Bijo no harawata

'Oh, Japan! This mishmash of Yakuza thriller and horror flick (English title: 'Entrails of a Beautiful Woman') has a little bit of everything- rape, tentacles, strange designer drugs (Angeluh Rainu!) and a hermaphroditic monster. Not for the faint of heart, but well worth watching, if you have the 'guts'.

This is most definitely NOT for those with a weak composition, but is a rollicking good time for those whose tastes run towards the more esoteric and decidedly unenlightened. Pairs well with 'Emanuelle in America', 'Ebola Syndrome', and 'Boxer's Omen'. At a brisk 65 minutes or so, it doesn't wear out its welcome and makes for a good night fun, even if you feel icky afterward. A bleach bath can take care of that, though!

AKA Guts of a Beautiful Woman

The second part of director Kazuo 'Gaira' Komizu's 'Guts Trilogy'. A young woman looking for her missing sister is kidnapped, drugged, and raped by a Yakuza gang. She discovers that her sister suffered the same fate before being taken to Africa and sold into slavery. The young woman escapes and manages to reach a clinic where she tells a nurse everything that happened. Then, with the drug still in her system, she runs to the clinic roof and jumps, killing herself. The nurse decides that she will seek revenge on the Yakuza gang responsible for the girl's rape and death. Unfortunately, her plan backfires, and she herself is captured, forcibly drugged, and raped. However, the gang overdo the drug dosage and the nurse dies - only to be resurrected as a hermaphrodite, inside-out, zombie/corpse, who promptly seeks revenge on all responsible for her own rape and murder.

If the first movie (Guts of a Virgin/Entrails of a Virgin) was Gaira's attempt at a 'cabin in the woods' type slasher, this is his take on the 'rape-revenge' genre. The sex/nudity is dialled back a little from the first film, but it's still pretty heavy. The gore, though, is amped up. Gaira obviously had a bigger budget this time around, and the prosthetics/splatter work is consistently pretty good. He even manages to work in a homage to the Alien chest-burster. The performances are still cartoonish, with inept Yakuza gang members serving as light-relief (these guys are definitely more Sopranos-style henchmen than Godfather), and as with the first film we have to wait too long before the blood 'n' guts start flying around, but it's well-shot, and overall is a slight improvement. 5.5/10.

Kazuo Komizu, who hasn't made one decent film, directed this "notorious" shocker and should be ashamed that it was a hit upon its Japanese release.

Yes, it does feature scenes of rape, gore and dismemberment, but so what? It has the style of a bad American porn film shot and badly photographed by Ed Powers ("Dirty Debutantes") and is incredibly slow.

It seems to have earned its notoriety based on its roster of anti-social acts.

There is a huge difference between this and horror that is well produced.

Just because someone likes their cinema a little wet does not mean they'll accept crap like this. On the contrary, that kind of fan (myself, for example) tolerates even less crap than the average punter out there because he's seen so much and has become overly discerning. It's a shame production companies don't realize that.

One reviewer here (ZombieKilla81) commented that the film's "near obsession with gang rape" is one of the factors that killed it. I disagree. The subject matter is never the issue. The issue is how that subject matter is treated. In ENTRAILS OF A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, it is treated so unimaginatively that it is boring.

Personally, I like graphic depictions of psychopathic behavior (with an intriguing context) if the material is well directed, freshly photographed and aesthetically pleasing. This Nikkatsu horror/pink hybrid is woeful.

This movie, I would like to say, was completely great. I can see how many people would think that it's just a shocker film. This isn't completely untrue, but it's as much of shocker fiction as Chuck Palahniuk's books are. One of my favorite movies of all time, Bijo no Harawata is a certain type of crudely made movie that you can have just about any reaction to. It's scary, funny, silly, gross, full of off-the-top material and to some people, arousing. The fist time I saw this, it was with my friend, and his mother had brought it home for him to see it. He said it was just some screwed up Japanese movie, but I saw so much more of it. It's badly made, yes, but it has a certain type of poignancy as to be beautiful, too. As the Director says himself, this is a shocker movie made for a certain reason. Its like atrophy. If you leave audiences soft, then the entire human race is going to be soft. I think this is a good philosophy, and I agree with it one-hundred percent. Bijo no Harawata is the type of movie that gang rapes the hell out of fitness, yogurt, and all of this new-wave stuff.

This is straight out sexploitation like I have never seen.

A young virgin (Seira Kitagawa) is brutally raped and drugged and raped some more by the Yakuza. They did the same to her sister before selling her into slavery. She commits suicide after telling her story to a doctor (Megumi Ozawa), who then decides to investigate.

Hiromi's (Ozawa) plans don't go as planned and she finds herself in the same fix. But, after she is raped and drugged and thought to be dead, she turns into a hideous monster that does exact revenge.

The blood flows as violently as the rapes.

For fans of the outrageous.