this is the peak cinematic experience. at no point in this movie did i have any guess what might happen next. this movie is so gruesomely lurid, garish, phantasmagorically beautiful, sometimes stunningly artistic and startling that i could merely try to hold it together while drifting with delight from one scene to the next. it holds back nothing. the surreal atmosphere takes hold about a quarter of the way in and increases in hypnotic effect from there. the obvious fakeness (or sometimes obvious reality) of many of the props and special effects and gore somehow renders them MORE viscerally affecting. Kuei Chih-hung seems to have realized that in a movie we can make anything, with no limits, and then went and made that movie.
i'm including a screenshot (not mine, also not a gross one) that will not even begin to prepare you for the many, many arresting and haunting scenes this movie contains. it could be reasonably compared to other striking asian horror-fantasy films like Hausu or Kwaidan (or even italian cannibal exploitation films). this is the kind of unique, creative movie that will never be made again and cannot be forgotten, even if you want to.