The thought of a live-action hentai gave me high hopes going into this movie. Olivia Taylor Dudley from The Magicians was an added bonus and an underrated actress. But I wish she was given more to work with here. This would have worked better if it were more Lovecraftian and worked like a Stuart Gordon movie. But now they could not decide if they wanted to be a comedy or not; it was almost like, by making it comedic, they could apologize for things like alien sex. Thus watering down the entire concept. Starting the film as a therapy session made you think it was going to take more chances than it did.
The alien sex scenes were more Roger Corman, and we got better alien sex in the 89s and 90s. The special effects for this was reallt pathertic. It is not like they did not have a big enough budget to pull off better as the film is otherwise well shot. The antagonist was a cult leader without a cult, sure it could be argued that he ate his follwoers before he had a chance to form, but there lies one of the films problems: the writing. It was like the film was made from a pitch that had not been fully fleshed out into a script so they ad-libbed absurd comedic elements to give it more meat on its bones, but in turn watered down what could have been an effective movie.
Dark concepts were turned into punchlines and sacrificed the emotional weight these actors could have conveyed. This movie dug into trauma; it would have been more ffective if the tentacles had been more rapey. , As the acting was never a problem, this was compounded by the fact that the writer was also the director. That way there was no one not co-signing their own bullshit here. This goes to show that indie horror movies are plagued by Hollywood's ego problems just as much as any other aspect of the business. Was a shame to see lvia Taylor Dudley's talent misused in this way,
