Tag: Teruo Ishii

Mysterious Thirteen Nights: Chapter 2 – The Dish Mansion at Hell’s Bancho (怪奇十三夜 第二回 番町皿屋敷, Teruo Ishii, 1971)

Posted on by

Class differences and the arbitrary codes of the samurai society come between a couple in love in Teruo Ishii’s take on the classic ghost story The Dish Mansion at Hell’s Bancho (怪奇十三夜 第二回 番町皿屋敷, Kaiki Jusan Ya Bancho Sarayashiki). Produced as part of the Mysterious Thirteen Nights TV series, this version of the tale focuses more on love across the class divide and general unfairness of the world around the lovers rather than the lord’s rashness and unforgiving cruelty.

At least, the real issue is that Hatamoto Harima has refused an offer of marriage from the influential Abe family because he is still clinging to the impossible idea of marrying Okiku, a young woman working as a maid at the estate. As she says, the class difference between them is too great. No matter how much Harima may say that they are the same and all that matters is that they love each other, he is not actually free to make this decision. Even if he wanted to go so far as to renounce his samurai status, his family would likely not allow it and use any means possible to stop him, including murder.

What they do instead is frame Okiku for breaking one of a set of precious plates gifted to the family by Ieyasu after the battle of Sekigahara. Okiku counts the plates as instructed, only to realise that there is one missing. Two of the other servants say she broke it, though Okiku swears she has no knowledge of whatever happened to the plate. Harima is shaken, believing the testimony of the two servants who were particularly close to him, yet thinking that Okiku has done this deliberately as a means of reducing the status of the Aoyama family and thereby dissolving the class difference between them so they can be together.

He does not seem to mind this kind of manipulation and even appears grateful that Okiku has forced his hand, planning to give up his status to be with her. When his scheming retainer Jinnai, however, tells him that it was all a trick Okiku has played to test his affections because she doesn’t really trust him, Harima loses his temper at this apparent act of betrayal. Despite saying that, at the end of the day, it’s a just plate and he’s not the sort of person who would let someone die over it, Harima ends up killing Okiku in a fit of range. Her body falls into the nearby well where she is said to have broken the plate. 

The fact is that this is a plot put in motion to force Harima into accepting the proposal from Abe for the good of the clan who fear refusing him will only ensure his rage. Okiku had become an obstacle to Harima’s marriage in drawing him away from his duty to the clan in favour of his personal feelings, so they removed her by trying to split the couple up. As a member of the samurai society, Harima is actually less than fishmonger’s sister to decide his romantic destiny. Even Okiku’s brother Iwakichi extends a degree of understanding to Harima on learning that he has killed his sister after telling him that Okiku meant to leave the castle because she too thought he would be happier with Abe’s daughter and no longer wished to stand in his way. Iwakichi understands that it was the samurai world that wielded the sword that killed Okiku, telling Harima only that he should live in Okiku’s memory as this is doubtless what she would have wanted.

Harima, however, goes on a rampage avenging her death, killing off most of the retainers that betrayed him, though he is not driven “mad” by Okiku’s vengeful spirit as in many similar films but makes a righteous decision to attack the corrupt samurai society. Even so, the film ends in a climatic sword fight taking place during a thunderstorm in which Okiku’s ghost appears among the men Harima is trying to kill. Ishii’s use of slow motion and surreal imagery such as the plates bleeding as Harima destroys them further add to a sense of supernatural dread, The conclusion then takes on a poetic quality as Okiku and Harima become a pair of butterflies, suggesting that their love was only possible outside of the human world free from the barriers of social class. That this classless society has not quite come about suggests that the film is also talking to a contemporary audience facing similar issues during the era of high prosperity while leaning in to a tragic tale of frustrated romance rather than condemning the hero’s rashness or the inherent cruelty of samurai society outside of its obsession with status.

The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses (ザ・ヒットマン 血はバラの匂い, Teruo Ishii, 1991)

Posted on by

After his fiancée is killed during a yakuza shootout in a restaurant, a former spy in training plots revenge in Teruo Ishii’s Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses (ザ・ヒットマン 血はバラの匂い, The Hitman: Chi wa Bara no Nioi). Ishii has been in retirement for 12 years before making the film but steps right into the zeitgeist with his bubble-era nightclub opening in which a yakuza goon pretends to be the son of a stockbroker to seduce a young woman he intends to press into prostitution, while looking back to classic noir and the borderless action past.

The young woman is rescued, though not soon enough to escape harm, by the titular hitman, Takanashi (Hideki Saijo), though he does not intervene to save her, only to take out the trio of yakuza who were one side of the gun battle in which his fiancée Reiko (Mikiko Ozawa) was killed. Reiko’s innocence is emphasised by her position as a teacher at a Christian school which is directly contrasted with the sleazy world of contemporary Shinjuku in which Takanashi becomes involved with a series of women. The Asia Town that he strays into is another international space with its samba bars and Filipina hostesses, while Takanashi is later sent to track a boat coming in from the Philippines which is thought to be smuggling guns. 

