Best Blu-Rays and DVD's of 2014

Another amazing year for DVD's and Blu-Rays.

Hollywood may be kissing off media you can hold in your hand, but many enterprising disk companies are keeping cinema history alive, and fueling what can only be described as a Golden Age for collectors and the cinematically passionate.

This round-up is by no means definitive, but I hope it directs you to some treasures  you might have missed.

Fifty Shades of a Deeper Gray: Fairy in A Cage

Beyond some extravagant and audacious bondage and torture sequences, Koyu Ohara's Fairy in a Cage (Nikkatsu Studios, '77) boasts stellar production values with period detail unique for its budget. Never have these elements been more obvious and lush than on Impulse/Synapse's Blu-ray of this infamous Roman Porno (Romantic Pornography) production. Never released on DVD or Blu-ray anywhere in the world, it finally gets the royal treatment.

Released simultaneously with the just-reviewed and highly praised Female Teacher: In Front of the Students, this superb piece of elegant perversion from '77, the year Star Wars arrived on our planet, is a must-have for collectors and the cinematically adventurous. The 'Fifty Shades of Gray' crowd may not be ready yet for  Mr. Ohara and writer Oniroku Dan's brand of S/M, but, if anybody is looking for a worthy entry point for this unique Japanese genre,  this may be a good place to start.

Mr. Dan is a Japanese novelist whose works have been enthusiastically adapted by erotic filmmakers. A couple of Dan standouts are Rope Cosmetology, Teruo Ishii's The Red Silk Gambler, and various films based on his 'Flower and Snake' books.   He's not big on plot or characterization, but he does imbue the genre with particularly personal touches.  You'll find a lot of rope bondage in the author's work, and Fairy  in a Cage is consistent with that fact.  The film is a catalog of squirmy "tortures" that run the gamut from suspension to spanking to various water-based outrages. Rape is pretty frequent, too.

Ohara, the director of the infamous Zoop Up: Rape Site,  True Story of a Woman Condemned To Hell, Wet and Rope, and the exploitation classic White Rose Campus: Then, Everybody Gets Raped, brings a more tempered artistic style to this tale of military and upper class corruption set doing WWII in the Land of the Rising Sun. The bare-bones story involves a wealthy pervert who uses a dubious military pretext to arrest and incarcerate (in his home torture chamber) a woman (Naomi Tani) that he wants for his own private amusement. Assisted by delightfully deviant wife, he involves Tani in his games, and brings along a devotee of hers (she's an actress!) for additional humiliation.

The film is lavish, somewhat confronting, but fairly predictable plot-wise until the two-thirds mark. It then shoots off on an interesting tangent and re-locates itself to a dense forest where horrors of a more personal kind are experienced by Tani, an actress who never met a torture she couldn't embrace.

The work of cinematographer Nobumasa Mizunoo on Fairy is exemplary. Surprisingly, he had only shot two Masaru Konuma classics before this (Erotic Diary of an Office Lady and Cloistered Nun: Runa's Confession), but produces the work of a veteran artist here, delivering exquisitely lit interiors complimented by striking compositions. The tortures shot through the metal bars of a cell are breathtaking, as is his photographic treatment of the film's final denouement. 

Similar in style to Toshiharo Ikeda's very fine Sex Hunter, Koyu Ohara's Fairy in a Cage is intensely erotic stuff that will arouse the open-minded and shock those bringing traditional expectations of entertainment to it. Like all Nikkatsu 'pornos', it is not, in fact, pornography as we Westerners define it, and steers well clear of hardcore sexual depictions.

That it is now available on Blu-ray is, I must admit, kind of amazing.

I urge you to support this release with a legit purchase in order to encourage Impulse's head honcho Don May to think seriously about releasing such unreleased (in the US) Nikkatsu treats as Rape, White Rose Campus..., Zoom Up: Rape Site, Sex Hunter, and Raping! on Blu-ray.  

Female Teacher: In Front of the Students

What's to be said about Yasuro Uegaki's Female Teacher: In Front of the Students (just out from Impulse/Synapse) is all good. Very, very good, in fact.

Nikkatsu, the old Japanese film studio that, after sixty years, suddenly turned dark and erotic to make ends meet, has, admittedly, made its share of lame efforts such as Nympho Diver and I Like It From Behind, both recently released by Impulse/Synapse. I suppose some folks bought them, but, for mine, they have little appeal because they're doing nothing that hundreds of British and American softcore porn flicks haven't already done.

