Seishun no satsujinsha

Would have to say on the whole it's pretty dreadful. It wouldn't be stretching it too far to say it is mainly a vehicle for nude scenes by Harada Mieko (then just 17 years of age, not something which would generally be allowed today..) with some gruesome stabbing deaths thrown in for good measure. The film-making is uniformly gloomy, with almost all scenes being shot on rainy days (or at least with the rain machine going full bore..). The cinematography is occasionally inventive, and this is perhaps the only feature that renders it watchable to the end.

Its interest today is mainly in its portrait of 1970's Japan. The tail-end of 1960's political radicalism in Japan found its expression in the ongoing protest against the construction and expansion of Narita airport, and this forms the fascinating if unlikely backdrop of the film, which is otherwise a somewhat Oedipal mash-up of patricide, matricide, rape, and attempted suicide.

Really great.

The second portion of it is not half as good as the first one but still the film manages to be pretty great. The whole murder sequence is really amazing and probably one of the most tense and well shot murder scenes i've ever seen.

Punk nihilism offset by pure, unfiltered anger, The Youth Killer becomes all the more bleak once you learn the events surrounding it were true, a volatile outburst of teenage desire and frustration, unwilling to be tamed by the people supporting them. The only other film directed by Kazuhiko Hasegawa, The Youth Killer offers a vastly different experience to that of The Man Who Stole the Sun, chronicling the complete collapse of a young man's life in two highly traumatic, chaotic days of murder and madness. The direction and photography capture the suffocating, hellish setting its protagonists inhabit, most fittingly in a film that on occasion, and considering the large parts taking place in single locations with only two actors, points intently towards a stage play. The editing does induce the whole thing with a sense of speed, but the truth is, that the film lags significantly, with certain scenes, especially the exploitation / erotic elements that are there mostly for titillation, overstaying their welcome. There's an unwavering faith in the central performances, a faith that borders on the indulgent though ultimately they do pay off, a lot of the acting is very laconic but it weirdly works with everyone in a heightened distressed state, it adds a great amount of grim reality to the film. Coupled with an upbeat, deranged and nightmarishly unfitting yet extremely catchy Godiego score, The Youth Killer is a difficult watch at times but one with such an integral and fascinating radicalism it's hard to look away from, beautifully shot but sinks into the bottomless depth of intentional emptiness all too easily.

Framed by the last unfocused protests of 60s and 70s Japanese radicalism, this is a raw and rather ragged take on the doomed young lovers' motif (Thieves Like Us, Badlands) but where their American forebears take flight on the open road our troubled Japanese anti-heroes are set in a frieze of emotional and physical inertia and spend much of their time helplessly moping about in a roadside café.

This rarely-seen film boasts some great twilight cinematography of inhuman hinterlands (highway verges, the edges of an airport, blank vistas of ribbon development) and an unwavering faith in the central performances that borders on the indulgent but ultimately pays off in depicting the ferment of teenage desire and frustration.