Tokugawa irezumi-shi: Seme jigoku

A film about obsessions on bondage and tattoos, disguised as historically adequate treatment of an inglorious episode in Japans long gone past. It's ingredients are violence, brothels, tattoos, female whorehouse bosses, tattoos, mean pimps, even meaner prostitutes, tattoos, whips, knives, drugs, torture and tattoos. The main theme is the transformation of young girls' skins into pieces of art, depicting both abstract and figurative motives, the latter mainly dealing with death, birth, violence and other more or less disturbing themes. Compared to other far eastern films from the same exploitation category, the violence seems almost moderate. The narration, in a fairytale-like old fashioned style, is, of course, a child of it's time. In total, the film's not so good, but not so bad either; it is not very original, but still (in a positive sense) light years away from the commercial cinema we have today – which is intriguing since films like this, in their days, were themselves first and foremost done to make money.

I love these bourgeois lemmings weaned on swill like The Exorcist, Alien, Jaws, The Omen, Poltergeist, The Silence of the Lambs, and other such Hollywood swill. They love to talk about "storytelling" and movies where you "care about the characters," as if that were the only one way of making a legitimate horror film (and let's face it: the "characterizations" in these films are often laughable in their pretensions and shallowness). Here's a bit of news for those who haven't figured it out yet: there's no such thing as "gore for gore's sake." There's only apologetic gore and unapologetic gore. Ishii was a terrific filmmaker. You people need to expand your horizons beyond Stephen King. (A great writer, by the way.)

Whatever happened to storytelling? That's the question that I was left asking myself after wasting time watching this movie. Yes, the gore scenes are plenty and creative, but the problem is that not once can you feel any kind of sympathy for people you don't know anything about. The so-called "love story" is a rushed into the first 2 minutes of the film and does nothing to help character development. The film shows absolutely nothing worth watching, even as a gore-hound I was left not caring that much about the torture scenes. This movie gave me no reason to care about any of it's characters of their story, it just relied on gore to shock me and I found that cheap and got more angry about losing precious time on this than on the gore itself. This movie is about torture, torture of it's audience that is.

I would never have thought that a film with so many bare breasts in it could fail to keep my attention; I guess you CAN have too much of a good thing.

Judging by the opening credits scenes, I figured this would be a hugely entertaining piece of gory sleaze: a woman tied to a cross has a spear thrust between her legs (freeze frame on blood gushing freely), the point emerging from her chest; and another victim, buried up to her neck, gets her head sawn off (more gushing blood). Bloody stuff indeed!

The film then starts proper, with a woman, Yumi (Yumiko Katayama), digging up the grave of a man called Genzo (Shin'ichirô Hayashi), and cutting open the corpse to find a key, which she needs to open her chastity belt. We then flash back to see how poverty stricken Yumi joined a brothel operated by madam Otatsu (Mieko Fujimoto) and her sadistic lackey Samejima (Haruo Tanaka), only to discover too late that the women there are tattooed and tortured, and then sold into slavery to a businessman called Clayton (Yusuf Hoffman).

Much of the plot focusses on the rivalry of two tattoo artists, Horihide (Teruo Yoshida) and Horitatsu (Asao Koike), and on the romantic relationship between Horihide and Osuzu (Masumi Tachibana), and this is where my mind started to wander. The film became extremely repetitive, with an endless succession of tattooing and topless nudity. One particular moment, where the two artists' work is judged by a dignitary, consists of a parade of tits and tattoos that seems to go on forever. Any film that can make me bored of boobs is doing something wrong.

Furthermore, considering the title, the film is actually fairly light on the torture, with some shibari (Japanese rope bondage), a little hot wax action, and a woman having her eyes poked out, but it's not until the very end that director Teruo Ishii delivers anything as brutal as that seen at the beginning. The final scene sees madam Otatsu tied between two trees that have been bent over and secured by ropes; when the ropes are cut, the woman is torn in half (a method of execution also used in the 1932 classic Tarzan The Ape Man and in Ruggero Deodato's Cut and Run).

5.5/10, rounded down for those dogs strung up in the market scene, the poor pups clearly destined for the cooking pot.