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CAPSULE: SAFE WORD (2022)

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Aishiteru!

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The sixth installment in the Pete’s Perverted Pix series

Safe Word is available for purchase or rental on-demand.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Kawase Chisako, Torinomi Nagisa

PLOT: Idol singer Misa is gets recruited by an adult club and becomes a professional dominatrix under the tutelage of a mistress.

Still from Safe Word (2002)

COMMENTS: Ladies and gentlemen, and everyone on the spectrum, your humble hedonist has returned from a veritable safari of sex exploring weird movies on the BDSM circuit. Today’s movie, together with “TFTtTfDSHP” and Antiporno, are among the three nakedest and kinkiest films I’ve ever seen. In my quest for the weirdest of erotic fetish cinema, I have hiked through the valley of boobies, twin peaks marching like sand dunes to the horizon. I have seen every body part smacked, licked, tied, or splattered with paint. I have explored enough daddy issues and mommy issues to make Sigmund Freud choke on his cocaine. I’ve witnessed acts not even documented in the Urban Dictionary. In particular, I’ve snorkeled through oceans of estrogen, because the points of view with these movies have been overwhelmingly female. Girls dominate this genre! So far, the kinkiest male-focused erotic film I’ve seen has been directed by Kenneth Anger. Boys, you need to catch up! I’ll say it again, the first director to make a serious film about a male/male S&M relationship will have a name that lives in film infamy. The Yaois alone will carve your likeness into the sides of granite cliffs.

Today’s film, Safe Word (named for the actual BDSM practice of having an emergency signal in case the bottom can’t take it anymore) is almost too on-the-nose for the current project. I picked it after the previous entry based on my interest in diving deeper into Japanese “pinku” and “Roman Porno” cinema subcultures: Antiporno was a send-up of the genre, so let’s see a serious entry. Safe Word is indeed as pink as a cartoon panther alright, with kinks o’plenty paraded and bountiful flesh ahoy. It just isn’t all that weird, though quirky bits and scenes do provide enough strangeness to at least make for an unusual entry. The plot is basic and unadorned with psychedelic fluff. Misa (Kawase Chisako), a singer/celebrity with a tepid career, gets recruited by a mysterious adult club. She’s offered the role of house dominatrix, to be employed on the business end of a whip for high-priced clientele. At first she’s repulsed, until she finds out she can take her aggression out on smiling and willing masochists. Then she dives into the deep end of kink. (It’s clear she was at least curious about this BDSM business to start with.) The story sort of follows the template of Buñuel’s Belle De Jour (1967), with mild commentary on contemporary social and sexual mores, but Japanese hentai style.

Not that Misa gets to crack the whip on clients from day one, oh no… she has to be trained. Wink wink, cue the oft-written BDSM scenario known as “boot camp” where a harsh master/mistress collars a new slave and puts them through an obstacle course of pulse-pounding, edgy fetish activities for a month until the bottom “graduates” to topping. In this case, Misa’s mentor is the scene-dominating Kanon (Torinomi Nagisa), a statuesque femme fatale who instantly snaps a psychological chain around Misa’s neck from their first meeting and leads her though a series of painful, humiliating, or just orgasm-inducing experiences. Later Misa takes on her own clients, whom are satisfied with a standard beating/tie-up/nipple clips routine, for the most part. But what of her former (ongoing?) idol career? What about her public reputation? What can she say to her friends when she’s being paraded around town by Kanon with a remote-controlled vibrator down her pants? And is Misa in a relationship with Kanon, or is she merely the latest in a succession of Kanon’s human playthings? Mild tensions are set up, but there’s really not a heavy plot here so much as a showcase of perversions.

As for those quirks I promised: Safe Word takes itself as a mild comedy. The main running gag is that it’s a mockumentary, which means (despite the cinematography being professional) the cameraman is randomly acknowledged in-scene, sometimes by characters mildly alarmed that their big sadomasochist session is about to be recorded, or sometimes by characters who take the opportunity for a selfie pose. Sporadically Misa live-blogs on social media about her thoughts on her career, stardom, and sexuality. Small details stand out, such as the decor inside the adult club where most of the action takes place: a baroque, elaborately painted parlor whose walls are crisscrossed with knotted rope, as if the walls themselves were bound. That’s honestly the weirdest it gets, if you don’t count the near-constant acts of hedonistic excess playing throughout.