That’s a tip off he receives from Nakatsuka (Kiyoshi Nakajo), an old mentor from the defence academy who now works for the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, the nation’s primary intelligence authority. Nakatsuka is also seen meeting with the police chief who tells him that the yakuza have been complaining that police are encouraging the gang war rather than trying to stop it. So much the better, Nakatsuka says, let them massacre each other then take them all out right before the election to manipulate public opinion. If the election goes their way, the police chief will have additional budget to hire more policemen. Thus Takanashi also becomes a kind of pawn in cynical political machinations conducted by Nakatsuka and CIRO who are helping him both out of friendship and sympathy and because it is useful for him to make use of Takanashi and his desire for revenge. Only veteran policeman Uchino (Tetsuro Tanba) smells a rat, but even he later lets Takanashi go after making a moral judgement that justice has been served and Takanashi hasn’t really done anything wrong.

And so Takanashi tries to avenge Reiko by setting the gangs against each other in a recreation of the original gang war. He’s first frustrated and then aided by Shinjuku party girl Rumi (Natsumi Nanase) who steals his briefcase and gives it to the yakuza, and also be her friend Hisako (Yuki Semba) whom he meets after ducking into a soapland to escape the police. Hisako’s apartment is well furnished with even the modern convenience of an exercise bike, while Rumi’s feels empty, like a hideout with its bare floors and sparse decor. The walls are decorated with posters for Casablanca and Bonnie and Clyde that bring home and older noir past that Takanashi is echoing in his quest to avenge Reiko’s death at the hands of a crime-ridden society. We’re told that he gave up his place at the defence academy and became a truck driver when his parents objected to their marriage, but now fulfils his destiny in tackling the yakuza threat head on.

Meanwhile, as a kind of counter to Rumi, Hisako, and Yasuda’s girlfriend, Kumasa’s woman Beniko (Kimiko Yo) who is very much involved in policy decisions and actively fights back in defence of Kumasa who is otherwise a bit useless. The film is sleazy from its opening rape sequence to the soapland escapade and inexplicable closing credits which consist of a number of raunchy gravure shots backed by a power ballad that otherwise have little to do with the rest of the film, but is perhaps less cynical that it appears or at least seems to edge away from nihilism towards something that appreciates that a more emotional, poetic kind of justice is possible and valid. Takanashi is allowed to complete his quest, though it incurs additional casualties, and then leave the scene having achieved a kind of closure and brought the cycle to an end leaving the rest to Nakatsuka and Uchino who now seems to have crossed over to Nakatsuka’s side if perhaps lamenting that he may be working far too hard to a achieve a justice that now seems surprisingly easy to enact.

Female Yakuza Tale (やさぐれ姐御伝　総括リンチ, Teruo Ishii, 1973)

Posted on by

Having completed her quest for revenge, Ocho (Reiko Ike) returns in Female Yakuza Tale (やさぐれ姐御伝　総括リンチ, Yasagure anego den: Sokatsu Lynch) once again swept up in intrigue after being framed for a bizarre series of murders. With Teruo Ishii taking up the reins from Norifumi Suzuki, the film has a slightly more realistic aesthetic making frequent use of handheld particularly in the narrow backstreets of the late Meiji Society while eventually taking a bizarre detour into the cruel world of an early 20th century mental health institution. 

In any case, Ocho’s troubles start when she’s met at Kobe harbour by a woman who says she’s come to fetch her. On arrival at her destination, Ocho is chloroformed and sexually assaulted by three men who evidently think she’s think she’s someone else and decide to get rid of her after realising their mistake. She wakes up next to the dead body of another woman and is in danger of becoming the prime suspect in a series of murders the subtitles don the “crotch-gauge” killings. After managing to escape, she sets about trying to find out who set her up and what’s going on while getting involved in a succession crisis in the Ogi in which the old boss who was once good to her has been killed. 

Though with much less political subtext, the film nevertheless indulges in the Sinophobia common in many similarly themed dramas in revealing a Mr Lee of Yokohama to be a major player in a drug trafficking scam in which women are forced to smuggle drugs in their vaginas after the gang gets them hooked to manipulate them. Besides Ocho, another woman dressed eerily like Sasori in a black wide brimmed hat and loose dress known as “Yoshimi of Christ” is also on their tail and seeking revenge while echoing some of the religious themes of the first film. She later teams up with recently released yakuza Jyoji who is looking for the daughter of the old boss who has gone mysteriously missing while he is also convinced that present boss Gondo had something to do with it along with the old man’s death. 

This is however mainly a tale of female revenge, Ocho’s being on the yakuza who cut off the Old Boss’ finger after he stood up for her as a teeanger whens she was caught cheating at a gambling den. Nevertheless, what eventually emerges is a sense of female socildairy as Ocho, Yoshimi, and the other women abused by the gang come together to free themselves from its grasp in a strange orgy of violence utilising eerie green lighting to lend it an almost supernatural dimension even if in the end the final blow is struck by a man and not without a little irony. 

This sense of unreality otherwise out of keeping with the immediacy of Ishii’s handheld camera is also seen in the mental institution to which the film eventually travels, a foggy gothic building echoing the Western mansion in the first film but similarly filed with oppressed and abused women sent mad by a patriarchal society or perhaps merely sent there to become so by men who wanted them out of the way. Gondo himself seems to be a regular visitor bringing along his own electroshock machine but finally resorting to using his bare hands in order to tie up a loose end and preserve his own position as head of the clan. 

