Tadashi has taken his girlfriend Kaori to Okinawa for a romantic getaway, borrowing his scientist uncle Dr. Tadashi and Kaori are a young couple in the flush of love. To have "gyo" on its own indicates that these fish are half-creatures - and lurking in the vacant space beside them is something unknowable and terrible. However, "gyo" itself is never used on its own in writing or speech, and always has other descriptors attached to it for all the various kinds of fish swimming in the sea. The title "GYO" is the literal romanji of the symbol for "fish" in Japanese. Manga don't often fly off the shelves like the latest Katie Price autobiography, so for a manga to enjoy three pressings must indicate a work of quite poweful impact - but is it just overwhelming awe at the macabre majesty of black grandeur which plunges you deep and long into an absorbing void, or has its popularity only been a perfunctory, superficial, quickly-discarded rubbernecking of a crash site? Quite a nice one too - a thick hardback with embossed outer covers and colour inner covers too.
Following GYO: Tokyo Fish Attack! we now have the original manga from which the movie was adapted, Ito's 2004 two-volume mini-series GYO: The Death-Stench Creeps, first published in English in 2008, reprinted in a second edition last year, and now republished again in a collected omnibus. The story was developed by Junji Ito, a leading light in horror manga who is already notorious (can a horror writer ever be merely "famous"?) for his Eisner-nominated Uzumaki, which was rereleased late last year in a deluxe hardback omnibus format and which gives a dramatic insight into his freakishly twisted world. Still, as bizarre as the experience was, it isn't so surprising if you're aware of the original source material.
It certainly astonishes you with quite a few, er, plot twists.
well, you can't fault the movie for its originality. My fellow staff member Mark Burke had the greater strength to overcome the block and articulate his own thoughts on the inimitable experience that is GYO: Tokyo Fish Attack!, and it will suffice here to say that those beguiled by the boisterous exclamatory title and led into the film expecting a kooky and campy ironically-bad B-Movie creature-feature. I did intend to write a review of Terracota's release of GYO: Tokyo Fish Attack! back in 2012, but wasn't able to muster the willpower - let's just say that it would have been an uncharacteristically prosaic entry from me.
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