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A series of very strange suicides happen, like a runner literally running
until she is dead, a man strangling hmself during his wedding celebration,
& a man jumping out of a closed window while he & his wife are
celebrating her birthday, & all these suicides have jsut one thing in
common, that before their deaths the victims saw a horrible green monkey
... which sounds too much to be a coincidence & soon homicide - &
inspector Sakurai (Ken Utsui) - is brought in to investigate. & Sakurai
soon notices the case is too big for him alone, & brings in an expert,
psychotherapist Saga (Goro Inagaki), who is a specialist in multiple
personality disorder & hypnotism. Soon, too, they find a trail leading to a
slick tv-hypnotist, Jissoji (Takeshi Masu), who seems to have poor Yuka (Miho
Kanno) totally under his control, & she gives away stuff about a green
monkey, even on tv. But however guilty Jissoji seems to be, Sakurai &
Saga have nothing to pin onto him, so have to leave him alone & instead
concentrate their efforts on Yuka. & while Saga follows her around, soon
notices she suffers from multiple personality disorder & (rather
unprofessionally) starts an affair with her other self, horny Rieko, Sakurai
learns about her background: that she has worked in a bank not long ago but one
day left worked for a stay in a hospital to be treated for anorexia.
There she met a social worker nicknamed Rat, who hypnotized her repeatedly,
just for a laugh it seemed ... or did he have more sinister motives, to hack
into the bank's computer with her help ? & was Rat Jissoji? ... well,
nope on both accounts, while Jissoji soon ends up in another bizarre suicide
himself (he electrocuted himself at a neon billboard in sight of Sakurai's
office), Rat, once he is found, turns out to be a whimpering idiot, half out of
his mind. So the police bring in Yuka for questining, even though Saga
strongly opposes especially their fiercer methods of questioning. But then Yuka
totally loses it, & via some strange form of mass hypnotism causes them all
to faint & stay unconscious for 9 minutes ... enough for her to make her
getaway ... & the only clue the cops have left is a concert ticket for
Antonin Dvorak's symphony From the New World, that was sent to Sakurai
only days before. & while Sakurai's already in the concert, Saga
finally figures out what post-hypnotic signal triggers all the suicides all of
a sudden: distinct metallic noises. & since both he & Sakurai were
hypnotized by Yuka, & Dvorak's symphony does include quite a portion of
cymbals & triangles, he races to the concert hall to save him from his own
suicide ... but comes too late, as Sakurai calmly shoots himself in front of
the shocked concert audience. Now Saga is the only one to fight Yuka's
hypnotic powers, but it's a losing battle, since for him she has made up a
different triggering signal ... but won't tell him what it is ... but she makes
sure that the 2 of them soon meet again, & Saga, foolishly enough, tries to
find the real, benign Yuka in Yuka (without knowing if she ever existed), &
in the course of this he confesses his love to her ... big mistake, since the
triggering signal was "I love you" ... & form now on, he tries to
kill himself on any given opportunity ... A very well-made
horror-thriller that twists & turns like nobody's business but manages to
stay completely logical & comprehensive throughout nevertheless, &
whot's more important, keeps up the suspense as well. Only in the end, when it
turns towards the paranormal/spirit world it does get a little far-fetched, but
then again, it is not really all that clear if that doesn't happen only in
Saga's head. In all, it's just a great genre movie.
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