Ocho is not above using her sexuality to manipulate him, while Ishii maintains the naked sword fights from the first film both from the balletic opening of Ocho and her parasol to the chaos of the final sequence as the women come together to take their revenge as one. Perhaps strangely there isn’t an awful lot of gambling in the film, but Ocho nevertheless makes good use of her trademark hanafuda cards while in a moment of symmetry it’s the wife of her target who eventually settles the matter in a more diplomatic fashion by subjecting herself to the same humiliation to which Ocho had been subjected to bring the circle to a close. Having once again stood up against corrupt crooks and greedy men, Ocho later takes her sisters with her as she walks off this time into the sunset rather than the dark. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Bohachi Bushido: Code of the Forgotten Eight (ポルノ時代劇 忘八武士道, Teruo Ishii, 1973)

Posted on by

A nihilistic ronin falls into the hellish trap of the Yoshiwara in Teruo Ishii’s dazzlingly psychedelic period drama, Bohachi Bushido (ポルノ時代劇 忘八武士道, Porno Jidaigeki: Bohachi Bushido). Adapted from a manga short by Kazuo Koike, the film once again tackles Edo era corruption as a brothel owner with a special connection to the shogun attempts to wipe out the competition presented by an enterprising merchant class only to find himself hoist by his own petard.

Ishii signals his intentions early on with the artfully staged opening scequence in which wandering ronin Shino (Tetsuro Tanba) is attacked on a bridge at dusk. As he turns to slash at an opponent, the blood splatter morphs into the film’s title while the clang of swords gives off little blue sparks that turn into the listings for the cast and crew. By the time the title sequence has concluded, night has descended on the bridge and Shino finds himself engulfed in darkness. “To die is hell, but to live is also hell” he exclaims as he jumps into the water below, hoping to be free of his empty life of killing. 

Unfortunately, he is rescued and brought to the Yoshiwara where they try to persuade him to join the Bohachi clan so called because to do so you must abandon all eight human virtues. The Bohachi’s main line of work is the sexual torture of women until they become docile dolls for their brothel. Shino describes them as “revolting” but then adds “just like me” and agrees to join anyway only to earn their mistrust when he refuses to play along with their games, buying but not sleeping with a woman brought in over a debt. Though Shirakubi, the guy who recruited him, tries to kick Shino out and calls the police on him for good measure, the big boss, Shirobe (Tatsuo Endo), decides he’ll take him in for use as an attack dog taking down anyone who interferes with business be they lords or officials. 

The irony is that the nihilistic Shiro enthusiastically takes to his work because he dislikes the debauchery of the Edo-era society even while working for the “legitimate” brothel owner who is at least “licensed” to exploit women for financial gain. What Shirobe resents is the rise of quasi-brothels in the various teahouses that are obviously selling more than just tea but continue to undercut his business by selling women even cheaper than he does. He also feels betrayed by the various samurai lords who choose to visit the teahouses over his own establishment and therefore seeks to have them frightened into submission by ordering Shino to kill any man found with one of the tea house sex workers. Later he even declares a kind of sex worker amnesty promising to pay five ryo for any of the teahouse women brought to him, no matter by who, and then joking that he’s actually killing two birds with one stone by getting his hands on a high quantity of new stock for a very low price. 

Shino refuses to sleep with the women and is most offended when his male assistant is killed in an attack by the rival brothel owners yet the team of warrior women sent to protect him did nothing to help because their orders were only to protect Shino and Shirobe’s orders must be followed to the letter on the pain of death. He seems to know he’s living on borrowed time and Shirobe probably intends to finish him off once he’s finished his mission of removing all opposition and restoring Shirobe’s power to manipulate the shogun but barely does anything to resist until faced with the rather ironic punishment of being given opium and then forced to participate in a never-ending orgy intended to result in his death in an extraordinary psychedelic sequence from Ishii . 

Of course, what they didn’t reckon on was Shino’s ironic desire to live or at least not to be beaten in which he actively begins stabbing himself to overcome withdrawal symptoms and carry on fighting even when they try to ram him with a giant spear cart. Ears are cut off, flying across the screen followed by arms and then heads. Ishii lends a poetic sheen to the closing moments as Shino is caught in a hero pose alone in the snow but still standing, if barely, and freed at least from one kind of hell if not from many others. 

An Outlaw (ならず者, Teruo Ishii, 1964)

Posted on by

Outside of Japan, “king of cult” Teruo Ishii is most closely associated with a particular brand of transgressive ero-guro exploitation films such as Horrors of Malformed Men, yet his career was much more eclectic than many might assume. Starring Ken Takakura with whom Ishii was developing a professional relationship which would eventually lead to the hugely successful Abashiri Prison series, 1964’s An Outlaw (ならず者, Narazumono) is one of a string of noir thrillers from the earlier part of Ishii’s career this one taking place mainly in Hong Kong and Macao. 

China-based Japanese hitman Nanjo (Ken Takakura) runs into trouble after he offs a man he assumed to be “the biggest thug in the underworld” but actually turns out to have been a law enforcement official working against a people trafficking ring. To make matters worse when Nanjo returns to his hotel where he was supposed to get his pay off, he discovers the body of a young woman in his bed who is later identified as the official’s daughter. Understandably annoyed, Nanjo starts trying to track down the people who hired him to figure out what’s going but is accidentally dragged into underworld intrigue after being mistaken for a drug deal middle-man owing to the yellow flower he’s wearing on his lapel. 

