Warning: Potentially disturbing images

Thank you for joining me today at Anime Rants for my review of Uzumaki episode 3. I loved the first and second episodes, but the third one was less likeable. There was one main problem: everything was way too rushed. There were like 6 different plot-lines crammed in rather than 3 or 4, which already felt like kind of a lot. I’ll go over my thoughts on each plot-line, but the central issue doesn’t lie in any particular subplot. The issue is that too much content was stuffed into the same episode.

Article Contents

1. Mosquitoes and Mushrooms
2. Yukie’s Death and Creepy Pottery
3. The Typhoon and the Oni Next Door
4. Closing Thoughts

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Mosquitoes and Mushrooms

The first plot-line in this episode was the one about the pregnant women who turn into bloodthirsty monsters after being bitten by cursed mosquitos. They became human mosquitoes themselves. At night, they roam the hospital, killing nurses and other patients to drink their blood. They also use spiral power to hypnotize their victims. The grinning, bloody faces on the women were extremely creepy, though also slightly over-the-top. They aren’t the best case of horror visuals for that reason.

Kirie witnesses the mosquito monsters while she’s staying in the hospital following the lighthouse incident. (Note: speaking of that plot-line, I was wrong when I said Kirie’s brother burned inside the lighthouse. He is alive and well.) The monsters attack, but Kirie manages to survive the night by spraying insect repellent at them. The next day, Kirie tries to warn the staff and tell her story, but nobody believes her. The pregnant women all look happy and normal in the daylight.

The pregnant mosquito monsters were creepy to be sure, but the second part of their plot – itself a smaller subplot – was far more disgusting. The babies born of the mosquito ladies keep re-growing their placentas, signaling that they want to return to the womb where it’s comfortable and they can keep getting nutrients from blood. (The babies can also telepathically speak to each other.) The placentas grow into hideous, mushroom-like organisms that invade the office of the supervising doctor.

That doctor knew what was going on, but he was insane. Rather than try to stop the disgusting mushrooms from growing, he cultivated them and encouraged the patients to eat them. The pregnant women loved the mushrooms, but Kirie spat hers out, saying that it tasted like blood. Gross! You could say that karma struck that doctor, because when he fell tried to feed Kirie to one of the mosquito ladies, he became the victim himself. The monster sucked out his blood through a spiraling, tube-like tongue.

This plot-line ended abruptly and without any real conclusion when Kirie was released from the hospital. To nobody’s surprise, she went home in a hurry. I fail to understand why she didn’t try to leave the cursed town after these events. I suppose she wanted to stay with her family and Shuuichi, but I feel like they could all be convinced to accompany her. Still, Kirie makes no further attempts to tell anyone what happened, and remains in the insane spiral town.

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Yukie’s Death and Creepy Pottery

There was one other subplot tucked into Kirie’s time at the hospital. The story followed up with Yukie Saitou, the mother of Shuuichi who is psychotically terrified of spirals. I liked this character and wanted her to survive. It makes sense to go insane after everything she went through. A part of me could identify with her mental struggles and paranoia, too. (I’m no stranger to temporary psych wards.)

Unfortunately for me and my hopes, Yukie didn’t survive this episode. She discovered that the cochlea – the inner ear organ that controls balance – is spiral-shaped. After trying to cut those out, she died. For what it’s worth, I was proud of Shuuichi and the supervising doctor for trying to protect Yukie. They refused to let her see the ear anatomy chart. But Yukie was still haunted by visions of her dead husband, who told her that spirals were inside her ears. Rest in peace, Yukie Saitou.

The next plot-line that was rushed through was the one where Kirie’s father started making unsettling pieces on his pottery wheel. His plates, pots, and sculptures are full of spirals as well as creepy, dead human faces. A bit later, Shuuichi hears the ghostly voices of his mother and father calling to him from the pottery kiln. He breaks it open, which releases a bunch of spirits into the night air. It also starts a fire, but the family manages to contain it.

