WARNING: This review contains spoilers for Hellstar Remina and Uzumaki. You have been warned.

Ito Junji is one of my favorite mangakas. His creative, fascinating, and horrifying drawings he painstakingly creates never fail to impress me. But Hellstar Remina is not one of his better works. In fact, it’s probably the worst out of all his manga that I’ve read.

Story: Hellstar has a very simple premise we’ve all probably seen before. Humanity observes an imminent threat to their existence and everyone goes completely bonkers. Hellstar doesn’t have one of the more creative ideas though. I’ve read several stories about “living” planets or mystery planets crashing into Earth. But if an unoriginal premise is executed well enough, it can still be good, right? Not in this case. I believe that a good cosmic horror story needs time to develop. It may be boring for some but for me, cosmic horror doesn’t have much of an impact unless I can see subtle growing unrest and terror, a strong sense of paranoia, and progressively worse things happening. Hellstar starts off with “haha we’ll be fine” and immediately jumps to “TIME TO BECOME A CULT AND SACRIFICE THE CHILDREN AAAHHHHH”. Because one guy suggested the planet Remina wouldn’t crash if they killed the person Remina. And apparently all of Japan heard and believed him. After that, the story is just Remina running away from the people that want to kill her until the story ends with Remina, some kids, and her new hobo friend in a bomb shelter where they have a year to live. The buildup was far too fast, nothing was scary, and the ending was underwhelming. Speaking of the ending, it was surprisingly lighthearted given the manga’s dark content. And that’s part of what frustrates me. Hellstar reminds me a lot of another of Ito’s works, Uzumaki. Unlike Uzumaki however, Hellstar doesn’t make “the end” seem believable and horrifying. The ones living in the bomb shelter will live a peaceful year and die in a comfortable place among people they care about. In Uzumaki, the town gets swallowed up into the spiral and it’s heavily implied that they’re still conscious. Even after all that suffering, the grand cosmic force wins in the end. Giving Hellstar a somewhat happy ending negates any fear that was built up in previous chapters because we know our leads are okay for now. Ultimately, Hellstar has no impact and is merely a weak imitation of Uzumaki.

Art: Of course, Remina the planet is extremely detailed and terrifying. The rest of the art is very solid too and as usual, all of Ito’s characters look “off”. However, there is very little truly disturbing imagery. Ito’s greatest strength is in drawing grotesque, immaculately detailed body horror and there is very little to found here. Remina is well drawn and closeups of them (as well as the pilot with the melted face) are impressive but none of the art is something I’d consider very scary.

Characters: None of the characters stand out. Remina is a pretty plain and average character, her father is a nice scientist, Remina has a lot of fans that claim they want to protect her but we all know they just want to get her in bed, and the evil cult members are evil cult members. That’s as far as any of them go. A good horror doesn’t necessarily need good characters depending on the type of story and if it carry the lack of good characters with other aspects but Hellstar is just further dragged down by characters with little to no personality. One thing I would like to mention is the leader of Remina’s fan club being revealed as one of the cultists in the masks. This is baffling. I suppose it’s done to show that anyone can be corrupted into thinking Remina is bad but the fact that there’s no further explanation just makes this seem like a confusing “twist” used purely for shock value.

Enjoyment: Hellstar was pretty short so I didn’t suffer much. And there was some ironic enjoyment to be found. “IT ATE THE FUCKING MOON!” comes to mind. For the most part, I was just bored and couldn’t get invested at all.

Final Verdict: Don’t waste your time. Just read Uzumaki instead. 4/10

Extra Note: The oneshot that came with this, Okuman Bocchi or Army of One, was actually really good and significantly better paced, better written, and scarier than Hellstar Remina. I'd suggest giving it a try.