Onsen Ponbiki Jochu

Onsen Ponbiki Jochu (温泉ポン引女中) (1969)

The leaps of development in loosening censorship, and pushing the envelope in terms of what was acceptable in a major studio film, were huge in the late 60s and early 70s Japan. The first Hot Springs Geisha (1968) film, a harmless resort sex comedy and one of Teruo Ishii’s dullest efforts, only managed to sneak in one or two brief topless shots. This sequel, which hit the screens 12 months later, by first time director Misao Arai, manages more in its opening credits scene alone, which consists entirely of a peeping Tom zooming into bathing girls’ breasts for the viewer’s pleasure.

The somewhat serviceable storyline is about an elder sister (Mitsuko Aoi) employed by a ‘sexual-services-ok’ hot spring coming at odds with her cool girl sister (virginal Ishii muse Masumi Tachibana) who establishes a competing club with her hoodlum man (Shinrichiro Hayashi). Of course it’s not long until gangster Toru Abe also wants his share of the pie.

Pretty girls in bikinis. And quite often without bikini. What’s not to like? For once, the formula actually works. It’s a skin flick in and out, but thankfully it’s one with an enjoyably laidback swing and drenched 60s aesthetics. And just when you’re about to get a bit tired of it, the film throws at you a really bizarre nude party scene with Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh dancers! Which is soon followed by a super violent shocker of a scene that makes you wonder if the filmmakers suddenly realized they should have gone the Joy of Torture (1968) route instead.

Yes, while the comparisons to Russ Mayer’s masterpiece Beneath the Valley of the Dolls (1970) may be unjustified quality wise, you cannot quite help but to see some parallels here. And yes, director Arai did work on The Joy of Torture (as writer), as did half of the other people involved in the production, in case you were wondering.

Not exactly a great film overall, and it does have its boring bits here and there, but plenty more fun that you might expect. This is as good if not better than the two Norifumi Suzuki directed instalments (parts 4 and 5) which followed with a bit of delay.

Finally for a bit of name dropping, the lovely and underappreciated Yumiko Katayama who had starred in Ishii’s Inferno of Torture plays one of the hot spring girls. And the opening reels features everyone’s favourite toruko Osman Yusuf (Toei’s man to go for whenever they needed a sleazy foreigner) as one of the customers.

It’s worth noting that while this film is the second part in the Hot Springs Geisha series, it’s also billed as the 7th film in the Eros series in the original trailer. The first Hot Springs Geisha film, in turn, was part 2 in the Abnormal Love series which had been initiated with History of the Shogun’s Harem (1968) and continued with The Joy of Torture (1969), Orgies of Edo (1969), Shameless: Abnormal and Abusive Love (1969) and Inferno of Torture (1969). It’s possible that the Eros series and the better known Abnormal Love are the same thing, and Toei just decided to alter the title on the run.

Oh Wonderful Utamaro

Oh Wonderful Utamaro (Shikijo Toruko Nikki) (1974).

Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi was best known for martial arts (Karate Bull Fighter) and Pinky Violence (Delinquent Girl Boss) films but he also directed a couple of erotic films in the mid 70s. This one is a mildly amusing sex comedy mainly remembered for starring American actress Sharon Kelly aka Colleen Brennan.

Kelly plays an American nymphomaniac who literally falls off the sky (with a parachute). She’s supposed to be picked up by a local yakuza gang, but “Porno Broker” Tatsuo Umemiya and his pal Gajiro Sato gets to her first. Umemiya then makes her work in his Turkish bath, which she doesn’t mind at all. In fact, she does eight men on her first night and comes asking for more. Poor Umemiya has trouble “getting it up” (or to be more precise, it usually gets up on the wrong moment, e.g. when bad guys are trying to kill him) and can’t help.

