- Young and pretty Oito owes money to some moneylender, and when she
cannot pay up, he sends his henchmen to beat her up. But Hanji, a
local strongman, defends her against the bullies, and pays her debt,
too. In return he has sex with her. A few days later, he confesses her
he is in debt because of helping her, and to pay back her debt, Oito
becomes a prostitute. This was all a plan of Hanji's though, to become
friendly with Oito's sister Kinu. Oito finds out eventually, but then
it's too late, she's already pregnant from Hanji. Then her rival at
the whorehouse she's working at decides to teach her a lesson,
torturing her and Hanji, and killing her unborn baby in the process. A
doctor tries to save Oito, but the dead baby inside her kills her,
too. It's only now that Hanji realizes what he has lost.
- A rich businesswoman has a dark side to her: She can only have sex
with ugly, disfigured men, and likes to be humiliated by them - much
to the dismay of her servant, the good-looking Chokichi, who is deeply
in love with her and thus tries to find out the origin of his
mistress's weird behaviour ... and eventually learns she was
repeatedly raped and tortured by a man with a burnt face age 17 ovr
the course of a few weeks - and has learned to like it. Chokichi
decides to cut up his own face to appeal to his mistress, then cut up
her face to make her unattractive to other men - but she isn't really
into the second part of his plan, and in the struggle that ensues,
Chokichi kills his mistress ...
- A feudal Lord with an endless supply of young and pretty women likes
to torture them in various imaginative ways just for his own pleasure
- like when he pits a group of red-robed girls against a group of
bulls with burning torches attached to their horns, just to enjoy the
spectacle of it all. During that show, one of the girls catches his
attraction, Mitsu, who not only shows courage and pride during that
humiliating and dangerous performance, she asks the Lord to torture
her more afterwards. It seems the man has find his perfect match.
Meanwhile, one of his wives, Okon, is severely punished for not
getting pregnant, she is covered in gold paint all over her body to
keep her skin from breathing, and only saved from that ordeal when
she's almost dead. But Okon has her revenge long-planned, and she only
waits to release it when Mitsu is about to give birth: She now reveals
that Mitsu is in fact his daughter with the lord, given away because
it was a twin birth, and according to superstition twins are bad luck.
Anyways, she had Mitsu trained to be the perfect victim to a sadist
like the feudal lord, so it was a given they would fall in love ...
Learning this the feudal lord kills both Okon and Mitsu, but a doctor
present at the scene cuts open Mitsu to save the child. The feudal
lord though has by now gone insane and thus burns down his house and
himself with it. Fortunately though, the doctor and the child can make
it out just in time ...
Teruo Ishii doing what he's best at: Telling tales of perverse sex and
grotesque torture, wrapped up in compelling (though at times exaggerated)
storylines, carried by a very elegant directorial effort. Now you might
find much of this politically not correct, might find some scenes too
painful or too over-the-top, but everything is done with style here, and
Ishii's competence as a director is only mirrored in his first class cast.
A very fine movie ... though perhaps not for everyone!
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