Back in the mid to late 90s, I heard the hype surrounding a survival horror RPG game called Parasite Eve which was out on the PlayStation. I knew of the game as it was reviewed in various game magazines and the horror story angle from Hiranobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series, had me intrigued. I never got a chance to play it as there was never a UK release due to rights reasons but weirdly enough did play the two sequels, Parasite Eve 2 and The Third Birthday which did get a release in these territories.
It's always been a regret that I never experienced the first game at the time and, whilst there are ways various to play the English translation now, I think it might be a tough hang to go back to it now, what with its tank controls and old skool pacing. That didn't stop me from buying a Japanese copy from Akihabara when I went to Japan in 2013 though- I just wanted a copy in any form!
Earlier this year, I decided to give the book a try, as the game references events that happened in the acclaimed book by author Hideaki Sena. I liked the book but found that it was a bloated, slow and methodical read until the thrilling final third. I knew that there was a film out and decided to give it a watch... maybe it would be a pacier affair.
The 90s were an extraordinarily successful time for Japanese pop culture in the West as manga and anime broke into the mainstream and Japanese horror and psychological thrillers worked their way into Hollywood with remakes of Dark Water, The Ring, The Grudge etc all proving quite successful.
Parasite Eve was a 1994 production but was not a part of this Hollywood remake boom- I decided to watch it out of curiosity and see why it wasn't remade.
The plot of the film concerns Toshiaki Nagishima, a biology and pharmaceutical researcher and his wife, Kiyomi. When she wraps her car around a telephone pole after having a weirdly prescient dream, she is declared 'brain dead' but Nagishima can't let her go. He donates his wife's kidney to a young girl, Mariko, but keeps the liver to carry out his groundbreaking research on mitochondria. What follows is a tale of body possession as the ever evolving sentient mitochondria takes control of the new hosts body and seeks to become the dominant biological entity on Earth by reproducing and creating a child.
Compared to the novel, the film moves at a much brisker pace and doesn't get too bogged down on exposatory detail; it follow the main story beats of the book but offers focus and brevity to get the main themes of the story across. This is either a positive or negative, depending upon your personal taste.
The direction by Masayuki Ochiai and cinematography by Kozo Shibasaki is spot on; I particularly enjoyed the dolly zoom used as the mitochondria announces it's arrival by giving a dictatorial speech via a poor scientist to a shocked auditorium.
The music is by the legendary Joe Hisaishi and adds much atmosphere to an already handsome and well shot production. The scenes of scientific pottering around looked authentic enough but I studied Anthropology at university so what do I know? The detailed scenes featuring the extraction of the organs and the transplant are quite graphic, not gore porn graphic, but realistic looking enough that it may not be for the squeamish. It didn't bother me and made the whole thing seem quite believable, except the whole sentient mitochondria bit, obviously!
Now, the CGI effects are pretty poor but I'm sure at the time, and with the television film budget this probably had, it would have looked fine - they're not Reboot bad and they've aged better then that infamous Scorpion King uncanny valley CGI but they are rudimentary at best.
Overall, the film covers the same story beats of the book but weirdly enough I prefer the book as it is more scientific based and is a darker take than the film. I get that they couldn't show a young teen girl getting inseminated by mitochondria as that would be problematic but what we have here is very PG compared to the horror 15 rating that I guess the book would be.