Kelly is obviously the main attraction here, whether you mean it literally or as a cinematic curiosity. It was not entirely rare to see foreign stars in Japanese sexploitation films in the 70’s though. Toei also imported Sandra Julien (Modern Porno Tale, 1971; Tokugawa Sex Ban, 1972) from France, Christina Lindberg (Sex and Fury, 1973; Journey to Japan, 1973) from Sweden, and even Harry Reems (Harry and the Geisha Girl, 1978) from USA. Nikkatsu even commissioned some Roman Porno films to be shot in Sweden by Japanese filmmakers utilizing fully Swedish casts.

Oh Wonderful Utamaro was Kelly’s only Japanese film. She was already a familiar face for Japanese audiences thanks to Teenage Bride (1970), A Scream in the Streets (1973) and The Dirty Mind of Young Sally (1973), which had been released in Japan in 1973-1974. She had also been covered in TV variety show called 11 PM quite a few times.

The film itself is a pretty ridiculous affair with hippies, yakuzas, lots of (boring) sex, silly comedy, Kelly, and a bit of extremely mediocre action at the end. It’s somewhat less fun than it sounds like. The best supporting character is an English speaking hippie dad taking care of a baby and having sex (at the same time) with Pinky Violence co-star Harumi Tajima who was probably more famous for her large breasts than her acting skills. Speaking of English, Kelly reads her lines in her native tongue with few sentences of (understandable) Japanese here and there. The rest of the cast speaks Japanese with a few sentences of (understandable) English here and there. Nice.

The film is a fun curiosity, but don’t kill yourself if you never get to see it.

I saw the film at a Kazuhiko Yamaguchi retrospective in Tokyo in 2015. The screening was preceded by a video greeting from Kelly. She recalled the ridiculous costumes, the language barrier thanks to which she had no idea who she was supposed to be shooting at when they put a machine gun in her hands, and the fact that she found director Yamaguchi more attractive than her co-star Umemiya. Umemiya famously disagreed and claimed in an old interview that he and Kelly got along so well they were having real sex in the film. The claim most likely has no base in reality.

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse (Kaibyô toruko furo) (怪猫トルコ風呂) (1975)

Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (Sister Street Fighter, Delinquent Girl Boss) was widely considered one of the least talented Toei directors of his time. He’s been ridiculed by critics, audiences and theatres alike. When Laputa Asagaya ran a retrospective of Yamaguchi’s films in Tokyo in 2015, the catch copy was “Message? Theme? What are those?”  Yet, the man helmed some of the most outrageous films of the 70s. Here is one of them, a 1975 cursed cat erotic horror flick loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe!

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse stars Nikkatsu starlet Naomi Tani as an abused wife sold to a brothel to cover her husband’s (Hideo Murota) debts. The deceitful husband is actually behind it all, and in cahoots with the brothel owner who is his lover. Tani discovers the truth and gets whipped to death (terribly ironic considering she survived all her Roman Porno SM flicks alive). However, the dead woman’s soul won’t overlook the injustice.

If that sounded like a spoiler, I’ve only described the film’s beginning. Once Tani is out of the picture, the character’s less charismatic younger sister (Misa Ohara) enters the storyline. She will be the film’s focus from here on, although there’s less fun to be had about her detective story than Hideo Murota occasional sleaze bag antics.

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse is a real Frankenstein job. Masahiro Kakefuda (Horrors of Malformed Men, 1969) and Nobuaki Nakajima’s (Tokyo Deep Throat, 1975) script steals ideas from Poe’s The Black Cat. The film takes place in a Turkish Bathhouse, a popular topic for Toei’s erotic films and documentaries at the time. The bathhouse, populated by bare breasted girls, doesn’t look too different from the Shogun’s palace seen in Teruo Ishii and Norifumi Suzuki’s films. Star Naomi Tani was of course borrowed from Nikkatsu and together with her came the SM film elements.

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse also launched director Yamaguchi’s unrelated series of animal themed films. In this film Tani’s vengeful soul finds a new body in a black cat that begins terrorizing the evil doers. Yamaguchi later directed Karate Bull Fighter (1975), Karate Bear Fighter (1975), Wolfguy: Enraged Lycanthrope (1975), and Which is Stronger: Karate or the Tiger (1976), all of which were martial arts films where man fought the fore-mentioned beasts. Bizarrely awesome.