Safe Word is a well-crafted film which serves as a serious treatment of alternative sexuality every bit as deep and respectful as Secretary (2002), while becoming a near-nirvana for hentai/Asian erotica fans. Note the difference: every culture has practiced bondage, but only the Japanese raise it to its own recognized art form, shibari. Who can help but admire such dedication? Safe Word is not for the vanilla viewer, and barely vouched for as a watch for weirdophiles, but for loud and proud deviants everywhere it’s highly recommended, a leather-and-rubber-clad valentine to the modern civilized sadomasochist.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film’s message is PERVERTS YAY!!! Take pride in yourself. Being gay, fat, handicapped, non-binary and indeed pretty much anything legal has been reclaimed as a badge of identity these days… but what about disturbing kinky weirdos? Their time should come. Embrace your tastes. Don’t be ashamed of what you love.”–Finn Clark, This Way Down

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ANTIPORNO (2016)

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The fifth installment of the Pete’s Perverted Pix series.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Mariko Tsutsui,

PLOT: A pair of actresses enact a sadomasochistic relationship within a film but switch roles when the cameras are off.

Still from Antiporno (2016)

 

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The manic, scene-devouring energy of the motor-mouthed lead actress is at least enough to place this deconstruction of pink films and media celebrity culture out of the ordinary, but then we slide down a hyper-surreal rabbit hole between the actresses in character and the actresses out of character, and their dreams, hallucinations, flashbacks, re-shoots of scenes, and existential reality riddles.

COMMENTS: Animal lovers beware: when our main character, Kyoko (Tomite) first opens her eyes in the morning, it’s to the sight of a large lizard kept in a glass bottle, clearly now imprisoned in there after having grown too big to crawl out, entirely dependent on outside forces to keep it alive. If you’re thinking this “bird in a gilded cage” metaphor might apply to our protagonist: ding, you are correct. Kyoko is a celebrity porn star and “artist” in Japan, kept in a brightly-colored but sparsely furnished apartment, where her existence as a performative sex object under the stress of Japanese idol culture has driven her well past barking mad. Not only does she dance and caper while hallucinating her dead sister playing the piano, she screams, throws tantrums, barfs, skips like a schoolgirl, and prances like a ballerina—mostly while stark naked. Kyoko is soon visited by her personal servant, Noriko (Tsutsui), and Kyoko shifts into alpha-bitch mode. She is cruel and humiliating to Noriko, and her abuse takes on an increasingly fetishistic nature. Kyoko humiliates Noriko, forces her to crawl and bark like a dog, forces oral sex on her, and sticks in a good belt whipping. When fashion model photographer One Hundred (Fujiko) and her posse show up, they only join in Noriko’s torment.

Just when Noriko is getting gang-raped, a director yells “Cut!” Ha, gotcha! This was just a scene these actresses were filming, and though they keep the same names, their personalities switch. Noriko is now an insufferably egotistic and unhinged diva, and Kyoko is a nervous understudy who trembles and grovels submissively. Yes, it’s one of those kinda movies. As subsequent scenes are filmed, the two lead actresses’  personalities each ramp up the sadism when it’s their turn on top, in a vicious game of humiliation tag. In between, we get treated to a snarling satire of the porn/film industry, as even the director treats Kyoko like a slave and the whole film crew pressures Kyoko to submit. I should add, all this is taking place in a few stylized sets given to bold primary colors and pop-art props, making for candy-sweet viewing.

If you think this movie is out of rug-pulls now that we have that movie-within-a-movie bit revealed, you’re mistaken. We slide back

Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ANTIPORNO (2016) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: INFLATABLE SEX DOLL OF THE WASTELANDS (1967)

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Kôya no datchi waifu; AKA Dutch Wife in the Desert

DIRECTED BY: Atsushi Yamatoya

FEATURING: Yûichi Minato, Shôhei Yamamoto, Masayoshi Nogami, Noriko Tatsumi, Mari Nagisa, Miki Watari

PLOT: A shady real estate agent hires a hitman haunted by the killing of his girlfriend to take out the gang responsible for the kidnapping and torture of his mistress.

