Entrails of a Virgin

For fans of porn and/or horror there is nothing but disappointment to be found in this film. The 'porn' is no stronger than you can find on late night television in Japan replete with the fogging or pixelation. But even if the fogging were removed it still wouldn't have lifted the sex scenes out of the banal to the, hopefully, mildly arousing. The perennial motifs of Japanese porn are here; juvenille looking women wearing white knickers taking no pleasure in the sexual acts they indulge in only under protest. As for the horror quotient, there isn't any!!

Dont believe the hype around the DVD release of this film and don't, upon seeing the box's cover, buy it on the assumption that its a manga animation....like I did.

When i sit down to watch a movie with a name such a this and a reputation to be one of the most grotesque japanese cinema has to offer i await to be repulsed. That didn´t happen. The first half of the movie was filled with softcore leening towards rape-porn, often featured in japanese films such as this. The few gore scenes where placed in the dark so you couldn´t see what was happening. There is of course the infamous highlight with chopped of hands, naked girls and lots of monster semen, but this comes too late. You are already uninterested. So, if this sounds appealing, see the movie with low expectations.

Maybe it was the title, or the trailer (certainly not the interview on the DVD, which is with the director as he keeps saying "hi, kids" into the camera like a buffoon), but I had expectations for Entrails of a Virgin to be at least a bit of sleazy fun with some good sex scenes and brutal, bloody killings by a weird Japanese penetrator. Turns out it's way too sleazy for its own good, or bad, or whatever. There's a problem- and one can see this also in the Italian sexploitation flick Porno Holocaust, similar to this in many respects- in not having balance to the sex and violence. Too much sex and it will turn into a prototypical porno, and not even with much production quality in comparison with most professional porno movies! And with the killing scenes, there has to be at least a little tack, and maybe just a smidgen of ingenuity, in creating the creature/killer/whatever. Entrails of a Virgin has neither. It's safe to say it's a pretty soulless movie, even if isn't one of the very worst ever made- it's there just for horn-dog Japanese fetishists to get off on girls in trouble and men who have all their brains in their 'other' heads.

In this case, we're given a photo team where the guys are taking some shots of some girls, nothing too salacious, and then by way of a dense fog they stay off at some house one night and are picked off one by one by "A Murderer" as he's credited. First off, the director Kazuo 'Gaira' Komizu decides he has to put in a quota of random sex scenes early on- we get spliced in (or phoned in, take your pick) clips of one of the photographers having sex with one or more of the girls elsewhere. It looks like it's from another movie. Then once settled into the house, there's a 'wrestling' scene that's poorly choreographed and shot (yeah, we really need to see him 'all' there), and then on to the rape and killings. First the rape, by the photographers, who promise the girls some jobs for their time. Then the Murderer, who like D'Amato's creature is simply covered in mud and given a stupid facial, and who for an unknown reason kills the men and/or rapes the women one by one.

Now, the latter of those, taken by themselves, should be considered the highlights of the movie. This is like saying, however, that the croûtons are the best part of a wretchedly tasting salad. An eye-gouging scene, a spike thrown like an Olympic event (that scene, actually, is kind of cool), and finally the entrailing of the overly sex-crazed girl, whose inconsequential name I can't remember. Even *this* becomes disappointing just by not being correct to the title! On top of this, the sex scenes, which become tedious through 'Gaira' and his indulgence in long-takes-without-cutaways where everything by the Japanese censors is blurred anyway, are dubbed over by the actors (you'd think that they seem to be enjoying themselves enough, hence the need to let them 'speak' for themselves). But the overall feeling from Entrails of a Virgin is that of a lumpy one, where it's just there to be gawked at and without a shred of suspense or true horror (watch as the last girl left alive, the virgin of the picture, tries to stop the murderer from getting to her, which lasts five minutes as she keeps throwing sticks at him!) You just want it to be done with, for the 'I hate women' mantra to ease up or be rid altogether.

Given the title and outlandish box art, I was ready for just about anything. Perhaps my expectation were forced just a bit to high, because I was left a little dry.

A film crew working on a soft-core sex movie end up at a strange house when they get lost in the fog and decide the best way to spend the evening is to have sex. Where hasn't this set up been used before? The difference here is the uber-perverse nature of the sex. Not allowed to show all the goods (groin shots were illegal in Japan for a long time, what is shown is fogged out) the movie tries as hard as it can to show the viewer just how unnatural sex can be.

Amidst all the kinky goings on, a mud monster (whose origin I can't fathom) shows up and begins murdering the men and raping the women...then murdering them too. Some of the sights are a bit much, most notably a woman having her intestines pulled out through her vagina or another woman spitting out a mouthful of...stuff, but otherwise the gore is pretty standard fare.

Ultimately the film is pulled down by it's own designs; it's too over-sexed to be a strait horror picture and too gruesome to work as a sex flick. The mediums can work, but there need to be a balance.

4/10

How do you review this objectively? I don't think you can. You either enjoy this sort of thing or you don't. I've given the movie a 5 not because its either good or bad, it simply is and I can't try to rate it for that reason.

After a soft-core photo shoot the photographers and the models go to a house in the mountains where kinky sex takes with occasional interruptions by a mud-covered demon/psycho who tears the men apart and has his way with the women. Plotwise thats about it, sex followed by violence followed by sex...

I don't know what else to say beyond that. Certainly its well made with sex scenes that are quite steamy (and kinky). I can't say that there really is a point beyond the melding of sex and horror. If its suppose to disturb it does that. If its suppose to titillate it does that too. I just don't know if you're suppose to feel both emotions at the same time.

As I said you either enjoy this sort of thing or you don't. Whether you watch it is your own choice, just don't say you weren't warned.