The Burning Buddha Man

Cut-out puppet style with combination of gekianimation telling a Buddhist Wizard of Oz story with Cronenberg-style body horror and overtly inspired by the works of Man Gataro and HR Giger-esque characters. Without a doubt, Ujicha signs an artistic work as rich as it is. A unique delirium staged both marvellous and nightmarish. The film follows Beniko who gets dragged into an uncanny tale and wants to rescue her parents. She finds shelter in a sanctuary and begins to realize that her situation is bleak and more disorienting than she can comprehend. Fascinating, and it only gets better and more interesting weaving the story of the Buddha thefts and its connection to Beniko's family. This story is so crazy that I imagine it was penned in a setting locked up in a smoke-filled room coming up with one crazy idea after another. Balancing, sometimes skilfully and sometimes not, between flashbacks, spectacle, reality and illusion, the undoubtedly ambitious direction always keeps its goal clear. Ujicha plays with the characters and composes sequences as weird as they are surprising, and many details make sense. One of the most incredible scenes, when a dog (Big Bang) joins the tale, it's enduring, the appearance of Beniko's Grandmother is also one of strangest moment in the film. In short, this is a movie you don't just like, you come to experience, it becomes part of you. As a viewer you only think: WTF.. It's MORBIDLY BEAUTIFUL!!

The Director; Ujicha (unsure of his surname/firstname); has indeed delivered an incredibly surreal tale of Buddhist statues fused with humans (!!); a young girl trying to save her family and the evil overlord; Enju.

Enju misleads our heroine and lead protagonist; Beniko; played by Nao Hanai (who also wrote the pop music soundtrack; see her Soundcloud); into this dark and surreal world of Budhist statues fused; yes fused; with humans. She discovers her parents (shock!) are one of these fusions and were created by Enju's (Dr Evil for Yokai!) evil science when staying at his shrine/palace on misleading humanitarian grounds!

Then the storyline takes a further dark and dramatic twist; perhaps which one would expect from a Takashi Miike film or a Sion Sono movie.

Utter insanity follows. It's dark humour and excesively surreal and violent. It's utterly bizarre; unique; horrific and sheer crazy! I don't want to ruin the story or the concept. You just have to watch with a very open mind!

Cinematography is great. Art direction is technical and astounding despite the limitations and the low-budget. Audio is fab. Real punchy pop-music and deep electronica soundtrack. It's a box-set on Third Windows' Films with 'Violance Voyager' bundled together as well as a couple of short movies on a 2-disc Blu-ray set.

I'm very happy with the movie. It's hard-to-describe as in my 42 years of watching movies; especially arthouse; I have never seen something so bizarre and strange. I thoroughly recommend it and it's a really well-made movie.

Unfortunately for some reason a lot of Asian films are really underrated on IMDB and I am not sure why. Please watch them. They will blow your mind!