Monday, March 6, 2023

TV Review: Junji Ito Maniac (2023)

Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre (2023) based on the manga by Junji Ito

Junji Ito is a manga storyteller who specializes in horror stories. This anime series brings a collection of his stories to Netflix in half-hour segments. Each episode has one or two stories along with a post-credits sequence that is an ongoing story. The stories are imaginative and dark with a lot of death and menace thrown in. The show has too many stories (twenty-one) to go through each individually. My favorites are "Hanging Balloon" about a celebrity who dies and a giant version of her disembodied head starts haunting her fans and "Tomb Town"about a city full of grave markers all over the place, like in the middle of the roads. Two siblings ran into a woman as they were driving into town and they have a body to hide. My less-than-favorite stories involved gross-out or body-horror that were a bit too gruesome without anything else to recommend them. Some of the stories were just odd and unsettling. 

Recommended for horror fans only.

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