You can't say the same about Nikkatsu flicks like Assault - Jack The Ripper, Rape!, White Rose Campus - Then, Everybody Gets Raped, Sex Hunter - Wet Target, Sex Hunter (the Ikeda film), Secret Chronicle - She Beast Market, and Zoop Up - Rape Site. All of these feature exploitation elements that are very culture-specific, and do not shun the sticky mix of sexual violence and eroticism that many Western films are afraid of.  Although S/M is being mainstreamed (and reduced to blandly flavored vanilla) by works of dubious literary merit such as 'Fifty Shades of Grey' (a massive bestseller), its harsher, more incendiary essence has been shaved away.

Nothing is shaved away in Impulse/Synapse's Female Teacher: In Front of the Students, a truly subversive Nikkatsu flick that some would describe as "troubling" for its perspective on rape. To take its politics too seriously would be to misunderstand its intentions. It is, afterall, a skin flick for a skin flick audience, so it takes a fantasy often imagined by women to its natural end point. If you think it condones the view that a raped woman can be sexually charged by the resulting trauma, you're projecting too hard. This is fantasy Japan-style, not reality.

The pretty Rushia Santo is 'Reiko', a new teacher at an elite high school. Forced to discipline a group of spoilt brats led by the particularly nasty Takuya (Toru Nakane), she finds herself intimidated by the boy. After an unnerving exchange with the group, Reiko is raped in one of the school's showers. Humiliated, she doesn't report the rape, but she keeps a piece of a jigsaw puzzle dropped at the scene by the masked rapist. Over the next few days, she attempts to identify her attacker, and flashes back to key images of the rape, but  her search is sidelined by a series of highly erotic seductions that relight the fire of the incident.

Like Toshiharu Ikeda's little-seen Sex Hunter (not be confused with Sex Hunter - Wet Target) and the notorious Captured For Sex 2, Female Teacher: In Front of the Students exudes an atmosphere of sexual nihilism and abandon that is downright intoxicating. Director Uegaki demonstrates a superb eye and flair for dark eroticism, and creates a seventy minute masterpiece that sucks us into a sexual maelstrom while never ignoring the story's emotional journey. Santo is excellent as a woman on an odyssey of deep exploration, and delivers a strong emotional, physical, and intensely sexual performance as a teacher torn between tradition and the delicious call of the dark.

The film has an amazing look. It's gritty and beautiful all at once, and the compositions, subtle camera moves, and extreme close-ups are striking. The sex runs the gamut from hetero to lesbian, and there is a potent threeway worked into the mix. The narrative never flags, and the sense of anxiety experienced by Reiko is always felt by the audience.

A great selection from Impulse/Synapse, and, hopefully, a sign of the direction future releases will take. Films like this offer a rare and exotic glimpse into the human mind, and underline why nobody does it better than the Japanese.

Hunting Sex Nikkatsu-Style

This rape- and revenge-themed nugget (Sex Hunter: Wet Target) cured me of the Lincoln blues. King Spielberg's nonsense left a bad taste in my eyes and ears with its pointless sentimentality and romanticizing of Abe, so I was keen to write new data over the old inner hard drive. I started with Red Dawn, which wasn't a complete disaster, although, like the first one, it struggled to find novel things to do after the bad guys (North Koreans this time) dropped in for a firefight. For some reason, John Milius's original is remembered as some sort of classic. It wasn't. It was average. It opened operatically with Russians fluttering down from the sky into a schoolyard, but then it languished with a long second act in which both sides engaged in pyrotechnic displays. And that was about it.

Killing Them Softly, caught on the same day as Lincoln, is a more honest look at America because it doesn't feel the need to add romance to harsh times. "America isn't a community, it's a business," mumbles Brad Pitt's character in the film's concluding moments. I couldn't help agreeing with him in light of the country's last twenty years of corporatization.  The film focuses on low level crims facing financial hardships not usually presented on screen, except in Buddy Giovinazzo flicks like Life Is Hot In Cracktown. Pitt plays a fella working for a "mob" of sorts who's been employed to organize some hits on two bozos who robbed other bozos. The drama's kept very much in the family here.

