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Rich jeweller Iwase (Junya Usami) has received a letter that his
daughter Sanae (Kikko Matsuoka) is to be kidnapped at midnight that day,
so he hires detective Kogoro Takechi (Isao Kimura) to protect her. It
seems though that Takechi bungles up royally, as he doesn't notice the
girl in the bed he's protecting isn't a girl at all but a doll, and he
lets himself be distracted by a woman (Akihiro Miwa), while the kidnapper
Amamiya (Yusuke Kawazu) has long made his getaway by train, carrying Sanae
in a trunk. But when it's cards-on-the-table time, it turns out that
Takechi's men have long been trailing the man with the trunk and later
freed Sanae, and that the woman who has seemingly distracted Takechi is
actually the Black Lizard, the head of the kidnappers. She somehow manages
to escape though, and vows to make another attempt to get her hands on the
girl. Despite Takechi's success in the first round, Iwase has beefed up
security at his place, to such an extent that everybody is standing in
everybody else's way, and Sanae can be smuggled out of the house inside a
couch. As a ransom, the Black Lizard asks for the priceless Star of
Egypt from Iwase, but for her, the whole thing was never so much about
wealth and stuff but the beauty of the (kidnapping) game as such - plus
she is sexually attracted to Sanae. There is a problem though, Takechi has
somehow managed to get into her hideout, and all of the Black Lizard's
attempts to kill him only result in the death of more and more of her man.
On top of that, she begins to fall in love with Takechi. This leads to
another problem: Thne Black Lizard's toyboy/slave Amamiya does not approve
her falling in love with Takechi and starts to rebel, so much so that he
is ultimately locked up together with Sanae - and the two of them fall in
love. But do troubles not cease?, there is yet another hitch in the Black
Lizard's plan, Sanae isn't even Sanae but a suicidal double in league with
Takechi. In the finale, it turns out that Takechi has actually been at
Black Lizard's side disguised as her hunchbacked sidekick all along, and
he has seen to it that the defenses of the hideout are down when the
police strikes. Realizing she has lost the game, the Black Lizard kills
herself, but not without confessing her love to Takechi ... Nice
crime drama that is based on a plot that is atrociously over-constructed -
but for once that's not a bad thing but the very fabric that makes the
story work. As is pointed out time and again in the movie, the Black
Lizard likes crime (or rather: her crimes) for the complexity of the game,
and when she kills herself in the end, it's not so much out of desperation
but because she finally admits defeat and pays the price for it. Add to
the comples narrative a very stylish, self-assured and dynamic direction
that doesn't shy away from also touching the more perverse aspects of the
plot (though in a very cautious way, after all, these were the 19+60's and
this is not an erotic flick), and an at least competent cast, and you get
a pretty good film.
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find Black Lizard at adultvideouniverse.com
