Dragging a gunshot victim though a rancid sewer isn’t the most sanitary thing one can do, but it’s all I could think of to save the life of Waldo Luckily, the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, had this gadget he created that showed our location in relevance to streets and other locations.

He called it a GPS.

That guy is a regular Batman with all of his fancy gizmos. I knew we’d be at the hospital in no time.

— To be continued. 

It’s January and we are now at the midpoint of this cultural wasteland of a decade known as the 2020s. I saw last year’s Twisters. All they did was remake Twister and add an S to the title. Enough! I’ll do what I always do and cover some horror movies during these cold winter months. For January, I’ll be covering Japanese horror movies. This week’s movie is 1998’s Tomie from director Ataru Oikawa. This is the first in a series consisting of nine feature films. Holy cow!

Tomie is based on the manga series of the same name from acclaimed horror writer Junji Ito. I had a Jun Ito obsession in the early 2000s because it was nice to read modern horror comics as I had grown up reading reprints of Tales from the Crypt. I recall Tomie the manga beginning with a story about a beautiful Japanese high school girl named Tomie that everyone is obsessed with. I think her teacher murders her on a field trip and the rest of the class covers it up. I think they even dismember the body and hide the parts. Imagine everyone’s surprise when Tomie shows up to class the next day right as rain. And things don’t go well for Tomie’s teacher and classmates, but I don’t recall what happened. 

The movie version begins with some creeper carrying around a grocery store bag. When he peers inside the bag, we see an open eye staring back at him. That’s plenty weird enough, but we’re then introduced to Tsukiko (Mami Nakamura), a young photography student living with her boyfriend, Yuuichi (Kouta Kusano). They have a new neighbor living below them, the creeper we saw at the beginning of the movie, a guy named Takeshi Yamamoto (Kenji Mizuhashi). Tsukiko is woken up in the middle of the night by strange noises coming from the apartment below. 

Takeshi is seen taking care of a young girl, but we never see her face. She tosses nail polish remover into his one good eye and he writhes on the ground with pain. Meanwhile, Tsukiko is attending therapy sessions to help clear up a three month gap in her memory from her high school days. We also have a bumbling police inspector named Detective Harada (Kenji Mizuhashi) who’s busy investigating the murder of a teenage girl named Tomie at the same high school that Tsukiko attended a few years back.

To anyone who’s read the manga, it’s obvious that the young girl that threw nail polish remover in Takeshi’s eye is Tomie (Miho Kanno), regenerated and out to torment the last surviving member of the class that mutilated her. Watch Tomie laugh with glee as she tries to force feed live roaches to a bound Tsukiko. I find it odd that this movie spawned eight sequels. There’s just not much to Tomie. Men obsess over her. Then they kill her. Then they die in some unusual fashion. She regenerates and starts the process over and over again. What’s her motivation, really?

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, episode 599, episode 642, episode 643, episode 644, and episode 645) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.