Unfortunately, Kazuyuki does a terrible job of channeling Ito’s spirit once he’s captured it. It even balance’s out the sweet and sour thematic style that Ito is so good at, giving us something so cute and adorable and at its core heartfelt, that quickly descends into something dark, terrible and usually grotesque.
Despite the very limited budget the film was made with, the visuals are at times quite captivating, and the madness that takes hold of the students starts quite strong. The girls in the class soon become enamored with fortune telling and the Handsome Boy of the shine, a dark spirit enveloped in mist that will tell your future, but which almost always turns out to be morbid and vile.ĭirector Kazuyuki Shibuya does a good job capturing Ito’s spirit. The shrine is a popular site for tsuji-ura, street corner fortune telling, in which one can ask a stranger what their future will be. Meanwhile, Midori’s mother becomes obsessed with cleaning mold from the bathroom walls, and Midori’s dreams start becoming reality.
Soon love obsessions run high as a power struggle for Tejima’s love builds. Soon, she becomes entangled in a love triangle between class hunk Tejima, and her new friends Suzue (Asumi Miwa from Uzumaki) and Tamayo (Yuki Inomata from Gemini). You see Midori has been experiencing the same dream for an unspecified amount of time that features a very similar shrine and pools of blood. She also encounters a shrine on the path to school that gives her an uneasy feeling. Upon her first day at her new high school, Midori meets Ryuhei (played by Ryuhei Matsuda), a friend from her childhood. Midori (Risa Goto) returns to the small town she grew up in with her mother, having left 10 years earlier after Midori’s father, a lab assistant, left them for another woman. Its claim to fame, besides being a Junji Ito adaptation, is that its one of Ryuhei Matsuda’s early works. First time (and what appears to be only time) director Kazuyuki Shibuya tries his hand at "Lovesick Dead" with the terribly re-titled "Love Ghost". He was able to tap into Ito’s playful visual style and his killer sense of the beautiful and the twisted, the sweet and the sour. Higuchinsky was successful in his adaptation of Uzumaki, finishing the film before the manga series had even been completed. Both take place in small, rural towns that descend into obsession and madness. That being said, it’s still quintessential Ito, similar in scope to "Uzumaki". It’s never been properly translated into English, although if you look hard enough you can find it online. "Lovesick Dead" is not Junji Ito’s most famous work.
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