Like any good noir hero and especially one played by Takakura, Nanjo is basically a good guy with a strong sense of justice and an acute moral compass. He doesn’t like having been manipulated into killing someone who wasn’t in the game nor does he approve of those who make their living by exploiting women such as arch villain Mao (Toru Abe) whom he discovers to have been running a nefarious international trafficking ring getting Japanese women hooked on drugs, shipping them to Hong Kong and Macao, and working them to death before abandoning them once they’ve served their purpose. Then again, he also has a strange problem with women who like to lie in bed in the middle of the day which seems slightly puritanical for a man who kills for a living yet you’d have to admit no one could call him lazy. 

Not much of Nanjo’s past is revealed save that he was born in prison to a woman who stabbed her former partner because he left her for another woman while she was pregnant with his child, raising her son to be anything but dishonest especially with women. In any case, he appears to have been based in China and Hong Kong for some time, claiming that he came down from Xiamen for the job and speaking fairly fluent Cantonese and Mandarin though in another strange coincidence many of the people he meets turn out to be Japanese. In this there’s a slightly ironic inversion of the normal patterning of post-war crime films which sees Japan exporting crime to China the big mcguffin revolving around a tin of drugs Nanjo was given by mistake intended for the local market while the secondary target becomes Mao’s people trafficking operation bringing sex workers who’ve gotten into his bad books to Hong Kong or to be used for the pleasure of wealthy men. Despite his apparent disapproval, Nanjo reveals he was given part payment for the job in the form of a girl who he could use for his “convenience” though it seems unlikely that he did so.

On the other hand, the secondary villain, the Japanese-speaking Minran (Yoko Mihara), is painted as something of a femme fatale playing off Nanjo and her boss while trying to get her hands on the drugs to split the proceeds with her Cantonese-speaking lover who accidentally kills a young girl Nanjo had befriended in Hong Kong. The girl’s death is in part Nanjo’s responsibility in that he placed her in danger without warning or an understanding of what he was asking her to do, yet he later proves no better when he kills the landlady of the hotel who had watched as she died and then blackmailed Minran for financial gain. Aside from the girl and her Japanese friend Aki (Yoko Minamida) who is dying of consumption after being worked to death as one of Mao’s trafficked women, and a detective with whom Nanjo later forms an unexpected alliance, Nanjo is the representative of humanist morality despite his morally compromised existence reminding Mao that his mistake was in thinking that there is nothing money could not buy in rejecting his efforts to pay him off. 

Shot largely on location in Hong Kong and Macao, Ishii adds to the noirish tone with frequent voice over and a melancholy jazz score while making full use of the atmospheric environment with its deserted alleyways and cobbled streets not to mention the naturally canted angles of the Victoria Peak funicular, while there is a fair amount of lowkey sleaze more typical of his later career along with a bizarre scene in which Nanjo sucks out blood from the mouth of a woman suffering a pulmonary haemorrhage. First and foremost a fatalistic noir thriller in which the hero, unfairly damned by a corrupt society, is unable to outrun his past transgressions, An Outlaw nevertheless suggests that true nobility is to be found only in those existing outside of its borders.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Flesh Pier (女体桟橋, Teruo Ishii, 1958)

Posted on by

Teruo Ishii may be most closely associated with his exploitation work for Toei in the late ‘60s and ‘70s but in actuality he began his career at Toho, later joining Shintoho where he served as an AD to among others Mikio Naruse whom he regarded as a lifelong mentor. After making his debut with boxing movie King of the Ring: The World of Glory in 1957, he worked mainly in children’s sci-fi tokusatsu serials before sliding into B-movie noir of which 1958’s Flesh Pier (女体桟橋, Nyotai sanbashi) is an early example. 

Set firmly in the contemporary era, Ishii opens with a documentary-style voiceover exoticising the seedy underbelly of the city’s entertainment district hidden away in otherwise sparkling Ginza. Shooting in a bold reportage style, he captures a sense of natural spontaneity reminiscent of early American independent cinema transitioning directly into nightclub Arizona where a woman is furiously dancing. Arizona is as we’ll see the nexus of the recent proliferation of “call girl” businesses which have arisen since sex work was criminalised and in this case at least dependent on an international sex trafficking network backed by an American gangster, Thompson (Harold Conway). Salaryman Keizo (Ken Utsui) is a new customer, double checking that the business is “safe” before being reassured that they don’t deal with anyone they don’t know and have already vetted his identity, but when he reaches the hotel room he’s been handed the key for, he discovers the body of a woman lying in the bathtub and is forced on the run. The twist is that Keizo isn’t a bored executive after all but an undercover policeman working on breaking the trafficking ring. 

Co-scripted by Akira Sagawa, Flesh Pier seems to draw frequent inspiration from Casablanca only with the roles slightly reversed as replacement hostess Rumi (Yoko Mihara) finds herself wondering why of all the gin joints in Ginza Keizo had to walk into hers while the bar’s musician, Teruo (Teruo Hata), quite clearly in love with her himself, completes the triangular relationship. The couple even enter a Moroccan-style room while echoing Rick and Ilsa’s painful rehash of their Paris break up as Rumi tries and fails to explain why she left him on some previous occasion, Keizo remembering that she wore a white sweater and a blue coat to mimic Rick’s “the Germans wore grey, you wore blue” while the film’s ending is also hugely reminiscent of Casablanca’s “beginning of a wonderful friendship” only with additional romance. 

