There’s an old axiom about how you can’t manufacture a cult favorite, and instead the audience has to find it and organically turn it into one. But that hasn’t stopped some from trying. So here we have writer/director Eisuke Naito’s HIGUMA!! The Killer Bear, a creature-feature horror-comedy that’s more odd than funny and more perplexing than scary. It’s barely an idea for a sketch, and stretching this thin material to feature length proves disastrous.
We first meet teenaged Sora (Fuku Suzuki) showing his mother the newest video game that he’s designed. She’s delighted and supportive, but within minutes his father, the victim of a scam that has cost the family all its savings, has committed suicide. Sora’s future is in jeopardy, and when he hears his mother on the phone trying to finagle money to pay for his college, he instead enters the shady world of app-based gig work. Soon, Sora is assigned a number and begins doing low-level gangster work, making stops and ferrying envelopes to and fro. Eventually, he and some other anonymous guys are tasked with retrieving a gem, which was stolen by another gig worker named Sakurako (Wan Marui) who planned to keep it for herself. She fends off their attacks at first, but is eventually subdued — but not before she swallows the gem. The boys drive her deep into the woods, planning on making her throw up the gem, then killing her and burying the body.
This is an awful lot of setup just to get a few people into a forest, and to Naito’s credit, he plows through all this plot very quickly. Also to his credit, once the action moves to the secluded wooded location, the titular bear pretty much immediately attacks, doing his titular duty and killing everyone except for Sakurako and Sora. They barely escape, and must make their way back home while avoiding calls from the gangster who’s demanding the stolen gem be returned. The pair eventually run into a grizzled old hunter (Takashi Ukaji) who has seemingly been pursuing the bear for years, but also supplements his meager earnings via looting the corpses of the bear’s victims.
This could all be the makings of a pretty good, straightforward horror-survival thriller, but Naito is entirely determined to make the proceedings as goofy as possible. The bear itself is a huge puppet, and the film makes absolutely no effort to hide the fakery, instead leaning into the campy facade. The face and skin textures are nicely detailed, with one milky white dead eye, tons of scarred-over lacerations, and muddy, matted fur. But the body is lumpy and misshapen, and the bear’s movements give the impression of two or three people inside a suit trying their best to synchronize the arms and legs. None of this is inherently a bad thing; fans of analog special effects might even be delighted — it’s certainly better than cheap CGI and adds a little personality.
But for as much as the killer bear is showcased in HIGUMA!!, the film seems embarrassed by the creature and its own modest budget, and so it leans into everything as if it’s a joke that nobody should take seriously. Bodies are hacked up and gouged, there’s lots of blood and puke, and limbs are tossed around with wild abandon. But nothing has any stakes, with every joke landing with a thud and the characters largely devoid of any real personality. Supposedly dramatic scenes of Sora worrying about his mother and contemplating whether or not to betray Sakurako for possession of the gem are followed by a vomit gag or a montage of Sora playing video games and “leveling up” his gear. It’s all a mess. Ultimately, HIGUMA! The Killer Bear is a 90-minute example of just how hard it is to self-consciously make something like Evil Dead II or Bad Taste. There’s a fine line between intentional camp and bad comedy, and it’s ultimately too fine for Naito to walk. At least the bear seems to be having fun.
Published as part of NYAFF 2026 — Dispatch 1.
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