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OK, so I'm totally into Junji Ito. He did Uzumaki, the thing where people are killed by Spirals, and Gyo, where little robot lets powered by the corpse gases of various marine animals conquer the earth, which had that little bonus story that "This is my hole! It was made for me!" comes from, and Hellstar Lemina, which is a surprisingly long manga series about this world eating monster, you know, eating the world, and some cool one-shot stuff. He has this really odd mix of genuinely disturbing and just being totally frelling weird that I am fully on board with. Anyway, some older series of his spawned like, a dozen movies, and Netflix has some of them, so we're going to start off here with Tomie: Beginning. Which... isn't the first one. That'd be just plain ol' Tomie, and it's 6 years older than this. This is either some sorta prequel or lame reboot. So it's probably like the WORST place I could possibly be starting, but... it's available. See, Netflix does this whole thing where they hold really obscure movies hostage until enough people add them to their Saved lists to rationalize buying the DVD. I've got a good 23 totally frelled up movies I can't watch because nobody else wants to. 5 of them are in this series, so, if this seems like something you'd like, or something so bad you really want me to torture myself with more of it, stick'em on your saved queue. While you're at it stick on Robo-Geisha, Battle Beyond the Stars, Fright Night 2, and Pontypool. Pontypool I've already seen and have no intention to CS, it's just a really good movie, people need to see it.
Anyway, I should probably talk about the actual movie here shouldn't I. So let's see. It's Japan. It's a highschool. We've got this dude here, he's a nerd, we've got the new girl Tomie here, she... OK, you know the girl in Uzumaki who had the exploding cigarette and then here hair went all crazy? Yeah, she's got that same Alpha Girl sorta vibe going on. Like here's some bullies pressuring the nerd into developing a picture they took of her, and she just comes vamping in, smiling, asks someone of they have a lighter, uses it to burn the picture, see you dudes later! And the burning picture kinda has this weird demony thing going on too. Also? Seems there's mounting evidence that Tomie here can teleport, and not even in some weird editing fashion, it's being presented like an official thing. Really, this seems like this is just kinda the portion of the movie where they re-establish stuff we're already supposed to know. She's all like "OK, hey dudes, I'm totally in charge now. You dudes? You suck and are my puppets. You girls? You're probably going to eventually get all jealous and scared of me and start trying to murder me and stop it. Not cool, but whatever, it's human nature." That last bit she's mainly telling to this here red haired girl. Now, this may have drifted away from the original source material some, but Junji Ito usually seems to go with this sort of approach. We've got one girl who gets some inkling of what the heck is going down, they find one guy who totally believes them and tries to get their back and uh... I don't want to say it NEVER works out, I'm just saying this girl is likely to spend a lot of time screaming.
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Meanwhile, I'm kinda digging Tomie here. She hasn't done anything evil yet, she's just all, look, I know how my life goes, things will go a whole lot smoother if we can all get on the same page, OK? That guy you like? I'm totally stealing him from you, that happened, let it drop. Getting mad at me ends bad for you. You though over here? Hey, I like you. You can either hang with these jealous bitches and get the same vaguely ironic death they're in for, or you can get on the winning team, be my friend, we'll do all that dorky BFF stuff, it'll be fun. Which is fair. I mean, she's apparently some kinda succubus or something, but she's up front about it. Oh hey, swanky music. Anyway, this whole revenge thing of hers is actually way tamer than I expected. The one girl, yeah, she stole her boyfriend basically just to mess with her... and because guys just inherently worship her... to a degree that I think we can safely dismiss the possibility of having a proper male character at this point. The other girls who were picking on her for being such an unfair dude magnet, she just got some guys to tie'em up and make'em eat grubs. She actually ate one first herself just all "They're not so bad ya wimps, see?" Again, she's just taking over the social hierarchy.
Now here's some nerds, male amazingly enough, attacking Tomie and her designated BFF, who's going to be our viewpoint character by the way and uh... dude they just sliced off Tomie's ear with a frelling sword. She's totally cool about it though. Just like "OK, I get the deal here. I'm totally hot, and you're a bunch of losers, so you're going to go all crazy stalker and kill me because if you can't have me no one can, right? Well, OK, if you want to do that, go right ahead. I totally know who you are though, the stupid ninja masks aren't fooling anybody. ou're the losers from the photography club. So, you're going to get caught after." Then they all run off and she turns to her friend and goes "Also, that REALLY $@#%ING HURT." Then her ear grows tentacles all The Thing style and crawls away.
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Later BFF here has her head all bandaged, asking her why she doesn't want to go to the hospital and she's all "Oh, I've been down that road. The doctors get all weird and freaky and knock me out and do the whole violent rape thing, it's just not cool." Then she unbandages the severed ear to change it and hey, there's her ear back. "Oh yeah, I know, I'm some sort of horrible monster freak right? Well, yeah. Pretty much everyone's been telling me that for a few hundred years now, and I mean, OK, I guess I AM. I mean, we've established that I'm some kinda regenerating immortal and all right? But whatever man, look at it from my perspective, I've always just got people flipping out and falling in love with me and we have to destroy this horrible monster, at least I'm rational about this stuff. Anyway, we're still cool right?"
