MARRONNIER (Japan 2004)
Directed by: Hideyuki Kobayashi
Starring: Mayu, Misao Inagaki, Miyako Koga, Hime

“Her apprehensions mount until the deranged stalker finally seizes his prey, plunging Marino into a dream-world of living dolls and satin wedding-gowns, hacked body parts and bondage! Can she and her friends escape before being turned into Numai's blasphemous mannequins?”

- publicity material

"Barely coherent…hapless…bad…worse…"

- Dennis Harvey, Variety

Puppets. Murder. Japanese schoolgirls. Some things are just so strange they have to be seen to be believed.

Marino loves her Marrionnier doll, and she loves her friends. Unfortunately, her Marrionnier doll was made by an demented genius who uses a diabolical machine to turn human beings into wax. Then he uses the wax to make dolls. Evil! Evil! His assistant, Numai, is even more insane and he takes a fancy to Marino. He begins to stalk her, and when that isn’t enough, he captures she and her friends, imprisons them in his underground lair and tries to turn them into dolls, too. But then his dolls come to life and start killing everyone. It’s a nightmare!

Shot like a karaoke video, or a TV commercial about tartar build-up, MARRONNIER is the kind of movie that boils your brain and makes you very scared for the direction humanity is headed. But its pedigree is impeccable. The director/writer/editor/puppeteer is Hideyuki Kobayashi and three of the female roles are played by well-known manga artists. But the evil one behind the scenes who’s pulling the strings is Junji Ito. This dental technician turned horror-manga-creator is one of the most famous manga guys around. He’s responsible for Tomie (who’s now the star of a series of films) and Uzumaki, which swirled through US theaters a few years ago. His latest opus is Gyo, about devil fish with legs, but he took some time off to executive produce MARRONNIER and to do the character design for the dolls. He also appears in a cameo performance, both as a human and as a puppet.

MARRONNIER is a bizarre send-up of the currently hot, hot, hot Japanese horror craze. It’s a surrealist suicide charge aimed at destroying all the po-faced, “Ooo scary” movies about girls in white frocks with long black hair that the world just can’t seem to get enough of. It deeply upset audiences at the San Francisco Film Festival, but we all know that people in San Francisco are sissies who don’t eat meat.

You’ll never be able to look at a Japanese horror movie with a straight face again after witnessing the head-splitting frenzy of MARRONNIER.