Mermaid in a Manhole, however, is quite a different thing. Hideshi Hino starts his film with the camera prowling through sewer garbage, so we get lots of slimy worms and the odd embryo. A short expository dialogue between a young couple which ocassionally shows up throughout the movie to act as a Greek Chorus establishes a depressed painter's mood ("it's only a month since his wife left"), and then he enters the sewers, with a voice-over commentary explaining "Here rest all the beautiful things I've lost".

He remembers the days of his youth, when there was a beautiful river where now the sewers are. In a bizarre touch, this melancholy sequence is broken when he exclaims: "Chibi, is that you?", sadly pulling the rotten remains of a guinea pig out of the dirt, "and now you're here in a cold place like this", embracing the remains.

Starting to paint his former pet, odd noises lead him further into the tunnel where the titular mermaid is resting, also a victim of the town's sewer-building activities. When she starts to get sick ("That's what you get in a place like this", the painter says compassionately), he takes her home and puts her into his bathtub where she keeps rotting, the spreading disease spurting blood and puss. Writhing in pain, she finally offers him her body to paint with: "My whole body is full of puss in seven colours."

He cuts her wounds, there's more writhing and it all looks more and more like a minimalistic love story. Worms start to appear in the wounds, and the painter collects the worms and pulls them out of her wounds. She seems to die, but revives again, and as he performs tender backrubs on her, she says "You must paint me in the last moments before I die". And so he does.

While all this is gross stuff indeed, there is a little more to the movie than revolting make-up. As a movie, Mermaid leaves much to be desired. It often looks like the direct-to-video production it is, and some cliched scenes of exposition are handled too broadly. However, as opposed to the usual spoofy "let's out-gore every gore movie" efforts like Braindead (1992) or Nekromantik (1987), offbeat humor and horror effects manage not to get into the way of the fact that Mermaid has the mood of a very sad romance. Indeed, David Cronenberg should love this film, which plays a little like The Fly (1986) brought down to its essentials.

There are no "villains" in Mermaid, no conventional "strong scenes" (no killings, no sex etc.) are distracting the viewer from the mermaid's cruel martyrdom. There's just a sympathetic, but powerless character who watches another one painfully dying. The mermaid represents the painter's wife and "all the beautiful things" he has lost, so she is bound to rot and vanish too. The helpless fatalism displayed by the characters, realizing that they are living in a nightmare, reduced to absurd and useless activities, just waiting for the inevitable fate to befall them, says more about real "horror" and pain than two dozen chainsaw murders.

Like the hero of his manga Panorama of Hell, director Hideshi Hino was born in Manchuria in 1946. His family fled the country soon after his birth, and he nearly lost his life en route to Japan. He began to draw at an early age, and in 1967 his first comic strip, Cold Sweat, was published. Apart from Panorama of Hell (whose mad painter uses his own blood as painting), Hell Baby is also available in English; both works ooze Mermaid's mood.