I didn’t understand the connection between these events at first. Everything moved too fast to make sense of it. But it was explained to me that the mud for the cursed pottery came from the nearby swamp, which is also where the dust from cremations settle. The remnants of ashes in the mud meant that Kirie’s father was trapping souls into his eerie crafts. Shuuchi released them, ending this unusual chain of events.

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The Typhoon and the Oni Next Door

Imagine if a typhoon was sentient. Not only is it self-aware and equipped with desires and emotions, but it also happened to fall in love with you. This sounds very silly at face value, but if you really try to imagine how it might be, it’s a terrifying concept. This is what happens to Kirie in the subsequent plot-line. A typhoon hits the town and then stays there, hovering and causing destruction for hours. It has fallen in love with Kirie. It even begins to call “Kirie” with a windy voice. Creepy.

Like most of the plot-lines in this episode, this one would have been improved with further time spend developing it. As it stands, it was a boring little arc. Someone got swept up into the typhoon in Kirie’s place, and the storm spat her out. The fall back to the ground was fatal. Shuuichi and Kirie also eventually got swept up in the storm, but they survived. I guess that was thanks to the typhoon? It’s weird that it didn’t kill Shuuichi, though.

I think the events were slightly out of order, because the typhoon supposedly disappeared after making contact with Kirie as it desired. But during the next subplot, there is a violent rainstorm, suggesting that it happened during the typhoon. Kirie’s little brother hears a recent rumor that there’s an Oni in the neighborhood. The next door neighbor, Mr Wakabayashi, tells the family that there’s a sick man moaning in a nearby house, and that’s the origin of the Oni rumor.

(Side note: In case you don’t know, an Oni is a type of Japanese demon. There are many versions of Oni, but most of them have horns and are very savage toward humans.)

The sick man dies, leading his elderly mother to start sobbing and screaming in grief. Kirie went to check on the old lady and was disturbed to see the son’s body. We don’t know what she saw until later. In the meantime, it turns out that Wakabayashi is a massive creep who spies on people and is infatuated with Kirie. While he’s spying on Kirie, weird organisms start growing on Wakabayashi.

At first, the organisms look like small hermit crab shells with spirals patterns. But the strange creatures soon grow into disgusting, squirming growths that completely take over Wakabayashi’s body. This is the same thing that happened to the old lady’s son. It’s what disturbed Kirie the other day. But unlike the other man, Wakabayashi was still alive, roaming hungrily around. It looked like he had sharp teeth and dozens of horns – just like some kind of Oni.

The monster approached Kirie ominously, but she led it outside, where it got blown away by the typhoon’s winds. There was then one final event to end the episode. The corpse of the Jack-in-the-box kid bounced into sight, sewn back together after being torn apart in the car accident. The kid’s legs and guts fell away, but his torso kept moving, bouncing around due to a large metal spring. He looked eerily like a clown from a jack-in-the-box. I guess that was his last prank. The episode ended abruptly at that point.

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Closing Thoughts

Episode Rating: 7/10

Although there were some really good moments of horror, this episode really suffered from being too rushed. I also think it’s becoming less and less believable for the people of the town to do nothing about the spirals. They should be trying to escape or maybe even combining their efforts to beat this curse. The fact that nobody cares about all these gruesome deaths and terrible events is making me lose my suspension of disbelief. However, I’m still enjoying the experience overall.

The most horrifying scene in this episode was when the mosquito ladies were using creepy corkscrew tools to draw blood out of victims. The placenta mushrooms were also pretty gross, but since Kirie didn’t eat hers, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The runner-up was the scene where a centipede tried to crawl into Yukie’s ear. I’m still not sure if that was her hallucination or reality. Either way, it was unnerving.

That wraps up my thoughts for today. Uzumaki isn’t as perfect as I was hoping, but it’s still fun. As always, I appreciate my readers and anyone who clicked on my blog today. Your engagement means a lot to me. Until next time, Sayonara!

~Thanks for reading~

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