COMMNETS: Every day at three o’clock in the afternoon a woman screams and the phone rings. It rings while off the hook, it rings when disconnected, it rings even half-buried in the sand of a desert wasteland. Shô always knows when three o’clock strikes because Rie tells him so. At three o’clock five years ago Shô murdered Rie—when she tried to call him and no one answered the phone.

Real estate agent Naka wants to hire a hitman, so Shô waits for three o’clock in a sunblasted middle-of-nowhere. The client needs to know the assassin of his choice can hit his target in three shots or less. Rie screams as Naka leads Shô to a lone evergreen tree, the only one around for miles, because the blood of “snitches” waters it. Shô chops it down in thirteen shots.

After this display of marksmanship, Naka takes Shô back to his city office. He shows the hitman a disturbing film reel of black-hooded goons recording their sexual abuse of Sae, the woman Naka wants Shô to rescue. Naka himself can be glimpsed in the background, tied to a chair and blindfolded, forced to listen while his girlfriend screams. Shô complains about the poor quality of the entertainment. He can’t see anything in a picture so grainy. Naka admits the film might be wearing out. He must have watched it a hundred times by now.

Shô agrees to take the case. He returns to his hotel room to find a naked woman waiting in his bed. He smells more than cheap perfume and forces her into a bathtub. Mina serenades him with a song overflowing with double entendres. Of course she’s part of the trap, she admits it, but Shô’s not like other gangsters. She wants to help him. He clutches his gun while succumbing to her advances, aiming at the door, ready to fire whenever his enemy enters the room.

Wastelands contains all the classic tropes of film noir—an emotionally compromised detective, a slightly seedy and suspect client, a femme fatale—and then some. Fans of may notice eerie similarities to Branded to Kill, also released in 1967 (they make a perfect double feature). Director Atsushi Yamatoya was one of the Guru Hachiro writers responsible for Branded‘s script. Callbacks ricochet like a volley of gunshots across both story arcs: three o’clock, rings (expensive in Branded, cheap in Wastelands), insects, an antagonist named Kô, hitmen obsessed with their reputations, a (maybe snuff) film within the film.

Both movies share a similar sense of fatalistic black humor and a dynamic visual style. The cinematography always goes for the unusual. Odd camera angles enhance ambiguities of space and perspective, adding to the disorientation. A scene with a character walking up a flight of stairs rotates so “down” becomes left with “up” heading to the right. When a henchman gets shot and slumps over a bar counter the camera tilts with him. The rest of the scene remains skewed as though we’re now viewing the film through the lifeless eyes of a corpse.

Plentiful shoot-outs punctuate the action and every actor who gets shot milks his death scene for all it’s worth. By contrast, the female characters lie around motionless and silent. Whether drugged or sleeping, or worse, it’s hard to tell. Aside from Mina, who radiates a voluptuous vitality (repeatedly rejected as untrustworthy), the others, both living and dead, become indistinguishable.

The final confrontation between Shô and the target of his revenge occurs as a protracted contest recalling Branded‘s Hanada and No. 1. After some creative trash talk (“I can see your heart” – “What color is it?” – “Sickly green” – “You’re colorblind”), they vow that by 3:30 pm tomorrow one of them will die.

Like a fly struggling to escape from a forgotten whiskey glass, time traps people in its vise. Outside a window Shô now sees the desert wasteland surrounding him, the same tree still there standing by its lonesome, as if he never shot it down in the first place. Even Sae and Rie begin to resemble each other. Can Shô save the one if death has already claimed the other?

One possible interpretation of the title implies the entire story takes place in a hellish afterlife where ghosts doomed by their former selves relive their last agonizing moments on earth. A blast of fire burns behind the opening credits. Everyone complains about the heat, but there’s never any air conditioning to cool their tempers. There’s nothing but heat (except for Shô’s lighter, which never works whenever he needs a cigarette). This inferno reduces not only women to puppets. The men jerk each other around by strings, but they’re all tangled together, everyone incapable of escaping their own personal purgatory.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“..an enigmatic and paradoxical title, perhaps capturing something of the film’s hybrid, even contradictory nature… It should come as no surprise that Yamatoya, directing from his own script here, had previously helped write Seijun Suzuki’s similarly surreal and abstract take on hitmen, Branded to Kill…”–Anton  Bitel, Little White Lies (2020 screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: A HAUNTED TURKISH BATHHOUSE (1975)

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Bakeneko Toruko furo

DIRECTED BY: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi

FEATURING: Naomi Tani, , Tomoko Mayama, Misa Ohara,

PLOT: A prostitute reincarnates as a vengeful ghost cat to seek revenge on her abusive pimp husband.

