Love & Crime


Our culture’s fascination with true crime stories didn’t begin with Dateline.  Even before the media began exploiting them in print you can be sure tales of murder, infidelity and abnormal sexual practices made up a large percentage of social gossip.  So Teruo Ishii’s Love & Crime (1969) is really just giving the people what they want: a four-part anthology mostly focused on “poison women” whose predilection for greed and wanton lust made them short-lived media sensations in Japan.

Things kick off with the Toyokaku Inn Incident, involving Kunie Munakata, the first women sentenced to death since the second world war, who seduced her employer, murdered his wife, then finished the job by killing him as well to take control of a profitable tourist spot.  Ishii stages each murder with the gruesome enthusiasm of an E.C. comic book come to life, full of bloody axes, rotten corpses and peek-a-boo nudity. It’s high entertainment in grand guignol fashion and the best chapter in the film.

The following stories include the Sada Abe Incident, featuring a documentary-style appearance by the woman herself, who chopped off her lover’s penis to have something to remember him by; the Kodaira Incident, a serial killer who raped at least seven women during the chaos after WW2; and Oden Takahashi, who, after surviving a torturous marriage to her leprous husband, was beheaded in 1879 for partnering with her new lover to murder wealthy travelers.

Jumping from decade to decade in rather haphazard fashion, the film uses an opening sequence involving a modern forensic investigator trying to solve the murder of his own wife as a bookend. The structure is a mess, but it’s certainly never boring.  Ishii utilizes drastically different styles in each chapter, most notably the Kodaira Incident, which switches to black-and-white and takes an almost experimental approach with the disturbing rape/murder scenes. It’s a tough watch and certainly an outlier in what is otherwise a showcase for famous femme fatales (made even more so by some casual victim blaming). Love & Crime makes no excuses for its salacious content, which was Toei Studios’ trajectory at the time.  And Ishii’s skill set fits each tabloid terror story to a tee.

88 Films packages things in a dual-format Blu-ray + DVD numbered limited edition that includes a new commentary track from Jasper Sharp and Amber T., video essay from Mark Schilling, trailer and still gallery along with a collector’s booklet and commissioned artwork that really plays up the grotesque appeal. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All Ladies Do It / Frivolous Lola

Image
Every semi-professional review of erotica probably starts off with the same question:  what’s the difference between porn and art?  The internet age has essentially done away with foreplay; sex is merely the act of completion itself, minus the threat of any malware or suspicious browser activity.  But the work of Italian director Tinto Brass, for all its leering upskirt shots of derrieres and pubic hair, still communicates something that websites like Pornhub never will:  the art of seduction.  All Ladies Do It  (1992), a breezy sexual adventure, follows Diana (Claudia Koll) whose marriage is threatened by her fantasies of dalliances with other men, stories her husband believes are nothing more than exciting role play.  But her loose definition of adultery inspires plenty of promiscuous hook-ups, taking advantage of any (ahem)  loophole  that provides a quick thrill.   Flirting with some hardcore sequences (there...
Read more

Hand of Death

Image
Even hardcore martial arts fans will admit that not  every  film is worth watching.  With the sheer amount of product pushed out from Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest at the height of the kung-fu craze, quite a few lesser efforts slipped through the cracks, many serving as a training ground for new talent on the way up.  So even if the final product – like 1976’s  Hand of Death  - is aggressively average, there’s bound to be some novelty when it comes to the talent involved.  Names like John Woo, Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung are sure to attract interest.  But put them all in the same film and you’ve got yourself some must-see viewing!   Yet another showcase for the mythical shaolin brotherhood, here a monk, Yun Fei, is sent to exact vengeance on a ruthless warlord, Shih Shao-Feng, who’s made a long list of enemies throughout the province.   Yun Fei assembles a team of talented fighters to defeat Shao-Feng and ...
Read more

Charley Chase at Hal Roach: The Late Silents 1927

Image
As a niche within a niche, silent films are certainly a hard sell for modern audiences.  Even Turner Classic Movies can only spare a couple hours a week in their schedule on late Sunday nights.  Perhaps because silents are positioned as something to be appreciated rather than enjoyed, dry history lessons held back by their crude technical limitations.  But the newly restored  Charley Chase   at Hal Roach: The Late Silents 1927  proves silent  comedy  was anything but.  A “do-it-all” comedian, Chases’ on camera persona relied less on slapstick than farcical domestic situations.  Unlike Chaplin’s  tramp  character, Charley often played a put-upon everyman just trying to catch a break.  The first two shorts in the set are a prime example:  There Ain’t No Santa Claus  follows his character’s attempt to hide the purchase of a Christmas gift for his wife from his rent-hungry landlord…while...
Read more