Nevertheless, the crime here is bigger and darker than most contemporary noir with awkward echoes of Japan’s prewar sex trafficking industry embodied by the karayuki as it becomes clear the gang’s business model relies on finding young women and luring them abroad with promises of good jobs only to force them into them sex work. Meanwhile one of the regular policemen, Hayami (Hiroshi Asami), gets a shock when he sets up a meeting with one of the call girls and is met by his own fiancée who, unbeknownst to him, has resorted to sex work in order to fund her brother’s tuition. “What else could I do?” she tearfully asks him making plain that in the difficult if improving economic environment of late 50s Japan sex work is still the only viable option for many women needing to support their families in the absence of men given persistent societal sexism which often locks them out of other kinds of well-paying jobs. Hayami perhaps understands this, drowning his sorrows with his veteran partner insisting that he’s sick of being a policeman and plans to quit only for the older man to sympathetically tell him not to give up so easily. 

Then again, Keizo’s secondary love interest Haruko (Akemi Tsukushi) is an intrepid undercover reporter posing as a model in order to bait the trafficking ring. Even so the primary drama revolves around Keizo and Rumi’s unfinished business along with her musician’s jealousy, the implication being more that her feelings for Keizo have clouded her judgement rather than reawakened a sense of moral goodness. Like many femme-fatales in post-war B-movie noir she is made to pay the ultimate price for her transgressive femininity in having firstly climbed the in-gang ladder and then damned herself in her conflicted love for the earnest Keizo even while suspecting he may be an undercover cop despite his acting like an underworld thug. These are indeed a new breed gangster much more like those seen in European and American noir rather than traditional yakuza while the environment of the Arizona is also something of a liminal space as the opening voiceover puts it in but not of Japan. 

While nowhere near as lurid as some of Ishii’s later work, Flesh Pier is certainly daring for the time period in the griminess with which it depicts the successor to the red light districts along with its air of forbidden allure even while its club scenes are in keeping with those found in other contemporary gangster tales if lent a little more realism in the immediacy with which Ishii shoots them making full use of documentary-style handheld. Expressing a degree of anxiety as regards Japan’s increasingly global outlook along with that of increasing social change, Flesh Pier is formally daring from the young Ishii artfully playing with classic noir while fully embracing the transgressive thrills of B-movie crime. 

Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

Posted on by

“There’s no hope for us anymore” cries the hero, redeeming himself with one last act of humanity before allowing himself to be consumed by the flames of Edo-era barbarity. Another tale of feudal exploitation, Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄, Tokugawa Irezumi-shi: Seme Jigoku) opens with an otherwise unrelated scene of female crucifixion followed by an elaborate beheading, presenting both of these events with a degree of historical authenticity they do not perhaps possess. Nevertheless, his central tale which turns out to be less about two women than two men, turns on the exploitation of female bodies, subtly suggesting that the modern society is itself founded on female exploitation. 

Though dropping the portmanteau structure frequently employed in the Joys of Torture series, Ishii returns from the prologue with the end of the first arc in which the presumed heroine, Yumi (Yumiko Katayama), makes a stealthy visit to a ghostly cemetery in which she trashes the grave of a man named Genzo (Shinichiro Hayashi), digs him up and dismembers his body to retrieve a key we later see him swallow which she hopes will unlock her womanhood currently imprisoned by an ornate chastity belt, only the key doesn’t fit. 

Flashing back again, we see Yumi forced into sex work in payment of a debt and imprisoned in a labyrinthine brothel which specialises in bondage and torture under the guidance of lesbian madam Oryu* (Mieko Fujimoto) and her samurai fixer Samejima (Haruo Tanaka). The brothel’s USP is in its tattooed women which neatly leads us into the main narrative as Yumi’s body becomes a battleground contested by two men, top tattoo artists in search of the perfect canvas in order to win, ironically, the hand of their master’s pure and innocent daughter Osuzu (Masumi Tachibana). 

Horihide (Teruo Yoshida) and Osuzu are in love, but the dark and brooding Horitatsu (Asao Koike) is determined to frustrate his rival’s desires by becoming the successor to Osuzu’s dying father, the tattooist Horigoro. The “hori” which prefixes each of the men’s names relates to the process of tattooing and comes from the verb to chisel, hinting at the way they prick and channel their desires into the canvas which is human skin. Horihide is our “hero”, described by Horigoro as the light to Horitatsu’s dark, Horitatsu currently making more of an impact with his designs of violent intensity, but each of them is in a very real way content to use and exploit the bodies of women without their full consent in order to practice their art. It is essentially an act of violence if not of “torture”. 

Meanwhile, Oryu and Samejima are profiting off their “merchandise” more directly in participating in the trafficking of tattooed ladies to lecherous foreigners displaying an early fetishisation of Asian women. This being late Edo, Japan is still in its isolationist period in which fraternising with foreigners was illegal which is why the action eventually takes us to Nagasaki and the Dutch trading port of Dejima, here presented as a nexus of corruption, where Samejima and Oryu prove themselves very much in league with foreign powers dealing with powerful businessman Clayton (Yusuf Hoffman), despite his name apparently a Dutchman, and his Chinese associates. Like Nikkatsu’s borderless action films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Inferno of Torture indulges in an unpleasant Sinophobia which culminates in a chase through a crowded Chinese wet market in which we catch sight of dogs hanging bound ready for the slaughter in similar poses to those of the women in the brothel, not to mention thrusting snakes, before being confronted by a basket full of adorable puppies presumably headed for a dark destination, while we finally rediscover Hidetatsu collapsed in an opium den after being forcibly addicted by Oryu as a means of control. 

