Hisayasu Sato
An underground Japanese film-maker (working mostly in the Pinku genre) that often deals with obsessions, fetishes and perversions arising from various neuroses and social alienations, with warped sex, violence and pain all wrapped in an extreme conceptual bundle. Another recurring theme is of detached or alienated voyeur using technology to view, but not experience, acts of sex and violence, with sex scenes often involving frantic selfish lust. For a while, he was very prolific, although most of his movies are impossible to find and mostly covered the standard Pinku themes of sex, bondage, rape, S&M and violence (not covered here), often mixed with unique Sato touches of abstract and artsy ideas, a wide range of twisted fetishes and perversions, and some plot twists. His explorations cover every sex act and perversion known to man, frequently revisiting all of them without any seeming preferences, including violence, rape or murder from both men and women, gay sex, bestiality, blood fetishes, voyeurism, suicide, etc. His more extreme movies listed here tend to get lost in fetishistic, depraved obsessions as well as impenetrable surreal elements, and sometimes he has something intellectual to say besides the shock and exploitation.
A difficult film that seems to deal with obsessions, fetishes, voyeurism and exhibitionism but for the life of me, I can't figure it out. A woman goes to a 'sleeping room' where she is drugged and watched over by a strange man, and the clientele play out their fetishes on her comatose body. After a mysterious murder takes place in the bedroom and her husband exhibits strange behaviour, she starts worrying. Fantasies merge into reality, she discovers her detached husband is also on drugs and may have violent and mysterious sexual escapades of his own. A lot of cameras, video-taping and diaries keep the exhibitionism theme going and the woman soon stops taking drugs to watch what the clients are doing to her. Features a twist ending and a cameo by a real-life cannibalistic murderer, but this one is too incomprehensible.
Caterpillar
See Rampo Noir.
Sato's re-imagining of In a Grove, on which Rashomon was based. In this version, instead of a web of lies and agendas, we get a web of desires, perversions like incest, and occult phenomenon like an oracle-demon, hallucinations, and human sacrifice. Once again, the story starts with a detective trying to unravel the story of a man and a woman encountering a bandit-rapist in the woods, but the real story keeps turning out to be unfathomable as layer upon layer of strange motives and events keep turning up. Of course, since this is Sato, the rape scene is more explicit, but most of the movie revels in multi-layered hallucinations as the oracle-demon uncovers dark secrets and obsessions, and dead people keep turning up to either change the narrative of what happened, or to haunt and elicit revealing confessions as ghosts. An interesting take, despite the cheap effects, weak period feel, and unescapable Pinku leanings.
Sometimes confused with Turtle Vision. A female detective tries to live a life of surveillance and of spying on couples having affairs while her husband is in a strange coma. But she lives in a world of desperate emptiness that erupts in perversions and violence, her psyche cracking under the existential pain. Adulterers are mere selfish naked bodies and lustful body parts on a TV screen, the flesh becoming a backdrop for TV noise, she finds herself involved in nonsensical sordid events and blackmail with her clients, and sudden attacks by men in the street and her apartment, her comatose husband wears bizarre goggles that mirror blackness, she receives a psychedelic video that gives her hallucinations, she sees horrors in a blank photograph, and she even gets a cry for help from her computer screen as she types. Her mental instability leads to a climax of violence.
Slightly demented satire by Sato on disaffected youth and the obsession with media and celebrities. A teenage couple drive around improvising radio shows, following night stalkers and rapists or peeping on various sexual escapades, describing what they see in detail, feigning shock and screams as the attackers become more violent. When they find an extremely sadistic murderer-rapist teenager, they make him a celebrity and follow his exploits. A precursor to Natural Born Killers. Also features a strange fetishistic couple that sex each other to death.
Definitely one of the stranger and artsier entries in Sato's Pinku repertoire. A meditation on different connections made between alienated people explored through AIDS and several characters: A strange man who follows and observes "Unidentified Followed Objects", a happy, risk-taking couple that like to inject each other with their blood and who observe the observer, and a doctor who asks the observer to follow his wife who is suspected of being some kind of vampire hooked on steroids and out for revenge against AIDS-spreading objects. The concepts are merely flirted with, and a lot of the movie feels like inscrutable madness, but is intriguing nevertheless.
A budding scientist discovers a formula for converting pain into pleasure (endorphins) and plans to release it as the ultimate painkiller. Secretly replacing his mother's contraceptive experimental drug with his own, he follows the patients and witnesses disastrous consequences as, driven further and further by the pleasure principle, they butcher themselves and others. A brilliant concept but given an over-the-top treatment with disturbingly realistic splatter as one woman eats her own genitals and eyeball, etc. Also features virtual-reality dream sharing with a cactus and a surrealistic sub-plot involving a man who sees a light then disappears. Don't ask.
