Nuns That Bite

Just released on Toei Video this past week,Yuji Makiguchi's Nuns That Bite (Onna gokumon-cho: Hikisakareta niso; '77) has been doing the theatrical rounds in Japan for some time, but has been MIA on DVD.

On the avmaniacs forum, one writer mentioned hearing that the film is the "Japanese equivalent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (in fact and spirit). Having just watched the pristine DVD, I can hit that rumor on the head. It's a stretch to say the film has any resemblance to Tobe Hooper's rugged masterpiece. In short, it's a Japanese nunsploitation film that, content-wise, feels like Teruo Ishii-lite. Ishii, for the uninitiated, directed such works as Horrors of Malformed Men, Orgies of Edo, and Love and Crime. He also helmed a number of torture-themed flicks for the same studio, but it is with Love and Crime (also reviewed on this blog), with its glorious catalog of freaks and visual atrocities, that this film shares common virtues.

 The set-up is basic and a little protracted. A woman on the run is raped, rescued, then raped again. Escaping, she heads for the hills and finds safe haven at a convent. After becoming a  postulant (trainee nun), she catches her fellow sisters engaging in lesbianism, fighting over nothing, hurling snakes at each other, and engaging in mild flesh eating. For a film with this title, the amount of cannibalism on show is disappointing.

Compared to the rich convent life presented in Norifumi Suzuki's School of the Holy Beast, the convent in Nuns That Bite is a more modest affair. It's a series of rooms in which nuns sleep, make out, and act crazy. The Mother Superior is MILF material (I guess MSILF is more accurate) who oversees various punishments and enjoys the services of a strange boy-in-waiting (her son perhaps?) who appears to exert quite a bit of power over the sisters. This fellow proves himself quite the first-rate tattletale when he reports on our heroine's investigation into the convent's non-religious activities. Not surprisingly, she pays a painful price for the little shit's loose lips.

The films sounds marginally better in synopsis than it actually is. At times, it's a little slow and pedestrian, and lacks the cinematic energy someone like Suzuki or Ishii would have brought to it. Various bloody atrocities are served up with glee such as a headless body, a severed head, bones stripped of flesh, human meat BBQ, and various stabbings and piercings. The lesbian lovemaking is erotic enough without becoming repetitious, and there are some deformed, freakish characters who should have been given more screen time and some story relevance. One sequence involving a crazy woman  performing a religious ritual and acting like she's on LSD has the Ishii feel, and could have passed as a deleted scene from Horrors of Malformed Men. There is also a psychedelic dance number.

 For director Makiguchi, this is fairly restrained material. Previously, he directed the brutal, visceral Shogun's Sadism (aka Joys of Torture 2: Oxen Split Torturing) and the nasty Bizarre Crimes of Post-War Japan. Nuns That Bite was his last theatrical feature. 

At sixty-nine minutes, the film is very short, but it feels longer because there's not much plot to speak of.
Still, great to see this little-seen cult treat in the daylight at last, and recommended for adventurous film fans, of course.

Important note:  

As the film is not subtitled in English, my review is 

substantially biased by my inability to fully comprehend 

and experience the film as it is meant to be experienced.

Star Of David - The Hunt is Over

I discovered Star of David: Hunting For Beautiful Girls ('79) on Japanese VHS in the mid-80's.

Blending sex, violence, and Catholicism into a rich, aesthetic tableaux, it redrew the perimeters of cinema for me.

Norifumi Suzuki, the director, is amongst my Top 10 Favorite Directors of all time, the others being Shoehei Immamura, Martin Scorsese, Walter Hill, Kinji Fukasaku, Arturo Ripstein, Hayao Miyazaki, Roman Polanski, Sergio Leone and Kenji Misumi.

There have been several incarnations of this film on VHS and DVD, but the Eastern Star release, which streets at the end of this month, is the ultimate for English speaking audiences.

The beautiful print is a direct port from the mouth-watering Geneon DVD, released at the end of 2007.

I am so in awe of this film's virtues that I find it difficult to list them in order of greatness.

A career rapist breaks into the home of a misanthropic scholar and his wife. The wife is impregnated by the intruder, giving rise to her husband's hatred of his offspring. The boy is raised in an abusive environment and witness to his mother's humiliation and degradation at the hands of her unforgiving husband; during the rape, the woman had an orgasm.

When the boy inherits his father's fortune, his genetic predisposition expresses itself, and he builds a torture chamber fueled by Nazi literature, concentration camp fantasies, and a desire to purify the "unclean".

When he finally meets up with his natural father, he discovers a stark contrast between the man's raw animalism and his own desire to manipulate and "educate", rather than use women as convenient vessels for lust.

Much, good and bad, could and has been written about the politics, intellectual framework, and sexual dystopia of Star of David....

Criticisms of the film's inflammatory subject matter are the usual knee-jerk sermons that contribute zero to any intelligent discussion of the film.

As demonstrated on the Eastern Star DVD's brief but candid interview with Suzuki, as well as the superb commentary track, Suzuki is a non-Christian who is well aware of the cinematic power of the church's sacred symbols and depictions of sacrifice.

In his School of the Holy Beast ('74), he took religious imagery to a new nadir, although that film is far less dark than this one.

Although made for a very small budget at Nikkatsu, Star of David - Hunting for Beautiful Girls is a beautifully shot, sumptuously designed pink film from a true master of the genre.

I urge you to support this release in order to send a signal to the market (and to Eastern Star/Discotek Media) that licensing films of this nature can be a worthwhile, commercially viable endeavor.

What Assault Jack The Ripper DVD was to 2008, the Star of David - Hunting for Beautiful Girls DVD is to 2009.