火曜サスペンス劇場「受験地獄」/ Kayō sasupensu gekijo: Juken jikogu / Exam Hell [1982]

Release date: Aired on January 12th, 1982

Director: Masaharu Segawa

Studio: Produced by Kokusei Broadcasting and NTV

Cast: Yōsuke Tagawa, Miki Jinbo, Akihiko Hirata, Mariko Tsubota, Masuo Iwamoto, Takeo Namai, Ryūsuke Ōbayashi, Kiyoshi Hitomi et al.

Availability: No home media release; extremely infrequent re-broadcasts.

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It's back-to-school season! Let's look at a very apropos TV movie.

Image credit kenta2005 on ameblo

Although the author went uncredited (at least in the 1982 version; the 2014 remake does seem to credit him), Exam Hell was based off of a short story by Kyutaro Nishimura, which first appeared in the March 30th edition of Shukan shōsetsu ("Weekly Novel"). Nishimura was a mystery author, best known for his Inspector Totsugawa series, and in writing Exam Hell he turned to the evergreen subject of Japan's grueling university entrance exams. Contemporary criticism describes the story as "[...]a high-quality social mystery that satirizes the strange social phenomenon of 'Exam Hell' and leads to a surprising ending".

While entrance exams are pretty hellish everywhere, the title of Exam Hell wasn't picked at random and nor did it originate with Nishimura: as a term it dates as far back as the 1930s, to the magazine Juken junpo ("Weekly Exam"), a publication geared towards students preparing to take entrance exams - any entrance exam, whether it be high school, university, or vocational. So what I'm trying to express here is that "Exam Hell" is not just a random combination of words, it's a neologism that the Japanese audience would likely have understood to be referencing a specific concept, the way English speakers might recognize a term like, oh, I don't know, let's say "shopping spree" or "terrible twos".

The story of the original work - which the 1982 film deviates from, so don't take this as representative - focuses on a wealthy university student named Masahiko Kimura who decides to call in a fake bomb threat to his school after oversleeping, with the intent of forcing the exam to be re-scheduled. Kimura gets away with it initially, but later, his plot is discovered by another student, Koichiro Sato, who happened to see Kimura at the scene and connect him to the fake threat. Sato uses this information to blackmail Kimura, demanding at first 100,000 yen and then increasingly exorbitant sums. Eventually, Kimura becomes fed up, goes to Sato's house, and murders him as he's in the middle of writing another blackmail letter, but there's the twist: the contents of that last letter were an apology and Sato's plans for his own suicide due to guilt and his belief that he'll never get into university.

If you'd like a really good (but short) summary of the 1982 version, see this suspense drama blog here (in Japanese).

Out of the many films that were broadcast as part of the Tuesday Suspense Theater timeslot between 1981 and 2005, viewers really, really liked Exam Hell. It made such an impact, in fact, that it was ranked #1 in NTV's poll of works that viewers most wanted to rewatch. To much fanfare (at least among those who make fanfare about such things), Exam Hell was remade in 2014, and the chief producer of that remake, Hitoshi Taihira, actually joined NTV because of the impression that the 1982 version made on him. This means that Exam Hell has the distinction of being one of the only movies within Hirata's filmography to have been remade.¹ (Said remake may or may not be BL; I was never entirely clear on that.)

Image credit hassy1936-gorin on livedoor. These do seem to have been his actual prescription glasses; they're very distinctive and he wears them in basically everything around this time.

In the 1982 Exam Hell, Hirata plays Masahiko Kimura's father² Senichi, with Masuo Iwamoto starring as his wife. We're lucky to actually have a few behind-the-scenes pictures from this one, which you can see on this Mariko Tsubota fanpage. In the remake Hirata's role is played by Katsumi Takahashi. Takahashi began his acting career well after Hirata had passed away, but his Wikipedia page notes that, growing up, he was a big TV watcher and specifically a big fan of Taiyo ni Hoero!, which Hirata had a fairly prominent recurring role on. One wonders how Takahashi might have felt about getting his role.