The film is talky and slick and director Andrew Dominick, who gave us the overrated Chopper and the fine Assassination of Jessie James By The Coward Robert Ford,  enjoys staging stylized shootouts and positively revels (hand down pants masturbating furiously, I suspect!) in the gloriously sickening street beating of old Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) by two thugs. The sound design and lighting in this sequence took my breath away. Easily the second best on-screen beating of the year after Guy Pearce's beating of Shia LaBeouf  in John Hillcoat's Lawless, this scene and Killing's more literary attributes make it a flick worth catching.

Which takes me to Yukihiro Sawada's Sex Hunter: Wet Target, a '72 shocker from Nikkatsu, the latest in Impulse Pictures' line of films mostly worth your time. Personally, I have no interest in the comedy-themed stuff Impulse is releasing in tandem with the harsher titles like this one, but I imagine there's a market of pussies for those, too. Each to his or her own.

Director Sawada made some of the most engaging and unique titles that Nikkatsu funded and distributed. His Retreat Through The Wet Wasteland ('73), conceived as a pink flick, became a crime thriller with an  obligatory and justifiable rape, and a helping of gratuitous eroticism. It had a story that is not a simple frame to hang sex scenes on, and a dark vein permeated its narrative. Without the sex, it still stood tall.

Sawada's Flesh Target: Rape ('79) was disturbing for its premise alone. An office employee crosses the line with his boss at a bar and gets demoted. In retaliation, he pulls up his socks and proceeds to rape as many of his female colleagues as possible.

In my imdb review, I wrote:

***An office "loser" becomes a "winner" by sexually assaulting and raping the women he works with at work and on the street.

Yukihiro Sawada, director of the brutal ASSAULT!, a truly gritty pink film, makes no concessions to political correctness in this mostly riveting sex pic.

Not quite as stylish as Hasebe's RAPE!, a film with a similar theme, it is, nevertheless, required viewing for fans of cinematic sex and violence hybrids.

Sawada's background in hard-edged crime/yakuza films gives him the good sense to successfully probe the warped psychology of the office environment the movie takes place in.

FLESH TARGET: RAPE is an alternative title, as is the simple FLESH TARGET.

There is something gloriously anarchic and wrong about this film and that's why I respect it (and its brethren) so much ***

I first saw Sex Hunter: Wet Target, made before the above films, on a crappy Japanese bootleg tape. It was unsubbed and the unfortunate victim of particle shedding. As a result, I was impressed but not blown skyward by the experience. Having now seen Impulse Pictures' superb DVD, which boasts a sensational color grade of a pristine source, I'm doubly impressed, but still not blown away.

The oddly named actor George Harrison (a Japanese who wasn't part of successful British rock band) gets some bad news just before he's released from prison: His sister has been found dead. Found hanging, in fact.

Harrison spends the next seventy minutes tracing his sister's last days, and discovers that it was a trio of American soldiers who beat, raped, and urinated on her before leaving her to die. We get a series of flashbacks documenting her degradation, and, to create some balance, we watch Harrison killing the bastards who aren't dead already. The rape and murder took place before the soldiers shipped out, so the fate of one member was sealed in combat.

Assisted immeasurably by cinematographer Teruo Hatanaka's stunning photography, Sawada delivers a taut little thriller that, once again, rises above expectations and shows a director not content to meet just basic genre requirements. The American GI angle adds a disturbing dimension to proceedings, infecting the tone with something more disturbing than sheer human savagery. The violence is reasonably harsh and graphic, although, thankfully, we're not forced to suffer through endless blowjobs and fogged fucking scenes. The erotica is plentiful, but it's skilfully integrated into the story's beats.

Most problematic aspect of the production is George Harrison's ex-con character.  He's out to avenge his sister, but we know little else about him. He's a bit of a nothing really running from one scenario to another.  An older man wanders in to help him on a couple of occasions, but George's relationship with him remains fuzzy.

The Impulse DVD includes a reproduction of the original  theatrical poster and some excellent liner notes by Jasper Sharp. I recommend it.  

Impulse's second December release, I Love It From Behind, is a softcore comedy featuring a stable of very attractive women. I can't find other reasons to recommend it. Not my style. just silly.

Sex Hunter is Cumming

 Coming soon from Synapse/Impulse is Yukihiro Sawada's SEX HUNTER: WET TARGET, a film well worth owning that I've seen (only) on non-subtitled VHS. Falling into the harsher end of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno line (thank God!), it's from a director who has made some excellent crime/sex flicks, the best being RETREAT THROUGH THE WET WASTELAND. 

 He also made the relentlessly grim FLESH TARGET: RAPE.

