Archaeologist Takashi Yabe (Naoto Takenaka) discovers the entrance to a cave beneath a burial mound near his son's school. He and pretty student Reiko (Megumi Ueno) enter the cave and are attacked by an unseen force. Later Yabe's son Masao (Masaki Kudou) believes he sees Reiko kissing another boy (who subsequently turns up dead) and suffers an attack in which a mark burns itself into his back. Masao is saved from supernatural attack by his father's archaeologist friend Hieda (Kenji Sawada) whose belief in goblins' claimed the life of Masao's aunt but Masao doesn't need convincing when more of his friends turn up dead (and headless) and the two are soon on the run from a spider-legged goblin wearing Reiko's head. With the help of a crazy old gardener, they discover the entrance to the lair of goblin Hiruko and are pitted against several of the spidery creatures and must find a way to seal the lair forever. Tsukamoto strikes the right balance bewteen horror and comedy in HIRUKO thanks to funny central performances and imagery which manages to be simultaneously derivative and audacious. Likewise, the goblins manage to look both funny and scary at the same time and the attack scenes are still suspenseful even as the animatronic, stopmotion, and bluescreen effects work gets more and more silly and shows its seams. The image of the spider-headed Reiko floating in the pond and singing her siren song manages to be as strikingly beautiful as it is repellent and ludicrous. Besides visual nods to EVIL DEAD (goblin POV), BRIDE OF REANIMATOR (bat-winged goblin head), ALIEN (the Hiruko fish), and THE THING (the spider legged severed heads), Tom Mes in his book on Tsukamoto connects a fiery image of hundreds of heads to a similar tableau in Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS. Neither as "out there" as Tsukamoto's TETSUO films (or even A SNAKE OF JUNE) nor as sedate as VITAL, GEMINI, or even NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE, HIRUKO THE GOBLIN may be Tsukamoto's funniest genre picture and is worth seeking out.