Still from A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse (1975)

COMMENTS: A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse is the softcore/yakuza/melodrama/horror mashup obscurity you’ve been waiting for (if you’re the “you” in the above formulation, you’ll know it). This breathless nonsense hits its soapy plot points with ruthless economy as it rushes towards its demonic vengeance, with nothing to interrupt the flow except for gratuitous rape, torture, and sex scenes. The lavish sets and painted sunsets make it look as good as a mainstream film of the era, but make no mistake: this ain’t art, it’s overproof exploitation.

Japan’s 1957 ban on public prostitution supplies the initial plot hook, as brothel workers migrate from legal sex work to going undercover at a “Turkish bathhouse” serving as a front for prostitution. Only Yukino (Tani) refuses to make the switch, preferring to take this as an opportunity to retire and spend more time with her husband (and her black cat). Hubby (a scenery-chewing Murota) is no prize, however; he stages an elaborate ruse to fake a debt to the yakuza to convince Yukino to go back to work, then invites her virgin sister to live with the couple so he can rape her. He’s also somehow hiding the fact that he’s second in command at the brothel Yukino’s been working at for years, while simultaneously starting up an affair with the bathhouse madame and owner’s wife. After Yukino gets pregnant and refuses an abortion, he and the madame make sure she’s taken care of (in a very sick torture scene), walling up the corpse a la Poe. In the second act, Yukino’s disgraced sister shows up and goes undercover at the bathhouse looking for revenge, but when she proves the most popular courtesan, the other girls get jealous and decide to beat her, until Yukino’s cat flies (literally!) into the brawl to scratch up hooker faces. As you can see, there’s a lot of plot going on here, but nevertheless the script finds time about every ten minutes to squeeze in a scene of bathhouse girls lathered up with soap, rubbing their naked bodies over clients who mug for the camera with expressions of comical ecstasy. And so it goes until the third act, when the vengeful cat spirit finally arrives in all its Kabuki kitty glory, turning the final twenty minutes into an intense stalking scene (interrupted by only a single bubble bath sex romp). Having sliced up the evildoers with cat claws or burned them to a crisp, an angelic Yukino recedes into the painted sky. Roll credits.

Production values—the bright cinematography, imaginative camera angles, relatively extensive sets and costumes, and a screechy, psyched-out rock soundtrack—are vastly superior to what you would find in a Western sleaze movie. In the Japanese studio system, there was less of a budgetary distinction between, say, a historical drama and a raunchy “pink film.” With one studio (here Toiei) making both prestige and exploitation movies, productions shared casts, directors, crews, and sets; a stalwart like Taiji Tonoyama could act in an S&M-tinged pink movie like this in-between roles in films. This gives a quickie like Bathhouse an unusual aura of professionalism, for a movie that’s basically a wacky, hastily plotted romp designed to put butts in seats and boners in pants.

Mondo Macabro puts out another fine-looking, expensive-feeling disc. The main bonus here is a passionate commentary from film writer Samm Deighan, who provides a great deal of context and information about the Japanese industry, the players, and the history of the various subgenres colliding here (while also, I would say, overselling the movie as a serious artistic effort.) A couple of featurettes from Japanese cult movie historian Patrick Macias, one on horror at Toei Studios in general and one specifically devoted to A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse, further supplement Deighan’s extensive background information. About fifteen minutes of trailers, for Bathhouse and other sexy/violent Mondo Macabro titles, round out a presentation that makes for a satisfying night at the movies for those willing to overlook the violent misogyny inherent in the pink genre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an outrageous horror-sex Toei production that packs more into 80 minutes than many viewers’ brains will be able to handle.”–Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital (Blu-ray)

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse

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    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE GLAMOROUS LIFE OF SACHIKO HANAI (2003)

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    Hatsujô kateikyôshi: Sensei no aijiru

    DIRECTED BY: Mitsuru Meike

    FEATURING: Emi Kuroda

    PLOT: A call girl survives a shot in the head and acquires the cloned finger of George Bush.

