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Koji Wakamatsu
Considered by some to be the king of the Pinku genre and made scores of these movies focusing on sex and violence (usually against women), containing rape or S&M mixed with artistic touches and a sprinkle of intellectual themes. Occasionally made more artistically strange violent nudies, and was more political and prone to artsy, social commentary during the early part of his career. Died in 2012. Bleak artsy exploration of lost innocence. A girl is gang-raped for the second time on a rooftop while a strange teenager looks on. They develop a strange friendship over the next day as we find out he has a bleak and violent past as well. They both muse existentially and try to convince one another to kill each other. Fascinating and well-done but lacks depth. An early work by Wakamatsu and although not relatively avant-garde or extreme by today's standards, this deserves mention as a pioneering work in the Pinku genre. A male boss seduces his female employee into his apartment and proceeds to whip, abuse and torture her while preaching philosophically about a woman's place, a dog's behaviour, dominance, training, the purpose of an embryo, etc. Turns out the man had a nasty breakup with his cheating wife (whom she reminds him of), and Freudian complications with his warring parents. So he alternatively abuses and caresses his victim as her independence and desires provoke his fury again and again. Boasts some B&W cinematic tricks that enhance the disturbing experience. Amongst Wakamatsu's final movies is a last bout of fantasy experimentation in the form of a lightly surreal crime drama. Crime movies usually feature a femme-fatale around which most of the violence and character development seems to pivot. Wakamatsu takes this to an absurd and fantastical extreme. The woman in this movie just sits around quietly, seductively and voluptuously, while a gang of criminals fall in her wake. She even appears and disappears like a vision or a muse, and is seen walking around or swimming practically everywhere. An ex-con just out of prison is looking up his mates, each for different purposes. But when he sees the woman that his traitorous friend is attached to, his plans change and he finds he cannot leave the island. Any man that crosses her path loses his common sense as well. Avant-garde Godardesque feature about suicide and love. This is a free-wheeling collection of riffs on the theme of suicide as related to love. A man wants to kill himself after his girl leaves him, a couple make a suicide pact but he fails to go through with it, leaving her with a scar and resentment, the two couples meet, exchange partners, one man gets up off his lover only to have another man replace him in a repeating reel, they keep changing their minds about suicide, they keep changing their minds about why they should commit suicide, until it all ends in the inevitable absurdity of it all. Godard-lite, Japanese style, from the cult director Wakamatsu. Some fictional revolutionaries steal explosives, blow up random targets, fight with rival gangs, splinter off into a personal war, and grapple with ideals vs. personal goals while having lots of boring sex. The intellectual idea here seems to be about life and sex performed for meaningless philosophies and slogans vs. personal ideals and anarchy. This is explored Godard-style with a few distracting cinematic tricks, endless meandering dialog about politics and ideals, and some random violence. Dull. Just another Pinku movie focusing on S&M, nudity, torture and rape, only this one is set during different periods in history and features some deaths and a relatively nastier ending. A plump man bicycles around with a gun raping and killing everyone in sight. A police woman, a painter who paints factories, lovers in a car, even a blind girl. Sometimes he rapes then shoots them, other times in the reverse order, and he likes to shoot them in the genitals. Some would say this is a statement of some sort against power, industrialism, modern society etc. but it's really just another Japanese rape movie. Another entry in this series that seemed to be popular in the late 70s and 80s. This one features mostly short stories involving lots of infidelities, angry husbands, bondage, various light to medium tortures, beatings, etc. All average Pinku stuff with various abuse against women, until the nasty ending involving a man crazed with lust who turns into a necrophiliac and decides to collect and cut out the object of the lust. One of the more unusual entries in Wakamatsu's Pinku repertoire. A gang of men and women bring a virginal couple into a barren landscape. The couple is tied, teased, poked, and undressed, provoked to sex. The man thinks he has a tail which comes and goes and has strange dreams. The woman is crucified while the man is given the corrupting and alluring status of boss while they play sexual games with him and the Yakuza boss watches from afar with a long-range rifle. Violence and madness erupt, mixed with Christian symbolism as they kill and rape each other. A messy study on the innocent vs. bestial in man. A slightly experimental entry by Wakamatsu that is full of the 60s hippy culture. A wife with a fertility problem wants to use her sister's womb to have children, but her sister is enjoying her boyfriend and sexual freedom. The husband is a commanding chauvinist and this soon turns out to be an uninteresting study on authority, patriarchy and conservatism vs. free love and youth culture. The cinematography uses many artsy superimpositions, compares a man breathing hard while running, to sex and gynecology visits, and employs mixtures of color, tints, B&W, and dream sequences while the people have sex, orgies and a bloody abortion. |
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