"You’re a businessman. Today you will sign a major contract that will change your life. But your girlfriend, who you love, has just been hit by a car. If you go to the hospital, you’ll lose that contract. Now, which will you choose? I see. You say you’ll visit your girlfriend in the hospital. Is that so? Well, I say we should consult the balance of truth. If you try to weigh your money against your love, there is no doubt your heart will start to sway. If you try to weigh your love against your money, your heart will start to break..."

Judgment Boy, a saw-toothed robot with a scale for arms, then started to spin, shrieking "Judgment!" as he whirled about. He came to an abrupt halt, and the balance of truth revealed the true intentions of our "hero," a nameless, faceless soul. Instead of going to his beloved’s side in her time of need, he goes to sign the contract, leaving her to die alone in her hospital bed. "You truly are a terrible person." Gregory the mouse scolds before shuffling off to take care of his "hotel of lost souls," Gregory House.

At this point, I paused the DVD to simply try to put my head around what I had gotten myself into. A quest through the DVD aisles of Best Buy to find something to stimulate me had come up with only Gregory Horror Show, a CG-animated Japanese import that promised to be "partly funny, partly scary, and always challenging for the viewer." They weren‘t kidding.

Gregory Horror Show is unique in that its 73-minute running time is split up into 25 bite-sized episodes, each only 2 to 3 minutes long, and packed with genuinely bizarre, sometimes disturbing characters. There’s Neko-Zombie, a cat who shrieks in the perpetual agony of having his eyes, mouth, and ears stitched shut. A little girl sobbingly wanders the hallways of Gregory House looking for her "lost dolly," which is in actuality a splinter of her own fragmented mind. Living clocks, bandaged puppies with axes buried in their skulls, phantom fish with televisions for heads (who broadcast lost memories to the main character), explosive board games, alcoholic telephones, and countless other eyebrow-raising characters haunt the corridors, interacting with the character in some oddly frightening ways. Most frightening of all is how immersed you become, living out the life of the protagonist on your screen.

For example, after eating a bowl of poisoned soup (made from the corpse of a previous tenant), you’re placed in the care of Catherine, a saurian nurse with a sexual fetish for drawing blood. She squeals in ecstasy as she sticks you with a comically large syringe, then starts to withdraw your blood in a shiver of joy. Judgment Boy questions you on several occasions to get a moral bead on you. Gregory himself does the same at the end of several episodes. You’re dealing with some impressively heady themes here: loss, identity, death, self-defense, and family. Many facets of life are represented by either the House’s tortured inhabitants, or explored in your interactions with them.

Of course, a lot of the effectiveness of the drama comes from the medium. All the characters are drawn in an intentionally boxy style, their cartoony renderings and slapstick antics barely masking the fact that you’re dealing with some warped minds, including your own. The first-person POV that the movie is shot in gives the feeling that one is immersed inside a truly deranged video game (ironically enough, there are PS2 games based on the morbid mouse available in Japan), where the laws of physics, reality, and the mind are tossed aside for the purpose of sending one on a journey of frightening self-discovery. Couple that with an extremely dreamlike quality, and you’re in for one hell of a ride.

Geneon (a division of Pioneer) has put out Gregory Horror Show with some extremely pleasant results. The completely digital nature of the shows means that there is no grain or print damage to speak of. Occasionally some digital artifacting popped up now and again in the black areas (of which there are plenty), but not so much as to sour the experience, which is perpetuated by peculiar textures and vibrant colors. Audio is a clean Dolby Stereo mix, with bright effects, crisp dialogue (as ridiculous as it may be) and well-layered music. Extras are slim, but they include four bonus episodes of GHS subtitled "The Bloody Karte," which take a more noirish turn as they explore the psyche of nurse Catherine. A few trailers show more of Geneon’s anime releases (which range from rather dry to oddly exciting in appearance) which are soon to be released.

Gregory Horror Show is a prime example of CG that works, exploiting the more digital medium to produce oddly textured, impossible worlds in lieu of an attempt to emulate organic life. Thought provoking and stingingly original, I eagerly await the further misadventures of our sinister rodent host and his hotel of horrors.

For more info, visit Geneon by clicking here.