“This is a house of horrors” the Chinese gang leader tells a group of women bought by Samejima from a prison and promised a life of wealth and ease as geisha catering to high class clients. It’s difficult to tell if Ishii is critiquing Edo-era misogyny or that of the present day, or merely revelling in it with increasingly perverse scenes of sexual violence and degradation which continually imply that women have no role or value outside of reflecting the desires of men while those who try to claim their own agency are brutally put down by an inherently misogynistic, patriarchal society. After a Count of Monte Cristo-esque subplot in which Horihide is framed for murder but escapes to plot his revenge, the psychedelic final showdown returns us to the tattooists’ artistic face off as they again weaponise female bodies to embody their own ambitions, Horihide turning a blameless young woman into an iridescent peacock to get back at her father. Nevertheless, he finally reassumes his humanity in ending his mission of vengeance before it takes more innocent lives while accepting that he may now be too corrupted to return to his former life. Elegantly composed often unconsciously recalling the keyhole in Yumi’s chastity belt as it imprisons women within the peephole of the frame, Inferno of Torture ends exactly as it began, with a scene of grim and ironic punishment in which the female form is itself obliterated. 

Inferno of Torture is available on blu-ray from Arrow Video in a set which also includes an in-depth commentary from Tom Mes discussing the treatment of the various actresses involved with the series, Ishii, and Toei in general; Jasper Sharp’s Miskatonic lecture Erotic Grotesque Nonsense & the Foundations of Japan’s Cult Counterculture; and a booklet featuring new writing by Chris D.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

*This character’s name is rendered as “Oryu” in the subtitles but “Otatsu” (different ways of reading the same character which means “dragon”) in the accompanying booklet.

Yakuza Law (やくざ刑罰史　私刑!, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

Posted on by

yakuza law posterOne of the things that (supposedly) separates the “yakuza” from regular thugs is that they have a “code”. That code means many and various things, but in their grand mission to justify their existence it often means that they stand up for the little guy, all too often oppressed by the powers that be. Of course, a lot of people might feel themselves to be oppressed by yakuza thugs who like to throw their weight around and generally cause trouble for small business holders, but that’s beside the point. Teruo Ishii’s Yakuza Law (やくざ刑罰史　私刑!, Yakuza Keibatsushi: Lynch!) goes one step further and asks if the yakuza are themselves “oppressed” by their own code, or at least the various ways it is used and subverted by all who subscribe to it.

Set in three distinct time periods, Yakuza Law is also fairly unique in that the vast majority of those on the receiving end of its violence are male. The yakuza is an extremely homosocial world after all. Each of the three tales presented is preceded by a title card featuring the particular “laws” the unhappy gangsters are about to break and what kind of punishment they might expect for doing so.

The first and earliest, set in the Edo era, is a typical giri/ninjo tale that places the ideal of the yakuza code against the need to preserve a personal vision of justice. The “rules” here are that a yakuza does not steal and he does not fool around with married women. Our hero, Tsune (Bunta Sugawara), takes the heat for a nervous underling, Shinkichi (Hiroshi Miyauchi), who crumbled in the heat of battle, but incurs the wrath of his boss while a devious footsoldier, Viper (Renji Ishibashi), hides in the bushes and then stabs a corpse numerous times to make it look as if he’s done good service. Viper, not content with his ill-gotten gains, sets up Tsune and his superior Tomozo (Ryutaro Otomo) by implicating them in a gambling scam while Tsune falls for the boss’ girl Oren (Yoshiko Fujita) who is also desperately trying to protect the feckless Shinkichi.

The problem with all of this, it would seem, is not so much that the yakuza “law” has been broken but that’s it’s being misused in all quarters and is clearly in conflict with basic humanity. The boss uses the code to manipulate his underlings and keep a firm grip on his power, while Viper bends it to his own nefarious ways and a third underling, Shohei (Shhinichiro Hayashi), rests on the sidelines playing a little each way but remaining loyal to his brothers even as the axe falls on his head. The punishments meted out are suitably gruesome, escalating from finger cutting to eye gauging and ear removal in a senseless and counterproductive lust for violence which does eventually blow back on the boss who pushes his authority too far over too small a cause.

In tale two, however, which takes place in 20th century pre-war Japan, the “crime” is causing trouble and the punishment exile, but again the problem is not the code but the men who subvert it. Thus, hotheaded foot soldier Ogata (Minoru Oki) sets the cat amongst the pigeons by starting a gang war on his own and is sent to prison for three years during which time his gang prospers because of the movement he started. Even so, they aren’t keen to have him back when he gets out and immediately exile him from their territory. He sticks around waiting for his girl, Sayo (Masumi Tachibana), but she gets picked up by the evil boss who wants her for himself and delays her departure so that Ogata can be captured. Believing he’s dead, she hooks up with another goodhearted yakuza, Amamiya (Toyozo Yamamoto), who saves her from the bad guys only to have a romantic crisis when Ogata suddenly resurfaces. Amamiya and Ogata are, however, both “good” yakuza which means they both really love Sayo and want the best for her, each respecting the other for the old love and the new as they team up to kick the corrupt yakuza out of town and make sure she’s permanently safe whoever it is she eventually ends up with.

