This movie is a lot like "Freaky Friday", except rather than being a G-rated Disney movie, it's a horror movie full of bloody gore and perverted sex. And instead of a mother and daughter switching bodies, the mother is a disfigured and very evil former actress who only had the daughter so she could later transplant her brain into the fresh, young, unmarred body of girl. And instead of having zany misadventures after she "becomes" her daughter, the first thing the mother does is seduce her daughter's handsome piano teacher (who earlier showed an unhealthy interest in transplanting SOMETHING ELSE into the body of the young girl). She moves in with him and his (at first) unsuspecting wife, all the while a police officer begins to investigate the bizarre goings-on. . . Actually, maybe this is NOT that much like "Freaky Friday"--it's actually far, far better!
This movie doesn't really fit with most Japanese movies I've seen (a lot of the cast look Amerasian or Eurasian, so maybe it was originally intended primarily for export). There were a lot of gory Japanese horror movies in this era like "Organ", "Entrails of a Beautiful Woman" and "Naked Blood", but even in the one gory scene in this movie, the director and FX team seem much more interested in the ridiculous but fascinating--and fully automated--brain transplant machine than in showing a lot of viscera and grue. The movie starts out with a long sex scene involving the mother back in her acting days, which suggests this might be a "pink" (softcore sex) film, but after that the sexual content becomes much more suggestive (if also much more perverse). The actress who plays the daughter is a little older than Jody Foster/Lindsey Lohan were in the Disney films, and maybe old enough to do sex scenes, but she clearly was not cast for that purpose (she actually seems to use a body double for her few innocuous nude scenes). I expect this would probably disappoint both gorehounds and perverts with schoolgirl fetishes, but I liked it. How many films go from softcore sex to "Mommy Dearest" to gory medical horror to evil Lolita/"Bad Seed" thriller? And wait until the end, which borrows heavily from a famous Hitchcock film. This is an entertaining and quite enjoyable film.
