Movies, as an astute producer once told me, are news. Much of the medical news recently, from Japan and elsewhere, has been scary, including stories about out-of-control viruses and out-of-their-minds doctors and nurses who kill instead of cure their patients. So why make yet another dull J-Horror pic with a long-haired female ghost when real life is becoming more frightening?

That seems to be the reasoning behind both the medical mystery "Team Batista no Eiko (Glorious Team Batista)," and "L Change the World," the sequel to the hit "Death Note" films that feature their most popular character — the so-called genius detective L.

This time L (Kenichi Matsuyama) is not battling Kira — the twisted college student who dealt death by writing the victim's name in a mysterious notebook. Instead his opponents are members of a crazed environmental group who want to "cleanse" the world of its excess population by infecting it with a deadly virus. The story of how L is recruited to save humanity is convoluted. Suffice to say that he becomes the guardian of a mute Thai boy — who's been traumatized by the ravaging of his village by the virus — while trying to rescue a girl trapped in a hospital's infectious diseases lab. And he's discovered that he has only 23 days left to live — his name and date of death have been inscribed in the fatal notebook.