By the third tale we’ve reached the contemporary era, but we’re no longer in a traditional “yakuza” world so much as one seemingly ripped from a spy spoof in which the cardinal rule is that if you undermine the organisation you will be eliminated. More thugs than yakuza, this kind have no code and will stoop to the lowest kind of cruelty solely for money. Debonair, 007-esque international hitman Hirose (Teruo Yoshida) accepts a job from shady gangster Shimazu (Takashi Fujiki) to assassinate his boss, only Shimazu offs him first and then frames Hirose (which he finds very irritating). Hirose spends the rest of the picture teaching him a lesson while Shimazu tries to eliminate his competition in increasingly inhuman ways (including having someone crushed into a cube while trapped inside a luxury car).

Bar the third episode which isn’t really even about “yakuza”, what Ishii seems to be saying is that the yakuza are also oppressed because they are forced to live with fragmented integrity, torn between giri and ninjo in their adherence to an arcane set of values which are often overly enforced at the cost of true “justice”. To be fair, that is the idea behind every other yakuza film, but Ishii does is add a more cynical edge in suggesting the issue isn’t the code and conflicting value systems but individualised corruption (which is itself perhaps a kind of “ninjo”) in those who deliberately misuse the “noble” idea of the code for their own ends – something which has intensified since the Edo era though is apparently not a result of post-Meiji internationalism. All of that aside, despite the brutality of the title, Yakuza Law is fairly tame outing for Ishii which tempers its lust for blood with cartoonish irony as its deluded heroes battle themselves in service of a code which has never and will never truly serve them.

Available on blu-ray from Arrow Video in a set which also includes a new audio commentary by Jasper Sharp and a vintage interview with Teruo Ishii, as well as a booklet featuring new writing by Tom Mes.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Orgies of Edo (残酷異常虐待物語　元禄女系図, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

Posted on by 1 Comment

Orgies of Edo poster“Pinky Violence” is a strangely contrary genre, often held up both as intensely misogynistic but also proto-feminist in its vast selection of vengeful heroines who seemed to embody the rage of several centuries of inescapable oppression. Teruo Ishii, at the very forefront of Toei’s attempts to graft pink film sensibilities onto its house style of manly yakuza drama, had a definite love for the perverse but, perhaps unusually, a consciousness of the implications of his world of surrealist violence. The Japanese title of Orgies of Edo (残酷異常虐待物語　元禄女系図, Zankoku Ijo Gyakutai Monogatari: Genroku Onna Keizu) translates as something like “a genealogy of the women of the Genroku Era” and concerns itself with three tales of misused women each of whom meets a grim end at the hands of faithless men who seem to embody the decadence of their prosperous times.

Ishii’s three tales of increasing madness and brutality travel from the streets to the palace in locating each scene of mounting debauchery within the shifting circles of prosperous Genroku era Edo. Our guide, positioned to the side of each of the tales, is a conservative doctor (Teruo Yoshida) who diagnoses his society as morally sick and hovering on the edge of a decadent abyss. Tellingly, each of episodes with which he becomes involved is presaged by his inability to access foreign knowledge in the wilfully isolated nation, slowly stagnating even in the midst of unprecedented prosperity.

His first patient is a young woman in the middle of a painful miscarriage caused by a beating intended to end her pregnancy. Abroad they know of an operation to avoid this sort of misery, the doctor muses, but he has no way of helping her. The young woman, Oito (Masumi Tachibana), like many in the tales of old Edo, got into debt and then was seduced by a handsome young man who posed as a saviour but only ever meant to misuse her. Hanji (Toyozo Yamamoto), a gangster, presses her into prostitution and eventually betrays her by taking up with another woman but neither of them are free of their respective captors be they the Yoshiwara or the gangster underworld.

The doctor’s second case is more extreme and calls upon him to make use of his knowledge of the Western notion of psychiatry in trying to cure a young noblewoman of her perverse fetish for the physically deformed. Ochise’s (Mitsuko Aoi) tastes stem back to a traumatic teenage incident during which she was abducted, held prisoner, and repeatedly raped by a man with a ruined face. Her loyal servant, Chokichi (Akira Ishihama), has long been in love with her but the pair remain locked in a one sided sadomasochistic relationship in which he knows that she can never return his love not because of their class difference, but because of his “perfection”. Pinching an ending from Tanizaki’s Shunkinsho, Ishii sends the frustrated lovers in a less positive direction in which a woman’s defiant insistence on pursuing her own desires is met only by the violence of a male need for possession which eventually leads to mutual destruction.

Mutual destruction is a final destination of sorts. The doctor’s third unrealisable request is for an untimely caesarian section – another piece of Western medical knowledge he has only vague awareness of. This unusual situation unfolds at the court of a lascivious lord whose perverse proclivities are quickly becoming the talk of the town. Drawn to a young woman, Omitsu (Miki Obana), who greets his attempt to fire his arrows at her while angry bulls with flaming horns charge at his other concubines with excitement, the lord is dismayed to hear of another of his ladies, Okon (Yukie Kagawa), enjoying the attentions of her pet dog and therefore somehow sullying his own bedroom reputation. The lord has Okon painted gold and thrown in a hall of mirrors for a slow and painful death of multiplied suffocations but she wins a temporary reprieve by promising to introduce him to untold pleasure if only he lets her live. This will all end in flames and ashes, but the lord hardly cares because it is only the natural end for his hedonistic endeavours.