(Ryusuke Oki, who plays Sato in the 1982 version, starred with another Onoda sibling when he played a similarly suspicious guy in 1983's Chitei no satsui, which features Yoshiko Otowa in a small role.)

Lot of graphic design choices going on here.

The 2014 remake is available on DVD and streaming on Hulu, but unfortunately our 1982 Exam Hell remains obscure. That doesn't mean it's gone entirely unseen since its initial broadcast, though: I've been able to confirm broadcasts in 2008, 2024 and 2025, so there's likely been others as well. For a short time, presumably as a result of one of these recent broadcasts, the full movie was even on YouTube (unfortunately the page was not archived), which means someone out there probably has it as a DVD-r in their desk or a file on their computer.

You can also find an original song from the 1982 version called Hakyoku no seishun ("Youth's Catastrophe") collected on a Tuesday Suspense Theater soundtrack album. No one has uploaded it online, but the CD is pretty cheap secondhand, so yours truly is probably going to do the thing at some point.

That's about all I can give you for this obscure but apparently well-loved TV movie. We're lucky we have this much information about it - the vast majority of Hirata's work in TV (and I do mean VAST MAJORITY) has been lost to time.

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1 That is, one of the only ones to HAVE a remake, not one of the only ones to BE a remake. The only others I'm aware of are 2008's I Want To Be A Shellfish, 2007's The Family, and Sanjuro, also from 2007. (You could probably get more pedantic about this if you wanted to count all the film versions of Chushingura and the story of Musashi Miyamoto as "remakes", but I wouldn't consider those remakes, just adaptations.)

2 Which is ironic considering that in real life he was Masahiko's brother.

火曜サスペンス劇場 - 地底の殺意 / Kayō Sasupen'sugekijō - Chitei no satsui / Tuesday Suspense Theater: Underground Murderous Intent (1983)

Release date: July 5, 1983

Director: Yoichi Maeda

Studio: NTV with cooperation from Shochiku Eizo

Cast: Masakazu Tamura, Kyoko Kobayashi, Hiroko Shino, Keiko Orihara, Ryusuke Oki, Akiko Sodeki, Yoshiko Otowa et al

Availability: Home media release of this specific film is unknown and unlikely. The film in its entirety is on archive.org.

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Today we're going to be looking at the only feature-length film I've managed to dredge up that includes Yoshiko Otowa in the cast. And I really did dredge it up: I used Wayback Machine to resurrect a deleted YouTube video (which was actually the second of two links that I found, the first was gone for good) and watched the entire thing that way. I know this is kind of a "don't you have anything better to do?" post, but I do have something better to do - sleep, it is 12:45 AM - and I'm choosing to do this instead. And you know what? I'm super excited about it.

(And anyway, I've put it on archive.org so now you don't have to do all that.)

For those of you just tuning in, Otowa is Hirata's younger sister. I talk about her and what is probably her most well-known credit here. Her work is obscure and sparse; in the late '50s and '60s she was frequently in films directed by their older brother, Yoshiki Onoda, but she never appeared in anything alongside Hirata. (The Onoda Venn diagram is surprisingly complicated.) After that she did a few things in the '80s and then mostly fell off the map.

Some background: "Tuesday Suspense Theater" was not a "television series" in the usual episodic sense of that term, but a series of made-for-TV films directed by and starring many, many top names of the time. A longer explanation of the series would just take up space since it's been running for so long and includes so many titles, a lot of which are pretty much lost media. (Although I will say you should watch Obayashi's Lovely Devils, it's an underrated gem of his.) This particular film also stars Masakazu Tamura of Nemuri Kyoshiro fame. This will be my first time seeing him out of a chonmage.

The link I posted includes commercials, which is always fun. I think we all love retro Japanese TV ads. I assume, because of the ads, that the video was ripped from a VHS recording somebody made during the original airing (as far as I know this was never rebroadcast). It's in atrocious quality, but what do you expect from a YouTube link that was literally brought back from the dead.