Later that night, BFF has a freaky dream, wakes up for it, and sees the... bloody bandages left on the floor scurry over to a school uniform left laying on the ground, then hair comes shooting out, a hand pops out from the hair filled skirt, grabs the top, gets it properly positioned to totally grow into the whole thing nudity free. Oh and now we're jumping back to the framing device I keep forgetting to talk about. BFF is narrating this whole story to a guy with an eyepatch, while looking at a class photo that shows how yeah, when you take a picture of Tomie there's always this weird demony space face growing out the side of her head. Presumably, this is after everyone else in the school has been killed in various ways or something. Their teacher's up next, but before I get into this scene can I just say again how much I love Tomie's attitude here? It's like we took the whole unkillable evil demon girl concept but totally forgot the evil thing and just made her all cool and laid back. I mean, yeah, she still ruins lives and such, and she's kind of a bitch, but really it seems like she just wants to chill out, and it'd be nice if dudes stop falling madly in love with her and causing these chain reactions of death, but hey, what are you going to do.
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Like, the teacher bit here? Yeah, her teacher totally wants to bang her and she's all "Dude, I know I'm hot and all and you can't really help it, but I'm still in highschool and you're married, and this just isn't a good idea, so... I'm going to go ahead and call rape here and have you tossed in jail, OK?" Which is fair, really. Anyway, moving on to the next flashback, here's some people beating Tomie to death in the woods. BFF runs over while she's bleeding to death, and Tomie's all "OK, I know you've never had to go through it, but seriously, dying sucks. I mean, I always get better, but you get all cold and it's like getting sucked into some horrible black void and stuff. Really, just not pleasant." Oh and this is great. We've got this sappy piano riff playing while the entire class, including teacher, who killed her because, you know, demon freak monster girl, are hacking up her body and each taking a chunk home in the hopes of keeping her from regenerating, right? And they're all laughing and joking, "wow, check it out! She had a sandwich for lunch!" "These lungs are spotless, I guess she really didn't smoke!" Then the teacher's all "Hey! We can make an anatomy lesson out of this!" But anyway, yeah, they dismember her corpse, burn all the pieces separately.... but she can regenerate from a blood stain, we've established that... I'm thinking we might not be going in chronological order with this stuff. But yeah, next day they're starting to have a memorial service, when, of course, Tomie comes strolling in. Unlike all these other Tomie quotes, this one really is what she says: "Hey,what's wrong you guys? You're all looking at me like I'm a ghost!" So yeah, apparently this drives most of the students insane and a bunch commit suicide and a bunch more get committed.
Anyway, now back in our framing device, BFF is proposing some theory that Tomie might be some kinda weird evolutionary offshoot of planaria that happens to look human, and you know, if you cut her into X pieces, even if one of those pieces is just a drop of blood, you get a new Tomie from each. And, you know, has some kinda super pheromone thing going on too I guess. Anyway, if it actually works out that way, wow there must be a bunch of her running around by this point. I'm still sticking with my assumption though that we're not going chronological here. Ear gets sliced, mob kills/dismembers/burns, Tomie, blood regenerates into new body, new body goes to school and freaks people out. Anyway though, next flashback is talking to said regeneration. She's all freaking out and crying and "I'm scared! I don't want to be killed again!" and BFF runs over all concerned, but then she's all "Oh relax I'm just @#$%ing with you. I'm sorry but you got so freaked out watching that regeneration bit I couldn't resist."
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Back in framing device land, turns out Token Guy here is NOT the one sane male in this story. He's totally obsessed and crazy and stabbed his own eye out with a pencil because he wasn't sure if he'd ever see Tomie again and wanted to make her the last thing he ever saw. Our whole framing device is just him trying to get BFF to tell him where she went. He gets a bit overenthusiastic and kinda... breaks her neck. Before she dies though, she tells him that she kept the heard she got from the whole dismemberment scene in the freezer and has it in her bag, so he runs off with her beating heart, then there's this kinda weird and honestly REALLY nicely done bit where BFF subtly turns into Tomie. I'm not QUITE sure whether it's like, she was possessed, or just kinda merged into her through the magic of co-dependence, or what. Anyway, she watches him leave and she's all like "Take, take, enjoy. That's a spare at this point." Then all of the sudden the teacher, in full bum mode pops out, stabs her with a... what do you call'em, those hari-kiri knives? So yeah, he's all "I'm not done killing you! You're a horrible evil thing and I am going to just keep trying to destroy you, or at least kill you every time you regenerate!" So he carves her heart out and runs off with it. Then she waits a while before getting up and is all "Man, what an idiot." And... yeah, that's basically it. More happy music for the credits.
OK, now, I know this doesn't really come across, but, I really dug that movie. Any incoherency here is just because I was getting distracted and, you know, actually watching the movie. Screens have to be dull too. There was absolutely no nudity, really a lot less gore than I know it must have sounded. Little blood when she gets stabbed, couple nice clean organs being held up, but even then, tame as it gets. Sorry I can't really get much in the way of cool screens, it's mainly a dialog thing. And oh hey, here's the trailer in the extras. Yeah, this is a prequel. The original probably has more teeth. Seriously, let's get it on the netflix list, I want to see it. Also, it's To-mi-e, Japanese style, not Tommy like you may be tempted to read. I don't actually need to explain that right?
