Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

Junk Head Blu-ray Movie Review

Into the mutie breach, dear cyborgs...

Reviewed by Kenneth Brown September 21, 2023

Junk Head stretches for the stars but, like its titular hero, plummets into the depths, loses the finesse and strength of its stop-motion body, only to be reborn as a Frankensteinian infant struggling to learn how to use its new arms and legs. Too much? Apologies. I desperately wanted Junk Head to be the next Mad God in my collection; a stunning, stomach-churning masterpiece of a fever dream that took legendary VFX artist Phil Tippett and his team 30 years to complete. Or at the very least, I hoped it would be the next 9; an uneven but engaging dystopian adventure released theatrically in 2009 by Universal Pictures and digital FX animator (briefly turned director) Shane Acker. Instead, Japanese writer/director Takahide Hori's bloody descent into rather generic mutated madness is an adequately animated but poorly edited stop-motion oddity that feels far more like a film student's senior year project (complete with one too many rookie filmmaking mistakes) than a dark epic from the next great animation master.

In a distant future world, humans have achieved longevity but lost their fertility in the process, and have nearly gone extinct as a result. 'Junk Head's protagonist, a cyborg spelunker and explorer, enters an underground world where artificially created species mutate and thrive. His mission is to research these creatures and learn the secrets of their reproductivity. But after he's attacked and loses his body, it becomes increasingly clear that this mysterious underground world is a dystopia where dangerous monsters roam and ambush unsuspecting prey, and that the artificially created intelligent species have developed a unique society that has long forgotten what humans even are. From Japanese writer/director Takahide Hori, 'Junk Head' is a dizzying stop-motion animated trek into a dilapidated hellscape.

First the good. There's something undeniably endearing about our hero, Junkers: a blank-slate cyborg from the human world with a sweet backstory and tragic new existence in not one but, over the course of the film, three different bodies cobbled together from spare parts. One of those bodies doesn't even allow him to speak for the entire second act, leaving the animators plenty of room to use his stick arms and wiry fingers to communicate with the varied denizens he encounters. Some of the mutants he meets are equally intriguing, from a wayward girl (voiced by Atsuko Miyake) and her silent companion to a trio of semi-amusing gas-masked guardians. (Like most of the characters, the guardians are voiced by Hori, speaking in an unintelligibly garbled alien language.) The aforementioned monsters that Junkers has to escape, avoid or defeat, though, are more hit or miss, offering cartoonishly mawed, overly phallic designs in place of truly scary mutated horrors (look no farther than Mad God's terrifying bestiary). They lumber, lunge and dismember their prey but only highlight the shortcomings in the animation. While Junkers and his new friends are lovingly realized, despite their humble appearance, other creatures are less believable, serving only as hindrances to Junkers' progress than any meaningful or memorable threat.

Junk Head is by no means plagiaristic (it released in 2017 before Mad God was even finished) but it shares uncanny plot beats, themes and conflicts with Tippet's film, just on a smaller, less visually thrilling scale. And those striking similarities are a curse on Hori's film, as comparison becomes all but inevitable; a comparison that can't possibly allow Junk Head to emerge victorious. Hori's underground world is mostly comprised of bland hallways, long staircases, crumbling architecture and industrial workshops. The occasional elevator platform or deep- earth boiler room mixes it up but, before long, it's back to fleeing from claymation-esque monsters around the same concrete corners and tunnels dressed with new garbage. It's a boring world that makes Junkers' exploration, well, boring. He wants to sever a penis from one of the fertile creatures (I can't make this stuff up) but doesn't have the strength or capacity to pull it off, and his misadventures feel more like side quests in a videogame (go fetch twenty "mashrooms" for us, literally) than harrowing missions or journeys into other realms.

