I tell you the truth. I would not trade one bowl of SKILANDIS for this movie. Remember the Grudge? Pretty scary, huh? Well this is same director as THAT movie, but not nearly as scary. Maybe this film does not translate too swell enough into Lithuanian?

Marebito is this Japanese film about an underworld girl-creature named Fuyumi. If you sit through first half hour of this film without falling asleep you will eventually get to the part about Shaver and the deros... (we heard this movie is somehow about deros, see). Too bad we had to sit through entire movie only to discover we had been taken down the garden path to Radviliskis! In fact I, Figbar Tobar am willing to speculate here, in the Shavertron, that at some point Mr. director fell asleep himself, but left his camera on until it ran out of tape. Maybe this technique was meant to replicate the excruciating pain of what is to follow.

Our hero, more or less, is Masuoka (spelled same way in Lithuanian as in Japanese--COINCIDENCE??) a news cameraman by trade. He leads boring life watching Hostel II and personal video footage of a broken window shade in the apartment next door. This finally pushes him over the edge so that he wants to know what is the opposite of boredom...in his case, that would be fear. He is apparently unemployed, too, which might be the reason he is a little goofy. He becomes obsessed with fear, which is more than I can say about myself while I was watching this. His obsession helped the movie go for another hour or so.

After descending into a very deep tunnel system connected to the Tokyo subway, he tracks down the ghost of a suicide victim he video taped in the Tokyo subway. The ghost is now living in the Underworld quite nicely, and knows all about RICHARD SHAVER and the Shaver Mystery. Funny how this happens after you kill yourself. Ghost tells our hero that Shaver wrote his book back in the 1920s (sic!) and that it was fiction...until the "book turned out to be a prophecy." Oh, and Mr. Ghost also tells our hero that "Fear is just ancient wisdom we've forgotten." This is why Masuoka decides he will ultimately find his greatest fear in this labyrinth of tunnels. We are not sure exactly what he intends to do when this finally happens, but he is going for it anyway.

He finds this skinny naked girl chained to a brick wall. So he decides to take her back to his boring Tokyo apartment full of video equipment crap, where he continues to keep her chained up. He finds out she only drinks blood for food, so can we guess the foreshadow of events that is about to unfold? Oh yes! Figbar can imagine!

In the great tradition of movies like The Return of Dr. X, our hero becomes a serial killer in order to bring much needed blood to this devil girl, who he decides was raised by evil deros. Does any of this make sense so far?

Well, it SHOULDN'T because it only SEEMS to make sense. Allow me to point out also that the director brushed off Shaver pretty fast. Nary a mention of Mr. Shaver after ghost exits stage right.

At one point our hero encounters a man in black, who berates him for failing to raise the girl like she is used to being raised -- by deros, of course. MIB? Why not throw in Mothra and Godzilla too? A TOHO monster team-up against the deros could only help this movie.

I will spare you the ending, but suffice to say that the Shaver Mystery is not mentioned again, nor is Richard Shaver. This forces me to give Marebito two Lithuanian pork feet braised in sauerkraut instead of the usual thumbs up.

Marebito is available on Amazon.com if you still are not convinced.

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