Lloyd Flanagan

While this is not by any stretch of the imagination a good film, because of the slow pacing, the inane police sequences, and the thuddinmg obviousness of much of it. It still has it's imaginative stretc hes. For example, showing that the killer has an orgasm every time he kills is unusual and quitye ahead of the time. Several of the strangling scenes where suspensilly paced, but weakened by how quickly the victim usually died (it only takes him about 10 seconds to strangle each woman with a silk stocking!) and also weakened by having every woman changer into her underwear before she gets killed. Basically much of this is saved by Victor Buono's performance which is not his best, is still quite menacing and one of the more realistic serial killers on film. His exaggerated false smiles of respectability brought to mind similiar ones I had seen on the faces of John Wayne Gacy. And the scene where he trashes the apart ment the hole time his mouth workingh inadvertenly was magnificent.

This movie manages to undo every romantic notion of poverty and life in the slums anyone might have. The characters here are not noble, or unfortunate and they are not victims. They are simply all cruel animals clawing on each other to get to the top of the jar. Every character's face is continually covered with sweat and if they are not afflicted with some deformity you can usually see the bones under their meager flesh. There is little distinction of charcters in the film. It is like an entymologists film of an ant-colony. Oshima's best film in my opinion, it doesn't suffer from the misogyny of "Cruel Story of Youth." or the try hard porno universe of "In the Realm of the Senses". These things are combined with a brutal realism that makes this film the most surreal and shocking, but without trying to be.