User reviews

Tokyo Strangler (2006)

* (out of 4)

A serial killer with a dark and perverted mind goes out with women before punishing them for wanting to have sex. By punishing them he usually ties them up, sexually plays with them and then rapes and murders them.

TOKYO STRANGLER is pretty much what you'd expect from a Japanese film that tries to be both perverted and disturbing. Like most films like it, this one here is rather perverted in its own way yet I do find it rather laughable that the pubic hair and full frontal nudity is still blurred out. There are scenes where the man is raping the women and I've just always found the digital altering to be rather distracting.

With that said, this is a pretty poor movie that will only appeal to those who love anything this twisted genre has to offer. At just 63 minutes the film seems twice as long because none of the characters are all that interesting and this is especially true for the serial killer. The dialogue is rather laughable at times and I'd argue that there's really not too much energy to be had. Even worse is the fact that it's really not that disturbing or shocking.

This film essentially begins with an unidentified man driving an attractive married woman (played by Yuria Hidaka) to his apartment and, after serving her a glass of wine, he then proceeds to bludgeon her with the bottle and knocks her unconscious. When she awakens, she notices that she has been tied up, and it's at this time that her captor rapes her at knife point before strangling her to death. The scene then shifts to another woman sitting on a park bench at night when a man appears out of the shadows and deposits a large bag filled with the body of a woman in front of her. Needless to say, this terrifies the woman who immediately runs away but, in the process, drops some paperwork pertaining to a divorce she had recently submitted. Always keen for another victim, the killer gazes at the divorce request with great interest, before also fleeing the scene. Meanwhile, as the body count rises, an attractive private detective named "Mary Takemiya" (Mayuko Sasaki) is hired by the lover of one of the victims to find the perpetrator, and thereby clear him of any suspicion by the police. What she doesn't realize is that, in the course of her investigation, she will come face-to-face with the killer and will soon become his next target. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this was a rather disturbing film to watch due in large part to the graphic sexual imagery and violence depicted in several scenes. Likewise, because the end credits were in Japanese, it was also quite difficult to line up the actors with their appropriate characters. To that effect, other than the two actresses just mentioned, I was unable to identify, with any reasonable certainty, the rest of the cast. In any case, because of its low-budget production limitations, I don't consider it to be one of the better films in this particular sub-genre, and I have rated it accordingly. Below average.