Worse, the filmmaking is rife with strange cuts, edits and fades to black; the camera spins hastily around Junkers when he runs, as well as frequently flipping direction from one angle to the complete opposite; the music is grating, inconsistent and disjointed from the visual tone; and the movie just... ends. No lie. Ends. As in a big-boss beastie (introduced only in the third act) is finally killed, leaving Junkers to complete his mission... and he doesn't. He stands over the corpse and suddenly: credits! Wait, what about his quest? What about the final part of the world he set out to explore? Does he find the secret to fertility? Does he return to the human world somehow? Will there be a sequel? Did Hori just... run out of money and time? There's zero resolution. I even checked to make sure I hadn't accidentally hit the "chapter skip" button, it was that jarring. Come to think of it, I hadn't realized how much I had grown to care for Junkers as a character until his storybook abruptly slammed shut.

Ultimately Junk Head is a passion project that's worth watching, if only to bask in its intermittent delights when it gets things right or stumbles across a legitimately unique and intriguing subplot (the boiler room attendant scene and the guardians going full John Wick leaps to mind). It just fails to share whatever that specific passion is with its audience, making for a disappointing effort that has much more potential than it has the capacity, artistry, technique or perhaps resources to bring to life on screen. I'd highly, highly recommend Mad God in its place. It isn't quite a perfect film (though I still without hesitation call it a genuine masterpiece) but it'll certainly leave you reeling, thinking, wincing and gasping in awe far more than Junk Head.

Junk Head Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Synergetic brings Junk Head to Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation that stands as the best aspect of the release. The palette is muted on the whole, with dirty eggshell whites, dusty burlap browns, dingy yellows, and endless hallways of pallid greens and decaying beiges. But color still pops when called upon. Blood is suitably vibrant and tacky, flames erupt and splash across the screen, and black levels are nice and deep. Contrast is solid and consistent (albeit a tad overblown at times under the harsh florescent lights of the underground factories), while detail is as revealing as its source allows. Fine textures are crisp, edges are clean, and delineation allows the viewer to probe the shadows and study everything the animators have put into a scene. There are small hints of artifacting here and there, particularly when scanning large areas of darkness in low-lit shots, but it hardly amounts to a distraction. All told, Junk Head presumably looks as good on Blu- ray as it did in the editing room.

Junk Head Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Junk Head's alien language Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track is less exciting. No lossless mix. No surround experience. Granted, the film was more than likely created with a stereo track, sans a sound design artist who might have lent a more compelling and immersive mix to the production. Hori can only do so much. Still, voices (garbled and unintelligible as they intentionally are) are crystal clear and neatly prioritized in the soundscape, and explosions, bestial roars and industrial machinery are decently weighty, even without the support of a subwoofer. Music is... all over the place. Under- represented, overbearing... you name it. The volume, prioritization and utilization of the score could really use some work. It never drowns out dialogue but, again, it's an alien language you can't possibly understand anyway, so it doesn't earn points there. In the end it's a serviceable audio track that's probably a good representation of the original sound design and mix.

Junk Head Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

A single featurette is included but it's a big'un: "The Making of Junkhead" (HD, 42 minutes), a detailed look at the production, character designs, stop- motion animation, music composition and more. I was worried this would be a simple port of one of the animation studio's short EPKs from YouTube. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find a fuller, more comprehensive mini-documentary that -- didn't help me but -- may help you appreciate the film more.

Junk Head Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I know some people will enjoy Junk Head far more than I did. A quick Google search of reviews uncovers quite a bit of praise for the film. But I couldn't get past its lesser qualities; the sloppy filmmaking and editing techniques prevalent throughout, the wayward story and abrupt ending, the disjointed score and uneven humor; on and on and on. Junkers is a great character, as are some of his newfound friends, but they deserve a better dystopian adventure. Synergetic's Blu-ray release is better, with an excellent video presentation, a solid stereo track (that presumably is as much as the source film has to offer), and a pleasantly surprising 42-minute production documentary. Honestly, give it a shot. Support independent filmmakers. Junk Head may be a far cry from Mad God but you may still have a good time with its stop-motion wares.