Summary (No Spoilers):
Evil Heart (1985) was a direct-to-video short film, clocking in at around 35 minutes in length. The film focuses on a group of girls telling scary stories. One girl tells a story about her heart transplant.
In-Depth Review (Spoilers Ahead!):
A group of girls are gathered together in an inn telling scary stories when one of the girls (Hitomi) lifts up her shirt to show her surgery scars from heart surgery. She begins to explain a tale of how she received a transplanted heart.
Hitomi's been struggling with heart problems, a situation clearly putting her in a bad mood, which catches the attention of her best friend (Takako). The two girls have a heart-to-heart talk, and that's quite literal, as Takako offers Hitomi to take her heart if anything bad happens to it, and Hitomi agrees to do the same for Takako. The girls laugh it off after.
Eventully Hitomi and Takako head down to the beach to play around and relax, but when Takako jokingly shoves Hitomi, she tumbles down over the rocks and falls, leading to further heart troubles.
When Hitomi is taken to the hospital and it becomes clear her situation is dire, Takako assumes the worst and runs away back home to panic.
Takako worries endlessly at the idea of having to give her heart to Hitomi due to their promise, a reaction which does seem a little silly initially but upon reconsideration, it makes sense for a teenage girl in shock and likely guilty from what she's done to have a breakdown with some delusional thinking.
Takako begs a religious statue for forgiveness, and the statue falls on her head, knocking her to the ground from the force of impact.
Takako, pronounced braindead from impact, has her body wheeled in and her heart transplanted from her body to give to Hitomi. The visuals for the heart being removed are highly realistic for a direct-to-video short film, aided by the usage of real tools (as explained in the short behind-the-scenes segment at the end).
The girls express their sympathies after the story is told, but one of the girls reacts oddly, insisting even when the girl had died, she was still alive even while brain-dead. This insistence unfolds a retelling of the story with the girl alive and suffering but unable to move and explain herself, something that feels a little silly when that's not how that works at all in the real science of it, but in the sense of the supernatural, it works well enough to keep the story moving forward.
The girl rips open her shirt as she makes it very clear she has proof, revealing a scar with stitches ripped open revealing she has no heart in her chest, and revealing this was Takako all along.
Takako chases Hitomi through the streets in a fashion similar to the slow-paced Michael Myers walk, never once stopping her slow pacing but always catching up to Hitomi regardless.
Hitomi backs away from the door of the room she hid in, but Takako grabs her from behind in a scene with a striking resemblance to Stu and Billy in the first Scream movie and shoves her hand through her chest, pulling free her still beating heart.
Takako's reaction to the return of her heart is unsettling as she rubs it all over her face before finally leaving to return it back to her body, still in that operating room as if she's passed through time to return it.
This short film seems to be based off of a manga called The Horror! by Kazuo Umeza, and the stylistic qualities of the story reflect that as many details are odd and don't make a lot of sense, but the gore of the heart transplant scenes were impressively done and there was something charming about the dimly lit shots, adding a cinematic feel similar to PS1 video games.
Though the story quality was not perfect, the impressive visuals gave this short film a push into being far better, especially with the very interesting behind-the-scenes segment following the movie, and for that, I will give this a 4/5 rating.
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