Vampire Clay [Sub: Eng]

The film sports practical effects that reach Brian Yuzna-esque heights of giddy absurdity, including a Claymation sequence of a teenage girl being swallowed whole by a wormlike monster as she squirms and screams.

Umezawa's feats of stop-motion are undermined by his incoherent staging and editing, which substitute manic energy for the nuts-and-bolts of building tension and clarifying action.

Monster movies are always a bit tongue-in-cheek going all the way back to the days of the guy in a rubber suit. Their goal is to make you smile and cheer when something crazy happens. In that regard, Vampire Clay succeeds.

this film of eerie earthenware and earthworms-that-turn comes with enough individuality and... idiosyncrasy, to earn itself the sort of appreciation (and, no doubt from some, abhorrent rejection) that typically greets products of outsider art.

Vampire Clay isn't perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it is one of the most gleefully absurd and visually engaging films I've seen this year!

This schlocky Japanese horror about murderous, sentient modelling clay which creates havoc in a small provincial art school is so inept, you start to wonder if it's deliberately so.