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse is at its best, and weakest, in the long finale where the vengeful cat flies around slaughtering her enemies and eventually turns into a runway cast member of the Cats musical. It’s all positively insane, but any real horror is long gone by this point. The poor cat, which is being thrown around the room by the crew, doesn’t look even remotely menacing. The ending also pales in comparison to Yamaguchi’s later movie Wolfguy, which was even more insane and benefitted from a better technical execution. Indeed, despite being a movie of different genre, A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse feels something of a dress rehearsal for Wolfguy, only with less violence and no karate.

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse  is 90 minutes of boobs, violence, supernatural horror that isn’t scary, funky score, occasional apocalyptic sunsets, and bloody cat attacks. It’s a fun film and never boring, but it isn’t quite as far-out as one would wish, especially when compared to the amazing Wolfguy. Consider it Yamaguchi’s House-lite, Toei Porno style.

Note: the correct reading of the Japanese title is Kaibyô toruko furo (as can be seen in the poster), not Bakeneko toruko furo.

Love’s Whirlpool

The most stylish 18 rated film of the year

Ai no uzu (2014)

One room. Four men. Four Women.

Daisuke Miura is one of the most interesting Japanese filmmakers right now. Miura earned his fame with uncompromising, largely improvised theatre plays that have been described “live documentaries” and which drove some of the performers on the verge of nervous breakdown. Somewhat surprisingly against this background, Miura’s cinema breakthrough was the romantic comedy Boys on the Run (2010). The manga adaptation was a mainstream production, but nevertheless full of punk, sex and otaku mentality.

Now Miura is back to his own material. Love’s Whirlpool is based on his own theatre play about a group of strangers who gather together in luxury apartment in Tokyo to have sex. The film hit the theatres with the relatively rare R18+ rating, and it was well know long before its release that the cast would spend only 18 minutes of the film’s running time fully clothed.

Sex, however, is more of a psychological than physical theme in Love’s Whirlpool. The attendees get together to have sex without the need for the usual social interaction and dating routines. Yet, once their host leaves them alone the first reaction is a long uncomfortable silence. Sex only comes in a good bit later. Then, it doesn’t take long until anonymity, pretending, and true feelings begin to mix the psyche in unexpected ways.

It takes remarkable skill to handle such a minimal premise that essentially takes place in one room. Thankfully the execution is excellent. The superbly stylish introduction alone sets the expectations high. The technical execution is top notch from framing to lighting. The visuals are nevertheless secondary to Miura’s interesting and darkly humoristic study on emotions, group behaviour, and sex.

Miura has created quite a good selection of characters. The attendees include a businessman, an office lady, a factory worker, a kindergarten teacher, an unemployed man, a freelancer, a student and a regular customer. Although a few of them function primarily as tools for group dynamism, all of them are relatively believable and fleshed out characters. The actual storyline focuses on an unemployed man who develops a dangerously close relationship with another attendee.

Although the casting process was reportedly difficult due to the sexually explicit nature of the film, Miura hasn’t gone for the second grade adult video stars but instead talented and fearless actors such as Hirofumi Arai. The biggest surprise, however, is the rising young female star Mugi Kadowaki (Schoolgirl Complex, 2013), who defies the usual career path of young Japanese actresses by playing the film’s sexually most aggressive role – and does it pretty well despite slight overdoing.

Miura does several other things against expectations as well. In real life we usually get to know people through their public fronts, which include pretending, wearing suits, and hiding under makeup – and only learn about their real personalities much later, if ever. In Love’s Whirlpool Miura undresses all his characters before we know anything about them. We then learn to know a whole lot about them before we know what they are pretending in their normal lives. When Miura finally shows them fully clothed again in the film’s final act, the effect is very interesting.

It is somewhat surprising that the film’s biggest flaw is actually its occasional softening of characters. Miura doesn’t take the realism as far as would be expected, but instead builds a couple of slightly naïve and audience-pleasing drama structures.

