|
Businessman Naka (Kohei Tsuzaki) has hired a contract killer, Sho
(Yuichi Minato), to free his secretary/girlfriend from the clutches of
gangsters, who have not only brutally raped her before his very eyes but
also filmed it & given him the film. The job is alright with Sho,
since the boss of the gangsters is Ko (Yhohei Yamamoto), the man who has
killed Sho's girl Rie (Mari Nagisa) five years ago, & Sho is on his
trail ever since.
Eventually, the two meet in a bar, & Ko, tired of running, sets a
date with Sho for a showdown. The time until the date, Sho intends to
spend with a prostitute, Mina (Miki Watari), but he finds out she is Ko's
girl. Still he shags her & tries to persuade her that his cause is
just ... but what he doesn't know is that she secretly removes the bullets
from his gun, & he doesn't pay heed to her warnings that he is walking
into a trap.
At 3, the appointed time, Sho is still in the prostitutes bed when the
door flings open, & in come Ko & his henchmen. but Sho pulls his
gun, shoots ...
Sho meets Ko at the bar, shoots all his henchmen, then fights it out
with Ko, & when he has defeated him makes him suffer, until Sho leads
him to Sae, whom Sho forces the badly injured ko to carry all the way to
Naka's place, & it's only there that Sho shoots Ko. However, it is
only then that he notices Sae is already dead, so neither that nor
shooting Ko did actually satisfy him in the slightest. But when Sho starts
to make love to Sae, she seems to come back to life, until she suddenly
turns into a life-size doll ...
We are back at proxstitute Mina's place, where Ko has just shot Sho
(everything after that was just Sho's dream, & it turns out Ko has
been working for Naka all along who was just looking for a way to get rid
of Sho (don't ask why). But one question remains open, it was Mina's job
to remove the bullets from Sho's gun, so why did she leave one inside ?
... When Ko realizes she was only looking for a chance to get rid of him
as well as of sho, he has her killed, too.
& meanwhile, Naka has hired yet another killer (Minoru Sawada) he
might want to get rid of as well ...
For the most part this film is a lovably blunt but very colly played
& stylishly directed sex & crime picture which is exciting enough
all by itself ... until it suddenly, towards the end, leans towards
surrealism & takes a quite nightmarish turn one wouldn't have
expected. The music, consisting mainly of improvisational jazz, also helps
the weird feeling of the movie.
In all a great film that has more to do with the genre reworkings of
Seijun Suzuki (for whom director Atsushi Yamatoya has scripted the
groundbreaking Branded to Kill [1967]) than the usual Japanese
gangster fare (not that there would be necessarily anything wrong with
that).
|
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
amazon.de
eThaiCD.com
find Sex Doll of Wastelands at adultvideouniverse.com
