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Meiji - Taisho - Showa: Ryoki Onna Hanzai-shi
Love and Crime
Japan 1969
produced by Shigeru Okada for Toei
directed by Teruo Ishii
starring Teruo Yoshida, Yukie Kagawa, Teruko Yumi, Rika Fujie, Mitsuko Aoi, Reiko Mikasa, Yumiko Katayama, Kei Kiyama, Toru Yuri, Kichijiro Ueda, Eiji Wakasugi, Yoshi Kato, Shinichiro Hayashi, Takashi Fujiki, Sada Abe, Tatsumi Hijikata, Asao Koike, Kenjiro Ishiyama
written by Teruo Ishii, Masahiro Kakefuda, Shizuo Nomani, music by Masao Yagi
Joys of Torture, Abe Sada
review by Mike Haberfelner
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A coroner performs an autopsy on, of all people, his own wife, and
finds fresh sperm of another man inside of her - which leads him to muse
over criminal women, and thus he researches four notorious stories:
- Kinue is the assistant of Chiyo, the owner of an inn, but she also
has an affair with Chiyo's incompetent husband - who in turn persuades
her to kill Chiyo. She does so with the help of her lover Shibuya, and
once Chiyo's dead, Kinue and Shibuya have the husband eating out of
their hand - until they decide to kill him as well. Kinue inherits the
inn because back in the day she has lent Chiyo a healthy sum of money
- and now she decides she doesn't need Shibuya anymore ...
- Aba Sade (played by herself in an interview sequence, by Yukie
Kagawa in flashbacks) is madly in love with her boss Kichizo, but
their passion grows out of bounds so he eventually asks her to kill
him, and she keeps his severed penis as memento.
- A serialkiller kills women in sex crimes - which for some reason
makes the doctor of the framing story muse whether women cause
criminal behaviour in men.
- After having been raped, Oden hasn't been herself anymore, upon
which her parents sell her to a geisha house. She's bought free by a
generous gentleman - who is hit with leprousy within a month. Oden's
lover kills her husband, but then sells her to a brothel, where she's
freed by a regular of hers - but when this guy and her lover meet this
only ends in chaos.
Love and Crime is definitely one of the lesser films of Teruo
Ishii's (rather informal) Joys of Torture-series: Basically
the framing story seems a bit far-fetched, the sepearate stories miss a
common theme, some of them are over-simplified and shallow, and all of
them lack the grotesque excesses of Ishii's best erotic features. In fact,
especially regarding Ishii's filmography as a whole, the film is somewhat
bland and uninteresting, little more than just another sex flick - and
that's something Teruo Ishii is definitely not famous for. A
disappointment, really.
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review © by Mike Haberfelner
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Robots and rats,
demons and potholes, cuddly toys and shopping mall Santas,
love and death and everything in between,
Tales to Chill Your Bones to is all of that.
Tales to Chill Your Bones to -
a collection of short stories and mini-plays ranging from the horrific to the darkly humourous,
from the post-apocalyptic to the weirdly romantic,
tales that will give you a chill and maybe a chuckle,
all thought up by the twisted mind of screenwriter and film reviewer Michael Haberfelner.
Tales to Chill Your Bones to
the new anthology by Michael Haberfelner
Out now from Amazon!!! |
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