One day, Hitomi observes her classmate Eriko stealing lipstick in a drugstore and follows her home. The two young women get to know and love each other. While the withdrawn Hitomi believes herself and Eriko to be reincarnations of angel warriors who once fought demon armies, her emancipated and apathetic friend wanders through life between sex contacts with older men and fear of falling into a boring bourgeois existence. The different futures of the two soon lead to tensions.Read More »
Plot:
In the 1990’s Kenjo dies in a terrorist gas attack and his girlfriend, Haruka, is killed while doing her rounds as a prostitute. In 2002, the two of them meet up again…but how can this be possible when they are both dead?Read More »
Psycho-mystery in which two men confront each other over the murder of a woman in Shibuya.Read More »
Quote:
Takahisa Zeze first assisted on three productions tailored to gay audiences by the Pink studios Shishi Productions and ENK Productions before releasing his first own feature-length film in 1989. Even this debut made it clear that the director, who had been socialized with politically engaged protest cinema, was set to exploit the artistic scope of the production context in a special way: Into the erotic film frame, Zeze carries the tragic love story between a member of the Korean minority and a Taiwanese prostitute, and turns in a previously unprecedentedly offensive way to the exclusion experienced by impoverished Asian migrant milieus in Japan – a theme that was to preoccupy the filmmaker again and again throughout his career. The setting is a pile-dwelling settlement near Tokyo-Haneda Airport that belongs neither entirely to land nor to water, an allegorically charged no-man’s-land backdrop also found in numerous of Zeze’s films to come. –Christian LenzRead More »
Quote:
A man in despair picks up a young girl named Momo from a telephone club, who turns out to have been a member of “The Monster with 21 Faces” involved in the “Glico Morinaga Incident”. Implementing audio tapes of the actual incident, the film was ahead of it’s time, twenty-eight years before “The Voice of Sin / 罪の声”. Young Takahisa Zeze struggles with the darkness of Showa history, and with his longing for criminals to be free people, he makes a strange escape between Tokyo and Kyoto, running fast and stagnant. A quiet demise that leads nowhere.Read More »
Quote:
In the year 2014, Japan has collapsed economically and thus its people emigrated in large numbers and settled in other parts of the world. In a corner in Asia, there is a little street called Mallepa, a big melting pot where Asians such as Hongkongers, Taiwanese and Japanese live together. It was a place where people fought for order, food and freedom. It was there where Shou (Gackt), raised as an orphan and Kei (Hyde), who could live forever, met and became the best of friends. However, they were unable to escape from the fight for power involving gangs of different ethnicity on the street of Malepa.Read More »
Quote:
Murder, sex, blood and designer erotism meet head-on in this
perverse tale of sexual alienation in nineties Japan.
Set amidst the desolate background of a warped and twisted Japan.
Raigyo takes its concept from a real life event in which a black
clad woman murders a man that she had just met by chance through
a phone sex club. Her chosen place for this execution, where he
will be stabbed to death, is called the “Love Hotel”.Read More »
A convicted rapist, Ikuo is released from prison and goes in pursuit of the woman he raped, Mieko. So obsessed is he with revenge he see’s her in every woman he meets. After carrying out vicious attacks on a prostitute and a young girl he finally comes face to face with her. Mieko tells him she wants to escape from Tomimori. To redeem himself in her eyes Ikuo takes her plea to the extreme resulting in inextricable tragedy for them all. The film is set in Japan’s notorious ‘soaplands’ – areas where young women offer bathing and massage to men, as a way round the laws prohibiting prostitution.Read More »
Synopsis:
Two young people, Hidenori and Sunako, are on the run from the law following Hidenori’s killing of his mother. The two manage to hitch a ride in a passing ice-cream van, but Sunako is assaulted by its driver while bathing in a stream in a forest. They escape through the trees, eventually ending up in a secluded wooden cottage where they hide out, eking out a feral existence by raiding neighbouring gardens. With Hidenori still in a state of shock, Sunako eventually breaks the communication barrier using her body, seducing him in a bathtub full of floating ripe tomatoes. It is a turning point in their relationship, and Hidenori then becomes the sexually dominant partner in this strange relationship. One day, Hidenori plunges a knife into his stomach, forcing the pair to leave their makeshift haven and seek help in the big city.Read More »