The theme is obsessions and fetishes over body parts, scents or other human minutiae as representatives or replacements of humans. A woman moves in to an apartment complex populated by some strange people. An obsessive man next door listens in on her every move through the walls, his wall-listening equipment growing more and more complex as he develops an intense empathy with everything she does and feels through the sounds she makes. A scientist father and son duo also interact with her, the strange son developing an unhealthy fetish for his father's prosthetic arm, and an obsession over medical mannequins and artificial body parts. Her food dispenser seems to have a life of its own, strangely creeping out both her and her voyeur-cum-empath neighbour, and they share dreams that grow steadily bloodier and more bizarre as reality starts to melt away in increasingly violent and desperate obsessions.
A slightly tamer precursor to Naked Blood with a near identical plot. A young man folllows in his father's footsteps experimenting with the barrier between pain and pleasure. He secretly adds his concoction into an experimental drug administered by his mother into some students, with nihilistic results. The students soon discover that pain gives them pleasure and once that happens they can't seem to stop. Sex soon mixes with rape, humiliation, incest, gore, masochism and death as the girls grab anything nearby that can hurt them. Typically for Sato, the young man observes this detachedly as a voyeur with binoculars, but soon joins in on the madness.
Sato does a black, absurd comedy featuring a parade of perversions. A daughter escapes her incestual father, gets molested by some bums, abducted and made to scare a whorehouse client with a chainsaw. She gets entangled with another family which includes a strange man, his incestual mother who is a pimp by night, and his wife who is a nymphomaniac by night. Then a cross-dresser tries to make everyone happy. Perversion so silly it's actually funny.
A family of husband, wife, son and daughter turn madly violent and perverted in a modern world of rock music, aerobics, radio and nuclear bombs. It's comical and filthy, like a Visitor Q, except without the happy ending. The father turns into a stalking homosexual, the son goes crazy with razor blades then rapes his mother and sister, the daughter is abused by a lesbian teacher with a syringe and some menstrual issues, there's abuse of food, a scene with a chainsaw and blow-up dolls, etc.
Yes, Sato does a bestiality Pinku. The beach is swarming with perverts. A dominatrix abducts wandering girls with the help of her male sex slaves, submits them to rape, abuse, and forced sex with a dog, while a necrophiliac takes pictures of the dead bodies that wash up the next day. When a woman miraculously survives drowning, she shacks up with the photographer who falls for her, but when the dominatrix finds out, she brings in the horse to finish the job. Extreme perversion, on a theme of the bestial nature of both aggressors and victims, with a plot twist.
Based on the rare unsubbed copy I saw, I can only describe this as another artsy violent Pinku by Sato involving a woman with a strange, perhaps psychic relationship with her horse, and a group of people that get in her way. There's bestiality, sex with a severed horse penis which she then keeps in a jar, a strange artistic interest in setting up mannequins in the forest or beach in artistic configurations, some musings over accoustics, sound and communication with beasts via sound waves, severed mannequin limbs, and ultimately, humans turned into objects as well, all of which makes statements I can only guess at.
A disturbed female lab researcher with a sexual fetish for lizards and test tubes develops an obsession for her female assistant and motherhood. At the same time, a young man deveops his own obsession for a gun that shoots liquids. As the researcher's obsession grows, giving her bizarre dreams involving raping the assistant or sodomizing a man with a lizard, she forms an uneasy alliance with the man whom she sends to rape and inject her assistant with his gun. The man grows restless with his role however and becomes more demanding. The ending features an amusing abrupt showdown as a real man's 'gun' appears, but overall, this is fairly uninteresting Pinku twisted sleaze full of strange fetishes.
An early film by Sato that deals with vibrators and how a young schoolgirl may be more knowledgable and advanced in these matters than perverts. A twisted, disturbed man kidnaps girls and tortures them with a huge vibrator, paint and various liquids, and finally, acid. One day he meets his match in the form of a sadistic, horny schoolgirl with a twisted fetish for vibrators and blood. A mostly uninteresting, pretty extreme Sadean Pinku film.
Sato sometimes explores gay Pinku movies and this is one of his more strangely violent and more well-known entries in this sub-genre. It's also an uninteresting one. An editor for a muscle magazine becomes obsessed over Kitami, the relationship evolving into sadistic, bloody games with knives until he snaps and chops off his arm. After jail, he searches for him to return his severed arm but detours during his quest and becomes involved with a hetero S&M couple for no apparent reason, leading to a bloody finale.
Sato's confusing take on the snuff-tape thriller. Snuff videos and pictures are found in all kinds of places, gripped by a dismembered hand in a garbage dump, in a video machine in a sex booth, etc. while various characters are either studying the tape, using it as a warmup for some obligatory sex scenes, or filming their own videos that often turn violent for no reason. Cameras and tripods themselves are used as weapons, characters keep popping up with confusing motives, and there's random gratuitous brutal violence including arm-mutilation, nail-carving, abuse with a syringe, and bloody bashing with a tripod. Once again, Sato is playing with the Peeping Tom theme of the camera used to create violence for voyeurs, but I think I must have missed something.