Another rare Wakamatsu for y’all…..this time from his late 70s shintoho roughies/torture era. A sort of sequel to Torture Chronicles: 100 Years of Torture Inquisition, and much along the same lines as that and Female Rape and Torture as far as plot and production values goes.
Not a great film , but worth a watch for waka completists and ero-guro fans.Read More »
A bus full of cult members gets stuck in snow. The cult has to stay in a mountain hotel. Strange things start to happen… This film was only released on VHS in Japan.
The music was composed by J. A. Seazer. And the screenplay was done by Izuru Deguchi and Ei Takatori (1952-2018). And some of the members from Gessyokukageki (月蝕歌劇団) founded by Ei Takatori also performed in this film.Read More »
A very rare ATG distributed Wakamatsu, starring Ken Yoshizawa and Rie Yokoyama as two pieces of a destructive love-triangle. Has all the usual Wakamatsu themes of politics, suicide and twisted love, as well as stylish Hideo Ito cinematography and great use of the more or less single set (a beach with an abandoned boat on it).Read More »
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It’s supposed to be a political critique of the japanese patriarchal family structure. The father wearing his military uniform is dominating his family sexually and violently. And while his daughter keeps saying that everything is normal, nothing is normal in this family.Read More »
Quote: Part of Wakamatsu’s ongoing fascination with sexual predators. It’s an incel film avant la lettre, executed in true Wakamatsu style. Certainly not his most prominent or polished work, though fans of Wakamatsu won’t be disappointed. Others should probably seek out his more famed work first. The film follows a frustrated young man. He yearns to be in the company of a woman, but seems unable to make any kind of meaningful connection with them. When a friend of his offers to share his girlfriend, he accepts reluctantly, but his first sexual experience awakens dark feelings that will drive him to commit violent crimes. Wakamatsu offers another glimpse into the mind of a very troubled soul. It’s certainly not a pleasant film, let alone a titillating one, so if that’s what you’re after you can better skip this one altogether. If on the other hand you like a stylized and frank descent into the rotten mind of a violent pervert, Wakamatsu has you covered.Read More »
letterboxd:
Japanese directors rarely fare well when they venture outside their home turf, the 80s and 90s weren’t really Wakamatsu’s best eras either. Just to say that expectations were pretty low when I started Singapore Sling. I wasn’t really prepared for a film this bad though, it is by far the worst thing I’ve seen from Wakamatsu up until this point.
Tatsuya is on a honeymoon in Australia. A couple of unfortunate encounters land him in jail, where he’s imprisoned without a chance of ever getting out again. His wife tries her best to launch an appeal, but it’s Tatsuya’s inmates who are his best chance of escaping his current predicament.Read More »
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Before he reopened his own production company, Wakamatsu directed his first mainstream film for a company called Shishi Productions that had a distribution deal with one of Japan’s major film studios (Toei). The film was called Prey (1979) and starred punk singer-cum-actor Yuya Uchida as a man on a mission to bring reggae music to Japan through his old friends who work in the record industry, but are only interested in promoting the next factory-line ‘idol’ singers and most of whom are involved in drugs and prostitution.Read More »
Synopsis: A detective investigating a serial rapist discovers that he and the perpetrator come from the same lineage of depraved individuals, a genealogy of violent and sexually perverse deviants that streches through the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras and can even be traced back to the Edo era.Read More »
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Fresh off the box-office success of Violated Angels, an eroticized dramatization of the Richard Speck case, director Koji Wakamatsu turned his attention to another real-life criminal, Yoshio Kodaira, the rapist who terrorized Tokyo in the post-WWII period. Renamed Marqui de Sadao here, and played with a skillfully detached cruelty by future director Osamu Yamashita (Joji Zankokushi), the rapist is depicted as far more perverse than his real-life model, including whipping and mutilation in his bag of evil tricks. As in Wakamatsu’s previous film, capitalism takes the blame for nearly every wrong in Japanese society, but in the context of such an exploitative and calculated attempt to earn box-office attention, much of the social criticism falls flat. Miki Hayashi co-stars with Kazue Sakamoto and Mikiko Ohkawa.Read More »