Week 12 (Sept 6 – 12) – Japanese V- Cinema: V-Cinema is shorthand for the Japanese direct-to-video wave of the 90s and 00s. These movies were often produced by major studios on very low budgets, but they allowed the filmmakers a great deal of creative freedom as long as they could deliver the “exploitable elements.” This proved to be a great training ground for young directors like Takeshi Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata and more.
Based on Kazuo Umezu’s book The Horror and made for the V-Cinema market, Evil Heart kicks off with a group of girls telling stories one night. If they tell a hundred frightening stories, a ghost will appear to them. That leads one of them, Hitomi (Yumiko Takahashi), to relate the tale of a heart transplant.
She starts by lifting her shirt to show the long scar, then reveals that one of her friends, Takako (Ayako Sugiyama), told her to make a pledge: if one of them ever gets terminally ill, the other will offer their heart. Some playful pushing — off a cliff, no less — and Hitomi is in the hospital, her weak heart finally broken for good, while the doctors want Takako as a blood donor. She loses it and ends up running home, where a Virgin Mary statue crashes onto her, rendering her brain-dead but fully aware as her chest is spread open and her still-beating heart is removed.
But death is not the end. Takako is still a ghost, possesses Emiko (Yuka Takeshima), and attacks Hitomi, trying to get her heart back.
Director Hikari Hayakawa also made Kekko Kamen and several Go Nagai V-Cinema movies.
You can watch this on YouTube.