The doctor performs his miracle and emerges with a child in whom lies the legacy of this immoral time. Yet the doctor wants to “save” it. Even if it’s a “beast” the child is innocent, he intones, insisting that he must live despite this burden in order to resist the madness. Like the strange butoh inspired performance art which opens the film, these are times of madness and confusion in which women, most of all, suffer at the hands of men who care only for their own pleasure. The doctor tries to cure the “sickness of the soul” that he sees before him, but knows that cannot be excised so much as tempered. Still he walks forward, away from the wreckage, with the future in his arms and resolves to live whatever the cost may be.

Orgies of Edo is available on blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Films.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Horrors of Malformed Men (江戸川乱歩全集　恐怖奇形人間, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

Posted on by Leave a comment

Horrors of Malformed Men poster

The line between madness and sanity is often a thin one, entirely dependent on a series of social perceptions themselves dictated by a vague concept of time and morality. Horrors of Malformed Men (江戸川乱歩全集　恐怖奇形人間, Edogawa Rampo Zenshu: Kyofu Kikei Ningen), loosely inspired by an Edogawa Rampo short story The Strange Tale of Panorama Island as well as a series of similarly themed tales from East and West, is set in 1925 – the end of “Taisho” which is to say immediately before the problematic “Showa” era marked by its own kind of madness and defeat if also by a gradual rebirth. Nevertheless, madness reigns in here though it’s madness of a very particular kind as those excluded from a fiercely conformist society seek to remake the world in their own image and take a horrifyingly poetic revenge on the rest of humanity for their failure to embrace difference.

The tale begins with amnesiac medical student Hirosuke (Teruo Yoshida) who finds himself inside a cage at a mental institution surrounded by screaming, half naked women one of whom attacks him with a knife. Luckily, the knife turns out to be a stage prop with a retractible blade presumably given to the unfortunate woman wielding it as a kind of calming device. Eventually rescued by the warden who attacks the mad with whips as if they were mere cattle, Hirosuke retreats to his cell to ponder on his current circumstances, if he is really “mad” or the only sane man in an insane world. Meanwhile, he is plagued by the memories of a long forgotten lullaby and the vision of a woman’s face suddenly contorting, transformed into a horrifying monstrosity.

Managing to escape, Hirosuke gets a lead on the lullaby that takes him to a coastal village where he discovers that a man who looks eerily like himself has recently passed away. Hoping to solve a series of mysteries, he fakes his own death and manages to convince the other villagers that he is the recently deceased Genzaburo somehow resurrected and risen from the grave. Where all this takes him is to a mysterious island where Genzaburo’s father Jogoro (Tatsumi Hijikata) – a hideously deformed man with webbed fingers, has been trying to create his own bizarre society.

Horrors of Malformed Men was technically “banned”, or perhaps it’s better to say suppressed in an act of self censorship by a nervous studio, but not so much for its gleefully surreal grotesquery as for the “malformed” in the Japanese title which is in fact an extraordinarily offensive word. In any case it adopts a typically difficult position towards those it calls “malformed” as warped both in body and mind. Our mad scientist, Jogoro is a man driven insane by his society’s consistent rejection of him. When the beautiful wife he has somehow managed to win displays only disgust towards his twisted body and finally betrays him by sleeping with her handsome, sensitive cousin, Jogoro’s mental stability is forever fractured leading to his dark desire to take revenge on the “perfect” world by creating his own “malformed” creatures mirroring his own spiritual decline.

Jogoro’s island is a place of “madness” where spiritual corruption leads only to a kind of devolution in which animalistic desires exist only to be sated. Here there is no love or community, only a cold and individual progress towards oblivion. Hirosuke enters a nightmare of a waking sort in which he must confront himself, his family legacy, and a potential conflict between his own desires and the rules of society. Yet he is also haunted by the image of an as yet unseen future of where such ugliness may lead. Jogoro’s otherworldliness and deformities, his singleminded to desire to remake the world with himself on top and others all below, speak of a madness yet to come and the terrible retribution which would be exacted for it.

As if to reinforce his own message, Hirosuke declares himself not of this kind – he chooses to remove himself from a world with which his personal desires are incompatible, maintaining their purity in refusing to live on indulging in a practice most would regard as so taboo as to constitute a kind of “madness” all on its own rather than honouring civilisation by living on in denial. Something tells him, this is where he’s been heading all along. Deeply strange, surreal, and perhaps questionable in its final moment of capitulation which lays the blame for the entire sad and sorry escapade at the feet of a scornful woman rather than the society which both forced her to marry a man she didn’t like and encouraged her to reject him on the grounds of his “ugliness”, Horrors of Malformed Men is not a story about madmen and weird islands but of the evil that men do and the pain it leaves behind.

Horrors of Malformed Men is available on blu-ray from Arrow Films. The set includes two audio commentaries – one featuring film critic Mark Schilling ported from a previous release, and the other a new commentary by film scholar Tom Mes, as well as interviews with Shinya Tsukamoto and Minoru Kawasaki on Ishii’s career, and footage of Ishii visiting the Udine Far East Film Festival. The first pressing also comes with a booklet featuring a wide ranging essay by Jasper Sharp plus shorter essays by Tom Mes on Ishii’s career and Grady Hendrix on Edogawa Rampo.

Original trailer (English subtitles)