A review of "Rigor Mortis"

Take elements of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, Jacob's Ladder, the Hellblazer comics, Silent Hill and put them into a blender with a healthy dollop of pure, original Takashi Shimizu and your resulting beverage will be Rigor Mortis.

Also blood. Lots and lots of blood.

The residents we meet in the gray and eldrich apartment complex which serves as the backdrop for the film include a jolly yet nosy superintendent, a sweet old tailor and her cantankerous husband, the newest tenant, a washed up actor…and a necromancer, albino anime boy whose mother suffers from PTSD and a former vampire hunter turned cook.* You in yet?

Before things get overly dark, there’s a wonderfully refreshing edge of quirky, black humor that sets this apart from your typical American horror film where everyone is taking everything so seriously that the audience has no choice but to giggle. But, as I said, things do get pretty dark.

Every shot is arresting, an absolute portrait and there’s a moment or two of fantastic, horrific, nightmare imagery. Throw in a score and sound design that settles on the viewer like damp cobwebs and you have an atmosphere so thick you couldn’t cut it with an axe.

It’s not a perfect horror film though. They’ve trotted out the old “children’s scary drawings as plot devices” trope, one character who starts out sympathetic just ends up seeming evil, and, at times, I felt as if I were missing something, whether it was bad editing or just lost in translation, I couldn’t say, but only once or twice did I find myself actually taken out of the movie because of it. Perhaps if they had done a better job explaining the rules of this world/apartment complex.

Then again, the two lines: "Oh? So you know that vampires are afraid of glutenous rice?” and "The cigarettes I smoke are made from ashes of the unborn” probably should have tipped me off that this is a culture I will never fully understand. One thing is for sure: I have never seen a horror movie with as much martial arts in it. There’s some pretty spectacular supernatural combat in this, specifically towards the end.

If you’ve enjoyed the Ju-On films (yes, this film features creepy, stop-motion nightmare chicks, smoking and climbing on walls) and Shimizu’s other works, you’re going to enjoy this.

And now, I’d like someone to open a Kickstarter to raise money to hire Juno Mak and Shimizu to direct the next Silent Hill film. It makes too much sense, you guys.

There’s actually a part, towards the end of the film, where you can hear the air raid siren….

Anyway.

Rigor Mortis will be in select theaters and available for digital download on June 6th.

For more info, head to the Rigor Mortis official page for theaters, trailer and other stuff.

* The explanation for which is just delightful.