(2005, Japan)
Three long years after TOMIE: FORBIDDEN FRUIT came not one, but two new Tomie movies, TOMIE: REVENGE and TOMIE: BEGINNING, filmed back to back. I got very excited, until I saw them... 
Dr Suma knocks over a young woman while driving in the woods at night. But she seems unharmed and quickly disappears. The doctor looks for the woman in an isolated mansion, wanting to check her injuries. Instead she finds two madmen raving about "Tomie" next to an unconscious woman in a sleeping bag. What on Earth is going on?
We learn a little more at the nearby hospital where Dr Suma works. She gets questioned by two 'National Security' men who are looking for Tomie - they think that she has the power to physically invade other women's bodies. They believe she's somewhere nearby, in the woods...
Well, the first place I'd have looked would be the mansion! But here it takes a whole hour of screen time for anyone to figure that out!
This 'possession' theme is a new story idea that stupidly means that Tomie barely makes an appearance in her own film! Her female victims get all the action instead. It's an uninteresting new power for Tomie, and she seems to have forgotten all her other tricks.  
I was also disappointed to see that this movie had been shot on video, with the opening night scenes looking especially murky and smeary. It really looks like a low-budget production and is an example of the perils of 'v-cinema' - they rarely deliver atmosphere (the original two JU-ON v-films being a notable exception).
The narrative is confusing, not helped by the shaky handheld camerawork. I also don't normally notice bad acting - watching a lot of horror films may have lowered my sensitivity to it - but here the acting is definitely poor. The messy and very short story ends with a surprise that cheats the viewer, rather than satisfies. The whole project is lacking the usual Tomie atmosphere of creepiness.
It's especially sad that the writer/director is Ataru Oikawa, who made the first TOMIE film, which I found interesting, off-beat and creepy. I thought that more than anyone he understood the Tomie mythos enough to expand it successfully. He's also directed TOKYO PSYCHO, which I'll be avoiding.
In its favour there is a little convincing drama from the two leading actors, Dr Suma (Hisako Shirata) and her boss (Kyusaku Shimada, the lead heavy in PRINCESS BLADE). There are a couple of gory scenes we haven't seen in the series before, but they're misjudged, overplayed and don't resemble anything in manga creator Junji Ito's drawings. The sound mix is uninvolving and lazily pumps up the volume to prop up some rather obvious leaping-out-at-the-camera scares.  
I can't be nicer about TOMIE: REVENGE. It just makes the first five Tomie titles look more consistent, imaginative and carefully crafted. I'd even recommend the made-for-TV TOMIE: ANOTHER FACE over it. I won't even recommend this to Tomie completists, because it's so divorced from the source material.
The Hong Kong region 3 DVD has good subtitles and an anamorphic widescreen presentation, but the audio sounds like a rushed stereo mix. There are only two trailers as extras. It's also out on DVD in the US.
If you're suffering at all from too much Tomie, we're near the end of the series, until of course, she returns again...
1998 - TOMIE
1999 - TOMIE: ANOTHER FACE
2000 - TOMIE: REPLAY
2001 - TOMIE: REBIRTH
2002 - TOMIE: FORBIDDEN FRUIT
2005 - TOMIE: REVENGE
2005 - TOMIE: BEGINNING
2007 - TOMIE VS TOMIE
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