Of course, a film with a cast as good looking as this wouldn’t quite match the reality in any case, although it’s actually not too much of a stretch. Commercial sex has become very mainstream and accepted in Japan, starting from sexy clubs that play an important part in Japanese after-work socializing even with the young and handsome. At the same time many youngsters choose not to engage in relationships but lead independent life instead. Keeping these issues in mind, Love’s Whirlpool doesn’t really stretch the believability too much. Miura also shows welcome mature attitude towards the topic by refraining from cheap moralizing.

Despite its small flaws, Love’s Whirlpool is easily the most interesting adult drama in a long time, and it also looks stylish as hell. Thankfully, it has become a major indie hit in Japan. After opening in a just a few theatres nationwide in March, it went to play in more than 60 theatres with some small theatres playing it 13 weeks non-stop. In Tokyo as well, it opened in only one theatre, but seven weeks later it was playing on five screens at the same time. Not bad for an 18 rated film.

Hello My Dolly Girlfriend

Takashi Ishii officially joins the dirty old men club.

Figyua na anata (2013)

It is no secret Ishii has always had a thing for sex and violence – and sexual violence. This has been more than obvious since his breakthrough as a manga writer in the 1970’s. Ishii’s visual eye and tremendous skill as a writer, however, became ever more obvious as he entered the film biz.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s Ishii directed and/or write a number of terrific efforts (Love Hotel, 1985 ; Original Sin, 1992 ; Black Angel Vol. 2, 1999) where graphic sex made way for excellent screenwriting and stylish neo-noir visuals. Since then Ishii has come a long way down. With the SM films in the 2000’s Ishii no longer even pretends to hide his desires. The director’s latest, Hello My Dolly Girlfriend, is a shameless otaku epic like no other.

The film’s hero is a bullied young man (Takusu Emoto), whose new girlfriend is a living human size doll (Kokone Sasaki). Unlike most doll romances – which stretch from Death Note director Shusuke Kaneko’s Mischievous Lolita: Attacking the Virgin From Behind (1986) to arthouse auteur Hirokazu Koreeda’s Air Doll (2009) – Ishii goes straight for the rapes.

The film sees its heroine spend most of her time bottomless, and the protagonist has sex with her for the first time before she has even come alive.

Ishii’s trademarks are still here. Rain, neon lights, recycled music, and Naoto Takenaka. What is missing is solid direction.

The film’s main attribute is its sheer lack good taste. The most memorable sequence features a woman raped, killed, and then raped again. A moment later the heroine kicks the villains to the ground with roundhouse kicks – all without wearing pants, and shot from low angle.

This would all be fine within exploitation genre were the film less clumsy and more compact. At nearly two hours the film outstays its welcome before halfway. After concluding his yakuza outrage, Ishii dedicates the rest of the film for never ending fantasy sequences – and Kokone’s naked body.

The latter attempt is doomed from the beginning, thanks to Japan’s prevailing movie censorship. Unlike the graphic rape of a dead woman, full frontal nudity is still considered obscene by the Japanese officials. The result is digital mosaic throughout the film.

(To clear things up, pubic hair does pass the Japanese censorship these days; however, Ishii’s heroine is trimmed, and the cameraman crawling half of the time, resulting in revealing material that even the notorious R18+ rating could justify.)

The film is not without its amusing points, though. The hero, a work-bullied office rat, is a violent macho man – when watching adult videos! When he encounters a real woman – in this case an enraged lesbian – he runs for his life. Japan’s traditional masculine society combined with the ever growing power of women has resulted in sad misfits who can only feel comfortable with dolls, anime characters and underage girls.

Occasional poignant moments do not make a film, though. As exploitation Hello My Dolly Girlfriend just isn’t energetic enough; as satire the fan service galore makes it impossible to take seriously. Any hopes of Ishii’s return to form, raised by his his previous effort, A Night in Nude: Salvation (2010), are brought down.

Next Ishii will be delivering another R18+ rated SM film, Sweet Whip, which opens in September, only three months after Hello My Dolly Girlfriend. That time Ishii aims at unclothing Mitsu Dan, who also has small role in Dolly Girlfriend.