    Still from the glamorous life of sachiko hanai (2003)

    WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Add George W. Bush saying “G-spot” in a Japanese accent to the list of things you never expected to see (or hear) in a movie. The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai might not be the most polished or profound flick out there, but left-field surprises like that are the reason we watch weird movies.

    COMMENTS: Sex films sometimes give low budget directors the chance to innovate and experiment. So long as you deliver the anticipated dose of T&A every ten minutes, the thinking goes, you can fill up the interstices with whatever nonsense or profundity you like. Some frustrated auteurs have taken this opportunity to mix ambitious absurdism with sex: started in hardcore, decided to make an entire oddball career in , and mixed pornography with honest-to-God surrealism. The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai stands firmly in this tradition, but with a typically Japanese panache.

    The opening scene is a 6-minute soft sex scene with call girl Sachiko seducing a client while posing as his tutor. The clip is made for straight wanking, betraying no hint of the avant-garde pretensions to come. Afterwards, during a confrontation at a cafe between two secret agents, Sachiko is shot but inexplicably survives a bullet to the head, while her lipstick is accidentally switched with a container holding the finger of a clone of President George W. Bush. The accident leaves her with super-intelligence and psychic powers, and she soon seduces a famous professor who like to discuss Noam Chomsky while boning. He hires her as a tutor to his underachieving adult son who’s only interested in military history. Meanwhile, a North Korean spy is searching for Sakicho. Eventually, in the film’s strangest scene, the finger reveals its true nature, as a man in a paper George Bush mask delivers a deranged villain speech from a TV monitor (occasionally interrupted by footage of Iraqis pulling down Saddam Hussein’s statue) while Sachiko, penetrated by the detached digit, writhes on the ground in involuntary ecstasy. That plot is bizarre enough, but there are plenty of surreal embellishments along the way: a crude cartoon, psychedelic green screen compositions, peeks into the activity inside the hole in Sakicho’s head, and one brief scene acted out by G.I. Joe action figures.

    Unfortunately, even if you’re up for the softcore interlude every ten minutes, all of this intriguing absurdity comes with a big downside: rape. Most reviews imply that there is one rape scene—and the one they are focusing on is icky and especially gratuitous—but there are technically more that that. There’s one where Sachicko is nearly comatose and unable to give consent, one that begins as an assault when a girl tries to break up with her paramour (but appears consensual thereafter), and of course the infamous “finger” scene (which, to be fair, is so absurdly conceived that it’s hardly disturbing). Even if you don’t find these bits nauseating, they’re completely at odds with the lighthearted, comic tone of the rest of the film. Lead Emi Kuroda is so and bodacious and spunky that, properly directed, Sachiko could have been a sex-positive goddess. The movie misses a great opportunity to be a vehicle promoting positive erotic energy as an antidote to the militaristic Thanatos drive, which would have been an absolutely winning formula. As it is, no one is going to fault you if you can’t get over the movie’s implicit and explicit misogyny; it’s a glaring flaw, and quite possibly a fatal one. On the other hand, even though the attempted political satire isn’t particularly trenchant, consisting as it does of a not-so-bold anti-nuclear annihilation stance, there’s something wholesome about plopping a prominent world leader into the middle of a smutty picture.

    As a pink film, Sakicho Hanai originally ran just over an hour and was titled Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice (!) Director Mitsuru Meike expanded it by about 25 minutes and sold it to film festivals as a cult movie. The Japanese trailer shows Meike pitching the film to a politician, hoping to get a quote for the poster. He tells the functionary who answers the phone that he’s only been able to make soft porn movies so far and that Sachiko Hanai “may be the last chance for me.” The DVD includes that trailer, the US release trailer, the Horny Home Teacher cut of the film, and a short film sequel (“The Adventure of Sakicho Hanai”) that is, if anything, more offensive than the feature, with no nudity but featuring puppet rape and Sakicho wrestling a woman in blackface.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…seems to exist in an uneasy limbo between avant-garde brilliance and completely inane abrasiveness… at times suggests Eraserhead reborn as a softcore Japanese porno flick…”–Rob Humanik, Slant

    (This movie was nominated for review by “Frank.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)