Directed and written by Soichi Umezawa, Vampire Clay is the second blood sucking body horror watched for review this week, continuing a trend of unplanned for themed movies. This surreal horror had some great special effects, but sometimes felt like the budget couldn't adequately display the story it wanted to tell.
While doing some gardening, a small earthquake reveals a sealed bag of clay buried in the clay. Miss Aina (who had been doing the gardening) decides to take the bag and put it in her small rural art school. One of the students then ends up using the clay from within the bag, unaware that this clay is a living creature that feeds on blood and other bodily fluids in order to sustain itself. Soon, the school finds itself under attack from a clay based creature that is able to transform its victims into clay, and absorb them entirely into itself.
The stop motion effects used throughout Vampire Clay were impressive, as were the special effects used to show the carnage it was able to bring about. From moving small phallic looking objects, to a clay mouse, and clay tentacles, this bizarre antagonist had a feel and look of The Thing to it. One of its abilities is to create a clay replica of its victim that can then be used to trick others into becoming new victims. Being made of a soft clay means it is easily damaged, and is able to use this to its own advantage, such as using items embedded in its soft flesh as weapons. The make-up effects looked fantastic, giving characters 'infected', a look of being part clay and part human. Later on there is a short fully stop-motion sequence that looked more effective due to the stop-motion being jerky and unnatural looking. It also had a fun ability to transform body parts it is able to touch into clay itself, an early highlight being a girl who smashes her now clay arms against a table top, resulting in her arms being ripped off!
The story was simple but barrelled along at a fast pace, and never really lets up once it gets going fully. There was a fun way at the forty five minute mark to have a relatively lengthy five minute or so origin story for the clay monster, narrated by a key character. The small cast of characters didn't have too much to flesh them out, other than Aina, whose backstory of trying to make it big in Tokyo is represented by some scenes that play out dialogue free. Up until the last ten minutes I thought this wasn't doing much wrong. I found the ending both stretched out, and a bit confusing. I think I got what the film was going for, but it wasn't really shown on screen in the most cohesive way.
A lot of the soundtrack felt more jolly than the events being shown, giving a nice juxtaposition between the onscreen horror and the music alongside it.
Vampire Clay was an entertaining, often darkly comedic horror that delighted due to the special effects, in particular the clay effects, both stop motion and make-up wise. The story was simple, making for the feel of a body horror that had a unique vibe to it, and some very messed up moments that I was totally on board for. Vampire Clay is streaming exclusively on ARROW.
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