SEX HUNTER, not to be confused with Toshiharu Ikeda's film of the same name (but without the 'Wet Target' addition), focuses on a man's efforts to catch and kill his sister's rapists/killers. The film does bear some similarities to the Swedish THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE.

Zoom In: Sex Apartments

 Of all the 'Roman Pornos' that Impulse Pictures/Synapse has released so far, Zoom In: Sex Apartments is the jewel in the crown. Bearing atypical hallmarks of originality, it serves as a reason to celebrate dark art, not find fault with its morality.

Director Naosuke Kurosawa, working with cinematographer Masaru Mori, takes Nikkatsu's trademark rape/murder subject matter and presents it as a frenzy of almost giallo-like surrealism.

Yoko Azusa, who starred as a burgeoning rapist in Yasaharu Hasebe's Assault - Jack The Ripper  four years earlier, plays the mysterious role of a suspected rapist. Betrayed five years prior by the film's female lead, Erina Miyai, a woman married to a professional cyclist (!), Azusa reconnects with her carnally and becomes involved in a spate of unusual crimes. Adding spice to the film's sexual violence is a fire theme: The rapist torches the vaginas of the women he's raped, and goes several steps beyond said item in one memorable scene.

To be frank, the story isn't big on logic and the lead female's inability to put two and two together is frustrating. Despite both these deficits, however, Kurosawa's treatment of the material excuses his sins (for me, anyway).

These Nikkatsu pictures existed to excite audiences with their erotic audacity; they were never meant to be realistic, and they were never meant to be much more than reliable programmers for the studio that switched its focus from mainstream product to erotica with a sucker punch. Occasionally, as in the case of flicks such as Assault - Jack The Ripper,   Secret Chronicle - She Beast Market, Beautiful Girl Hunter, and the film currently under discussion, Nikkatsu produced some remarkable works that transcended their genre requirements.

I'm keen to know when exactly Joseph Ellison's grimy Don't Go in the House ('80) was released in Japan because this Zoom In entry smells of that film's delightfully foul embers both tonally and visually. The rape/burning scenes in both films are downbeat and nihilistic, leaving us with no hope for the human race.  The callous indifference both killers have for their victims is uncannily similar in both pictures also. This nihilism is both disturbing and exhilarating, making it essential art.  

Giallos were clearly an influence on Kurosawa, and the cutting style employed in Argento's early work (Deep Red, Tenebrae, Suspiria) is slavishly imitated here.

At the other end of the spectrum are the films this one clearly influenced; the most obvious is Billy Tang's Cat III shocker Red To Kill, surely one of the most maligned and Roman Porno-esque of the former colony's horror flicks. Kurosawa's focus here on the concrete edifices where the mayhem takes place is carbon copied by Tang in Red. Most obviously, Red's chilling, driving score sounds like a direct bit of thievery from Zoom In. The visual characterization of the rapist here is also echoed in Red, and leaves me convinced that that film's writers saw a tape of this film and were more than impressed with its potent credentials.

Zoom In -Sex Apartments (original Japanese title: 'Zoom In: Rape Apartments') achieves a heightened place in the pink pantheon because it's consistently inventive, audacious in its conceits, and unabashedly vile. It's not a terribly graphic film and the nudity is restrained, but it's a ballsy exercise by a director with an arthouse approach to his material that made me reflect on Koji Wakamatsu's best works such as Dark Story of a Japanese Rapist, The Man Who Assaulted 13 People aka Serial Rapist, and Go Go Second Time Virgin. There's not a celluloid moment here where Kurosawa isn't exploring a strange or powerful idea. They don't all work, but they make for engaging cinema.

 For years, the film has been available as a decent boot, but now is the time to throw that away and support Impulse's stellar presentation with flawless subs, terrific liner notes by Jasper Sharp, and an insert of the original poster art.

I have no idea where Impulse is going next with these releases apart from the imminent release of The True Story of a Woman in Jail: Continues, a must-have sequel. Personally, I'd like to see them forging ahead with darker material like this and other unreleased (with English subs) Nikkatsu product such as the above-mentioned Secret Chronicle - She Beast Market, Zoom Up - Rape Site, Zoom Up - Rape Report, White Rose Campus - Then, Everybody Gets Raped, Raping, Rape, and Sex Hunter.

Yes, yes, yes, as monotonous as these titles sound to the uninitiated, they are all blisteringly unique efforts.

For now, rejoice in the fact that Zoom In -Sex Apartments is available to own and has never looked better.