Noticias

“The Japanese Navel” is a play, stage production, and movie written by Hisashi Inoue. It was specially written for the 34th performance of the Theatre Echo troupe and premiered in February 1969. The play is composed of two acts and is known as Inoue’s full-fledged debut as a playwright. At its 2010 staging, it received the Yomiuri Theater Award’s Special Jury Prize. The play uses a play-within-a-play structure to depict the life of a stripper from Asakusa as a treatment for stuttering, leading to a story with many twists and turns. The play was adapted into a movie in 1977, produced by the Art Theatre Guild.

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The story unfolds as a confessional play for stuttering correction, held on a small theater stage, which soon becomes a full fledged movie. The main character is Helen Amatsu, a former stripper from Asakusa,...

The issue of the Zainichi Koreans was one that interested Nagisa Oshima significantly, with him having shot the TV documentary “Forgotten Soldiers” in 1963 and the experimental short “Diary of Yunbogi” in 1965. Two events revolving around the problems of Koreans in Japan, the Kim Hiro and the Komatsugawa Incident, were also roots of inspiration for him, resulting in two films, “Death by Hanging” and “Three Resurrected Drunkards” both of which use irony, theatricality and intense avant-garde elements to portray his take on the subject.

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The overall directorial approach here becomes apparent from the beginning, as it shows three Japanese students at the beach, reenacting one of the most famous pictures of the Vietnam war, before they decide to strip to their underwear and go for a swim. While they are swimming, a hand emerges from the sand and steals their clothes,...

Hello, dear readers! We’re back with a brand new assortment of horror and sci-fi home media releases this week, and as we creep closer and closer towards Halloween, there are definitely a handful of titles coming out on Tuesday that would be fun to check out as you get ready for the spooky season. Arrow Video is keeping busy with a handful of releases, including a 4K version of Dario Argento’s The Cat O’ Nine Tails and Blind Beast. And speaking of Argento, Blue Underground is showing Two Evil Eyes - his collaboration with George A. Romero - some love with their 4K presentation of the film. Larry Cohen’s A Return to Salem’s Lot is finally getting a Blu-ray, and if you missed the latest Conjuring film in theaters earlier this year, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is headed home on multiple formats this week as well.

Yasuzo Masumura takes horror into kinky territory in an Edogawa Ranpo shocker about obsession, namely, mixing sex and death. Michio is the tactile-fixated blind sculptor who imprisons model Aki to serve as an ultimate objectified ‘body’ — but she eventually joins him, taking the lead on a delirious suicidal journey of discovery. Probably once considered pornographic, the 1969 show is fairly tame by today’s Nc-17 standards, and not as radically violent or abhorrent as one might expect — but it’s still loaded with weird, Dangerous Ideas. The sets are not to be believed — the unhinged artist lives in a surreal workspace surrounded by hundreds of oversized sculptures of body parts.

The Blind Beast (Moju)

Blu-ray

Arrow Academy

1969 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 84 min. / Street Date August 24, 2021 / Moju; Warehouse / 39.95

Starring: Eiji Funakoshi, Mako Midori, Noriko Sengoku.

Cinematography: Setsuo Kobayashi

Art Director: Shigeo Muno

Original Music: Hikaru Hayashi

Written by Yoshio Shirasaka from a novel...

Yasuzô Masumura’s Blind Beast (1969) will be available on Blu-ray August 24th from Arrow Video

Blind Beast is a grotesque portrait of the bizarre relationship between a blind sculptor and his captive muse, adapted from a short story from Japans foremost master of the macabre, Edogawa Rampo.

An artists model, Aki (Mako Midori), is abducted, and awakens in a dark warehouse studio whose walls are decorated with outsized womens body parts eyes, lips, legs and breasts and dominated by two recumbent giant statues of male and female nudes. Her kidnapper introduces himself as Michio (Eiji Funakoshi), a blind sculptor whom she had witnessed previously at an exhibition in which she featured intently caressing a statue of her naked torso. Michio announces his intention of using her to sculpt the perfect female form. At first defiant, she eventually succumbs to his intense fixation on her body and finds herself drawn into his sightless world,...

Earlier this week, it was announced that the last full-length work of Akutagawa Prize-winning author Kenji Nakagami, Keibetsu (literally “scorn”), is being turned into a film starring Kengo Kora and Anne Suzuki. Ryuichi Hiroki (April Bride, The Lightning Tree) will direct.

Kora plays Kazu, the only son of a prominent family. In spite of his distinguished upbringing, he spends most of his time gambling all his money away in Tokyo. In a fairly drastic shift from her usually image, Suzuki plays Machiko, the number one pole dancer at a club in Kabukicho, Shinjuku. The two start a fling based on mutual attraction and attempt to begin a life together in Kazu’s home town. However, his family is unwilling to recognize the relationship.

Machiko soon returns to Tokyo and Kazu comes to the realization that he has no way to pay off the massive debt he’s racked up with...