This had seven sequels? It deserved to sink without trace and never be thought of again, whereas if you exclude American remakes from the mathematics it spawned Japan's most prolific horror franchise of the post-Ringu era. I realise we're living in the land of straight-to-video here (or at the very least something cheap enough to look like it), but even so there's no way this deserved any success whatsoever on its own merits as a movie.

There have been eight Tomie films to date. There was a splurge of them in 1999-2002, then a few more in 2005 and 2007. Here's the list:

The key factor is that Tomie was originally a Junji Ito horror manga. A lot of films have been based on his work, of which the best-known (to me) is the flamboyantly surreal Uzumaki. I haven't read the original Tomie manga, but I've seen bits of it and it looks freaky. One panel for instance has a bunch of heads, limbs and possibly other body parts either growing from, exploding out of or surgically attached to an earthworm. The story of Tomie involves a cursed immortal girl who's so beautiful that men keep falling in love with her and murdering her. You'd think she'd learn to keep her distance. However even if you hack her to pieces, any of those pieces can then grow into a new Tomie who'll then go out to drive yet more men and women into frenzies of lust and jealousy.

That's not even really a spoiler, by the way. The film isn't adapting the manga coherently enough for there to be anything to spoil.

As a movie franchise, Tomie has some interesting features. Firstly, you can cast a new Tomie in every film. This allows lots of different interpretations of the role and gives lots of different actresses a chance to go nuts. Secondly, the nature of the franchise is so cyclical that every film can start with a completely clean slate if if likes, with the only ongoing story element being Tomie herself in her latest body. You don't need to watch the first seven films to understand the eighth one. On the contrary, it's very possible that the series could be watched in almost any order and you'd still get a sense of its universe building up.

That's particularly fortunate in this instance, because it would seem that writer-director Ataru Oikawa is assuming we've read the manga and is adapting it by pulling out random pages and filming them. Even compared with Uzumaki, it doesn't make sense. Characters don't get proper introductions and we're never quite sure who's who. Stuff happens without motivation or explanation, or else happens offscreen and we know nothing about it. There's a scene in the middle of the film where a character seems to get drowned and I wasn't sure if what came after that was a dream sequence, some kind of resurrection and/or a flashback to a previous Tomie's rampage a few years earlier. Admittedly we end up fairly clear on what Tomie is and the backstory of what happened to her last time, but that's because that's being communicated via exposition rather than through the medium of cinematic storytelling. In fairness the film's individual scenes actually aren't that bad, but they don't add up to a narrative. The film isn't even weird and confusing in a good way. It's just half-digested.

It looks cheap, e.g. the explosion at the end. If this wasn't straight-to-video, it deserved to be. There's one memorable Junji Ito moment with blood dripping into a bath, but it's only a dream sequence. There's also a scene with a topless girl in it, but that's it for memorable visuals.

The annoying thing is that there's theoretically some good stuff in here. Tomie herself is cool, both when she's slowly regenerating and then later when she's up and wreaking havoc. Meanwhile there's a subplot of sexual infidelity and people who can't connect with each other that could have been really quite interesting and even in the film as it stands isn't bad, while the concluding twist should have been awesome. As it was though, I wasn't sure whether even to believe it. Meanwhile the acting is okay. Miho Kanno is apparently one of the franchise's more popular Tomies, although she's not actually that attractive and I thought she could have done more with her big confrontation scene. Does it need saying that she sings in a band? As for the cast as a whole, they're doing their jobs and occasionally more, with my favourite being perhaps the brooding boyfriend, which is a slightly less one-dimensional role than it looks. The policeman who likes invading other people's personal space wasn't bad either.

The film feels dated too. Gadgets aren't digital, with instead cassette tape recorders and the kind of old-fashioned camera that requires film and negatives. Admittedly our protagonist is a photography student and so would probably be using a real camera even if digital ones were available, but even so. There are mobile phones, but they have radio antennae. Oh, and people smoke in a hypnotherapist's office, including the hypnotherapist herself while talking to a patient!

This is the kind of film that will merely bore an uninterested viewer, but underneath its uninvolving surface is in fact shockingly bad if you start analysing its structure and judging it as an adaptation of work that deserved far better than it gets here. It's a bit freaky, but not enough. People who've never heard of the material before will probably just get bored and turn it off. Fans of the manga will start ranting. However people overwhelmed by intellectual curiosity might perhaps watch it repeatedly, internalise the story that's being implied rather than told and end up cherishing its very incoherence. Me, I think it's just poor. There's no real reason for anyone to watch it, even as set-up for better films later in the series. It's not setting up anything and the Tomie franchise is fairly immune to that kind of thing anyway. It should have been better.