When the third act comes, it is as horrible as one could imagine. But, at this point, we have spent so much time suffering with Tsugio that there is queasy catharsis as he unleashes himself into violent action, running through targets from a seemingly endless roster of the wicked.
The brain-frying massacre is superficially a little like the last act of Stallone’s First Blood, released the year before. Tsugio cuts the power to isolate the village, then straps on flashlights and weaponry for a pre-dawn slaughter. He starts his spree by beheading his grandmother to spare her shame, then tears through house after house with his shotgun and katana. His unhinged act contains some of the most profane imagery you could see.
The film is based closely on the Tsyuma Massacre, still the worst mass murder in Japanese history. Mutsuo Toi decimated a third of his village’s population. He ended the horror by taking his own life on a hilltop above the village, which here eerily echoes the opening scene of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.
“…a punishing, brutal, classic of Japanese cinema…”
This is such a dismal story it makes it all the worse that it is delivered with the peppy flavors of early eighties mainstream cinema. The whole film is shot and lit simply by Keiji Maruyama, and the synthesizer music of Masanori Sasaji is sparing and unsettling in perfect measure.
That Tanaka should have produced such a transgressive picture should not be surprising. He was a veteran of softcore exploitation flicks in Japan known as Nikkatsu Roman Porno, a genre he enjoyed and openly respected as a medium for stories within strictures that, like Haiku, had a rigorous form (four sex scenes)!
And there is a lot of sex here, as Tsugio corrupts himself in the middle act, indulging in the Japanese rural tradition of Yobai, or ‘Night Crawling,’ where he visits the local women in their bedrooms at night for sex.
This film is something of a gut punch and mostly a foul experience. But it is utterly unique and crammed with fine filmmaking.
"…a gut punch and mostly a foul experience."
