It's the most horrifying of the three Daisuke Yamanouchi's Female Loan Shark films I've seen. Again, its anti-heroine (this time Kyoko Maki) is an extortionate loan shark who lends to desperate and/or stupid women and forces them into criminal self-harm for repayment. What's unique this time is the ghosts. There aren't any... except in the minds of Maki's clients. This leads to scarier outcomes than the supernatural would have been.

CLIENT #1 would like to borrow half a million yen. (That's only a few thousand pounds or dollars, actually.) Maki orders her to undress for nude photos, then later says that ordinary prostitution won't clear the debt. You'll need something kinkier. As in "you won't survive" kinkier. I won't spoil the subsequent choices, but you'll need brain bleach. Anyway, this deeply misguided client is doing it for her man. She'll borrow from Maki and immediately give it all to the leech she loves.

CLIENT #2 appears at Maki's offices with facial injuries and calmly asks for money, because her husband's been possessed by an evil spirit.

Then there's MAKI'S BACKSTORY, which is as evil as anything else in the film. She used to be a nice lady with a family. She cared for her elderly mum. Gangsters put a hood over this old woman's head, beat her (we see blood on the mask) and then rape Maki within touching distance of her possibly dying mother. Thereafter, it keeps getting worse. There's prostitution, murder-suicide and a kitchen knife. The most extreme scene involves two topless women (one's Maki) with electrodes taped to their nipples, being forced by laughing gangsters to stick knives into a metal box that's wired up to multiple power supplies. The weaker voltages hurt. One is much worse.

This film is horrible. It's tamer than Daisuke Yamanouchi's films around the year 2000, since normal people could watch this without vomiting. However, it's miserable, depraved and heading for a gruesome ending. The first Female Loan Shark film at least stopped on a heartwarming note. That's not the case here.

On reflection, I'm tempted to call this a ghost story after all. Those can be either: (a) featuring an actual ghost, or (b) taking "as a premise the possibility of ghosts or characters' belief in them" (quoting wikipedia). There's room to discuss whether or not this is a horror film, but it's certainly horrifying and deriving a lot of that from characters who believe in ghosts.