swallowed by the
vortex-inspired madness. You get some nice flashbacks about how he looked after
her after her mother died and that he's tried to protect her ever since. You
get some insight into their relationship, which hasn't been a regular
boyfriend/girlfriend kind of deal and gives you a reason to care about both of
these crazy kids and hope that somehow they can find a way to make it work in
this topsy-turvy (and increasingly spiral-ly) world. It isn't long before Kirie and Shuichi are about the only ones in town left
unaffected by the spirals and when the movie ends in a montage of still shots
showing the ultimate fates of all involved, it's a somewhat jolting and
unsatisfying conclusion. We never learn much about the whys or hows of the
phenomena of what has transpired in the city of Black Spiral. All that I was
able to figure out was that the town was cursed by a vortex. Maybe the movie was trying to say something about obsession and its destructive
power. It could be that it's telling us that we are our own destruction. The
vortex, a phenomena which twists back in on itself, is a manifestation of man
and woman's self-destructive behavior. We surely have seen people destroyed by
their obsessions (or perhaps more accurately their addictions) on a regular
basis. I frankly think that that's reading a bit much into a movie that seems
primarily concerned with shocking the audience with an increasingly bizarre
array of images and an increasingly oblique story. Still, it's worth a look as
it's entertaining and unsettling and you haven't lived until you've seen a
couple of giant half-man half-snails sliming their way up the outside of a high
school.
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