The film begins with a couple, Tomoyuki Katsuhara and his wife Katsumi (played by Tamura and Shino, respectively), returning to their apartment after an extended trip to Spain. The atmosphere is immediately off, and Katsumi finds a trap door under their kitchen floor that hadn't previously been there, leading to a small hole with a ladder. There are rumors that the guy renting their apartment in the interim, Nogawa, was a bit... odd, to say the least (we get a fantasy montage of him doing stuff like tying his girlfriend to a balcony and killing kittens). The film seems to set us up to think he had something to do with the trap door.

Otowa's character is one of the perennial nosey housewives who often congregate outside apartment buildings in older Japanese films. Her character is the one responsible for the nasty rumors about Nogawa. It took me a minute to figure out who she was even though I'd seen her in Comedy Trio because she's a bit older in this, but as soon as I saw her in profile I was like oh yep. 

imoto

Katsumi tries to tell her husband about the hole, and about Nogawa, but she gets a firm "baka" response, of course. But Katsuhara does go down into the hole with a flashlight and discovers something written on the wall: the name "Tatsuo Sasamoto" scrawled over with Xs. Both this and Nogawa's general weirdness turn out to be red herrings.

pictured: hole dispute

Nogawa comes over while Katsumi is alone and is generally a creep to her. I didn't catch much of what he said, but he seemed to know something about the hole under the kitchen floor. When Katsuhara comes home, his wife again attempts to talk to him about the hole, but he continues to be dismissive; this is when the jackhammers come out. Katsumi has men over to dig up the floor, but they don't find anything immediately. When she's down there alone, though, she finds a wristwatch and then a necklace buried in the dirt. She recognizes the necklace as belonging to a woman her husband used to date, and as she tries to pull the necklace up, she unearths... a skeleton!

this film is now 💀CERTIFIED SPOOKY💀

Katsuhara returns home and Katsumi confronts him, and he admits that the skeleton is who she thinks it is: a woman, Akiko - actually a coworker of Katsumi's - who he'd been seeing. We get a lengthy flashback that ends with Katsuhara and Akiko arguing and him strangling her in maybe the least dramatic murder scene I've ever watched. He picks up the phone, presumably thinking about turning himself in, but then decides instead to be reasonable and carve a hole under his kitchen floor to hide her body in. As one does. Back in the present, he confesses everything to his wife.

future skeleton on the left

They then decide to both commit suicide with red wine and opiates. Buuuut first we get a long Spain montage. There's flamenco dancing, that's nice, I always like to see flamenco dancing. There's also bullfighting, which is... markedly less nice.

Katsuhara wakes up from the suicide attempt, but Katsumi doesn't. He, of course, drags her body down to the hole under the kitchen. Katsumi eventually does wake up too, after she's been thrown into the hole with no way of escaping. Her husband can hear her calls for help, but he piles furniture over the trap door and ignores her. After a while she figures out she can make a good deal of noise banging on a pipe, and the whole building hears it - while Katsuhara is out feeling sorry for himself due to murdering two women, Katsumi is managing to summon the authorities despite being locked in a hole. The film ends with Katsumi in an ambulance and Katsuhara in the back seat of a police cruiser, tailing her.

big surprise for this Ultraman stan: that's Kitajima [Shūsuke Tsumura] from Taro on the left, behind Tamura

I gotta admit this is not the best movie ever. It has a few fun scenes, but on the whole, it's "get home from work and fall asleep in front of the TV" cinema. It could just be because I thoroughly read every scrap of plot summary I could find beforehand to prepare myself for watching something I would only half understand, but none of the twists and turns feel very surprising. From the moment that Katsumi finds that hole, you know she is going to end up in it eventually. Everything in between is just a lot of stuff. Nobody reacts to anything in a reasonable way. It's all TV-land dramatics and filler.

But I still had fun. If nothing else, this was definitely the oddest way I've ever found and watched a movie. I'm scheduling this to post on a Tuesday for authenticity's sake.