Kôya no dacchi waifu

An arthouse film noir .it is overstylist and veres at times towards pretensions. Mostly in the dialogue and its treatment of woman leaves a bad taste in the mouth but on the plus side it looks wonderful and has a great soundtrack Sijon suzuki would have been pround to have had his name on this

One might think it's hard to be surprised by a movie called Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967) (aka Dutch Wife in the Desert, or more accurately, Kôya no Dacchi waifu), but then you actually see it and your jaw is pretty much planted on the floor. Directed by Branded to Kill writer, Atsushi Yamatoya, in that quintessentially Japanese '60s Yakuza film style, but taken to an exponential degree on the weirdness meter.

Telling the story of a hitman who has an appointment with the murderer of his girlfriend, it feels like if David Lynch had made a New York City roughie inhabited by Japanese nouvelle vague gangsters it would be this film. It truly has to be seen to be believed. While the story does drag in places, I never lost interest. Camera work is strictly bargain basement with the 'creative' use of out-of-focus shots that seem to indicate there was, in the best tradition of ultra-low budget cinema, not a lot of footage that remained unused.

This film essentially begins with a hitman by the name of "Sho" (Yuichi Minato) meeting a businessman named "Naka" (Masayoshi Nogami) as a discreet location in the countryside to discuss a matter of grave importance. In that regard, Naka tells Sho that a female employee named "Sae" (Noriko Tatsumi) has been kidnapped and is being used as an unwilling participant in films of a sexual nature. Sho agrees to find Sae and immediately begins looking for a man named "Ko" (Shohei Yamamoto) who he believes did something similar with his wife who was subsequently killed. What Sho doesn't count on, however, is that while searching in the sordid underworld for Sae's abductors, things are not necessarily as simple as he would like them to be. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this was a rather confusing film which had too many subplots and other types of issues which only served to lessen the movie overall. No doubt some will consider it artistic, but I didn't much care for it, and I have rated it accordingly. Below average.

Genres come in all shapes and sizes apparently. I recently opened a can of worms on Facebook trying to define film-noir, a genre that, according to some, has lasted from the early forties, perhaps earlier, to the present day. In Japan, however, we had 'film-pink' or rather pinku-eiga, a series of sexploitation pictures totally unlike the sexploitation pictures popular in Europe or America. Some of these films could indeed be described as 'inscrutable'.

"Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands" is one of the best known of the 'pinku-eiga' pictures. Shot in widescreen, black and white it is a kind of esoteric Yakuza film with gangsters and snuff movies very much to the fore. It's certainly sexually explicit for a movie made in 1967 though perhaps no more so than a European sex film of the period but what passes for a plot marks it out as very much an art-house affair, (I doubt if the Soho 'dirty-mac' brigade would sit through it to the end). Visually it's often extraordinary and it wears its American influences well, down to a somewhat jarring jazz score and it has cult movie written all over it. I'm sure there's an audience out there somewhere for it but personally I thought it a load of pretentious rubbish and its disappearance over the years is perfectly understandable. Of course, if you haven't heard of it it's possibly because in the West it was called "Dutch Wife in the Desert" for reasons perhaps even more obscure than the film's plot.

If Tarantino had been alive in Japan in 1967he would have made this. Sinister, opaque, disturbing and dodgy on so many levels, yet there's genius in the cruelty