Jeonghyeongmi-in (1975)

... aka: 정형미인

... aka: 定形美人 (Ding xing mei ren)

... aka: 鬼猫上身

... aka: Geom-eungoyang-i gamyeon (Black Cat Mask)

... aka: Guai tan zheng xing mei nu (Ghost Story: Plastic Surgery Beauty)

... aka: Gui mao shang shen (Ghost Cat Daughter)

... aka: Remodelled Beauty, A

Directed by:

Il-ho Jang

Taking the bones of the French mad scientist / face transplant classic EYES WITHOUT A FACE, adding a supernatural twist and giving it a distinctly Asian ghost cat flair sounds like the makings of a pretty fun film... and this actually is pretty fun!

As domestic cats curiously swarm a hospital, obstetrician Tae-min Shin (Nak-hoon Lee) is horrified to discover that his delirious wife, Gyeong-ja (Yang-mi Park), has just given birth to a hideously deformed baby girl, which is supposed to be cat-like in appearance but actually looks more like someone let a toddler doodle on an infant's face with a Sharpie. It all has something to do with a family curse that we eventually see the origins of via flashback. (Note: If your wife's black cat scratches your bratty daughter, don't repeatedly slam your spouse's face onto hot coals until she's dead, strangle kitty to death with your bare hands and then bury them together.).

The more pressing immediate issue is that the wife dies shortly after giving birth and Tae-min is now saddled with a monstrous baby he has no interest in claiming. The doctor, along with a few other members of the hospital staff, including nurse Mi-hye (Jin-ah Seong) and his surgeon father, Jun-ho (Am Park), decide to remedy the situation by sneaking into the nursery and swapping out the defective baby for a normal one.

Nearly two decades pass and Tae-min has become an even more esteemed figure in the medical community. After returning from an international conference in the U.S., he announces to the press that he's been working on "artificial skin awareness in the field of orthopedics" and has revolutionized the art of skin grafts. He and live-in nurse / assistant Mi-hye have become romantically involved and raised the oblivious Yeong-ran (Ok-jin Kim), now a happy, well-adjusted and beautiful teenager, as their own. However, someone else has tuned in to the news broadcast, and she's about to make an unscheduled and unwelcome appearance at Yeong-ran's 19th birthday dance party.

A masked young woman cloaked in all black shows up in the cellar late at night. She - Myo-sook (Ji-in Yu) - announces herself as the doctor's dejected biological daughter and proves it when she removes her mask and gloves to reveal her blotted face, bushy eyebrows, fangs and claws. Myo-sook then demands her father operate on her face. She'd like to look just like Yeong-ran and, since dad has now perfected his skin grafts, he has the ability to turn her wishes into a reality.

Since she's cursed, the cat girl has supernatural powers at her disposal, which she demonstrates by hypnotizing Mi-hye, clawing her face and threatening to rip her throat out if her father doesn't agree to the operation. She can also levitate and do some other cool stuff that regular humans cannot. With her deep, gravely, echoed voice, and the sadistic delight she shows in shocking and scaring others, she actually comes off a lot like Regan in The Exorcist, which not-so-coincidentally was released just a few years before this.

When it comes time for the operation, Myo-sook refuses to be put under or given any kind of anesthesia. She wants to be awake to watch the entire process as it plays out! Once the operation begins, something even stranger happens. As Myo-sook's face is restored, Yeong-ran's face starts to deteriorate, almost as if the two are switching identities. Myo-sook, who has lived the life of an outcast hiding in the country her entire life, decides to take advantage of her newfound beauty by venturing out into the city. She also makes a play for Yeong-ran's fiancé, Chang-hoon (Jin Kim), who isn't receptive to her aggressive seduction attempts. The doctor then performs an operation to restore his adoptive daughter's face, thus turning Myo-sook back into her original form... and making her really pissed off in the process!

While this is a full-blooded, serious movie most of the time with some surprisingly gory and creepy moments, a lot of cat tropes are touched upon in an intentionally amusing way. At a restaurant, the cat woman gags when she tries to eat sweets yet helps herself to live goldfish she digs right out of a fish tank, much to the shock of onlookers! She also leaves dead animal gifts for the doctor, kills and feasts on rats, hisses, howls, hangs from the rafters and raids the fridge looking for raw seafood. The chaotic finale finds her disappearing and reappearing at will, leaping onto trees and the roof, transforming into an actual cat, multiplying herself and flying, sometimes accompanied by some silly slide whistle-sounding music cues. The rest of the experimental electro score from Min-seop Jeong is pretty great though, as are the performances from Nak-hoon Lee and Ji-in Yu.

The screenplay from Young-il Lee is adapted from the work of Japanese manga legend Kazuo Umezu. I've seen some sources claim it was his 1966 manga Nekome no Shōjyo ("The Girl with Cat Eyes"), which also involves two sisters - one normal and the other cursed with cat eyes - but instead this uses his Kuroi Nekomen ("Black Cat Mask"). "Mask" (seen below) has the cat stuff, the family curse, the doctor father, the assistant, the hospital stuff, the baby swap, the two young women (one beautiful, one disfigured), etc. According to the Korean Film Database, Black Cat Mask was also the film's original shooting title, so that should finally clear up any confusion in regards to the actual source material.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, the director was occasionally wooed away from his homeland to make movies in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, including being tapped by Shaw Brothers to direct the martial arts films The Deadly Knives (1972) and The Thunderbolt Fist (1972), as well as the horror film Night of the Devil's Bride (1975). He also made the obscure genre films Legends (1968) and Life After Death aka The Afterworld (1981) in his home country. Released just six years later, Yu-seop Lee's Hannyeo / "Grudge of Women" (1981) also involved skin transplants and was heavily inspired by Eyes Without a Face.

