Zombie holocausts and demonic scourges come in all kinds of cinematic flavors, but they’re seldom as joyous as the one depicted in Kenichi Ugana’s “Visitors: Complete Edition.” This is a film in which ordinary people get transformed into monsters worthy of “The Exorcist” — ripped flesh, rotatable heads, limitless quantities of ectoplasmic vomit — and they’re clearly having a blast.
As with his earlier “Extraneous Matter” (2020), Ugana has taken a snappy short film and extended it to an hour-long runtime, like a stand-up comic seeing how long they can draw out a gag before getting to the punchline. The original 15-minute “Visitors” — which screened at numerous international festivals in 2021 — is available on YouTube, but the chance to watch it with a live audience is reason enough to catch this extended theatrical release.
The short now serves as an opening act, and it’s a wild one: an exuberant bloodbath in the vein of Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead,” confined almost entirely to a one-story shack in rural Chiba Prefecture. That’s where a trio of friends have driven in search of their incommunicado bandmate, Sota (Ryuta Endo), only to find themselves in the middle of a demonic outbreak.
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