There was a poor quality VHS release in South Korea in 1983 (below, left), which is very clearly cut, though I'm not sure by how much. This version runs just 63 minutes, while the original theatrical running time given by Korean sources is 81. While I can't comment about the uncut version, the hacky editing jumps, scenes ending mid-sentence and incoherent butcher-job of a finale featuring shots seemingly out of order (like someone safely inside one minute but outside fighting the cat-lady a second later) is probably not how this originally played out. Though I'd love to see the film restored to its full glory one day (which would almost certainly boost my rating up at least half a star), I'm not sure that's even a possibility. This severely cut and heavily-damaged version is all that's known to exist. Since it was a box office flop, apparently nobody really cared about preserving this title.

This also received a VHS release in Hong Kong (above, right) with burnt-in English subtitles in the 80s, though that's not the version I watched. One source claims the HK video is a few minutes longer, though again I'm currently unable to verify that claim.

★★1/2

Umezu Kazuo no Noroi (1990)

... aka: The Curse of Kazuo Umezu

Directed by:
Naoko Omi

A creepy man sitting on a swing warns against playing puerile pranks and tells us not to toy with the supernatural to preface this two-part anime. The first tale is “What Will the Video Camera Reveal?” The mysterious Rima Ogawa has just returned to Japan from Mexico and is starting at a new school. Everyone (particularly all the guys) seem interested in the beautiful young girl, but she has a strange, unnerving effect on another female student named Masami. Simply by looking at her, Masami feels electricity coursing through her body, passes out and has to be taken to the nurse's office. Later that night, she has a nightmare so disturbing she can't even remember it and awakens to discover her bedroom window open and a small, unexplained mark in the middle of her neck. She puts a band-aid over it and goes about her business. The following night, she makes sure to lock her window but has another nightmare and awakens to discover the mark on her neck is larger and bleeding. She also has a clump of black hair in her hand...

Now convinced the new girl in school is a vampire who's out to get her, Masami tries to tell others but her concerns are brushed off as her being jealous of Rima's beauty. She turns to her friend Umezu who gives her a video camera and tells her to tape herself sleeping. That way if someone is indeed sneaking into her bedroom to feast on her blood at least she'll have proof. Masami goes through the same nightmare routine as before. Umezu watches the tape and sees something so frightening he immediately leaves; only telling Masami that if she wants to see what it is, to watch the tape herself. But Masami is too scared. She does however notice some strange changes in herself; namely that her neck wound has healed and that she seems to be getting more beautiful. This is particularly strange considering suspected vampire Rima is no longer in town and has transferred schools.

Our second story is “The Haunted Mansion.” Horror movie obsessed Nanako invites her friend Miko over for a slumber party where the two eat junk food, drink beer and watch horror videos. Getting a bit tired of movies, Nanako decides it'd be even scarier to go to a nearby abandoned mansion to see if rumors that it's haunted are actually true. Because the place is going to be demolished soon, she manages to talk her apprehensive friend into going to at least look at the place. Once they arrive, two other curious neighborhood girls show up and the four break in. As soon as they enter through the door, it slams shut. And their flashlight dies. And they discover the portrait of a mysterious and beautiful woman. Always good signs. After stumbling into a child's room, the horrors begin.

Miko has a hallucination involving a music box, a teddy bear and toys bleeding and then the room filling up with blood. And then a hideous ghost in a blue flowing gown shows up. Simply by staring at someone, the ghost can make their body completely fall apart, as three of the girls soon find out. The squeamish Miko is the only one who remains as the ghost slowly approaches. She suddenly wakes up in bed, thinking everything was a nightmare. The next day at school, Nanako and the other three girls who were with Miko in her dream all have unexplained scars around their limbs and necks. In order to see if all that is connected to the mansion, the four girls decide to go there and see for themselves. Needless to say, that turns out to be a big mistake.

Running just 43 minutes, the animation here is cheap and crude when it's compared to – say – Disney movies made around this same time. But ask yourself: Do Disney movies feature a face-sucking, spider-spewing, tentacled mutant creature and dismemberments and decapitations galore? That's a lot of the appeal of something like this. Though more recent anime has certainly improved technically, this is still a lot of gory fun and both of the fast-paced stories are clever and surprising in spots. The brief bookmarking segments are also pretty amusing. 

This is based on stories by horror / manga / comic writer Kazuo Umezu. As an inside joke, one of the horror videos the girls in the second story almost watch is titled “The Curse of Kazuo Umezu,” which promises “Ultimate terror!” and to be “A masterpiece of horror!” After I looked this guy up, I realized I'd already seen something based on his writings: the live action SNAKE GIRL AND THE SILVER-HAIRED WITCH (1968), which seems to be the very first adaptation of any of his work. After years of writing, Umezu made his directorial debut (at almost 80 years old!) with the autobiographical Mother (2004). He also is a noted inspiration behind the work of Junji Ito (Tomie, Uzumaki).

★★★