Blind Beast (Mōjū) first published by Little White Lies, as the 134th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “My name is Aki Shima,” Aki (Mako Midori) says in voiceover at the beginning of Blind Beast (Mōjū). “I was never very popular as a fashion model.” This narration is accompanied by black-and-white images of Aki taken…
Giants and Toys (Kyojin to gangu) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 127 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column At the beginning of Yasuzo Masumura‘s Giants and Toys, an adolescent working-class woman named Kyoko (Hitomi Nozoe) stretches and smiles, exposing her crooked, rotten teeth – and then her image freezes and is reproduced in…
Irezumi first published by Film4 Summary: In this elegant proto-feminist shocker from Yasuzo Masumura, a woman forced into prostitution wreaks her spidery revenge. Review: Two years after their immaculately perverse melodrama Manji (1964), Yasuzo Masumura (Red Angel, Blind Beast) and Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba, The Naked Island) were drawn to work together again on another lurid tale of…
Manji (aka Swastika, aka Passion, aka All Mixed Up) first published by Film4 Summary: An artfully lurid melodrama of illicit desire, excessive obsession and ritualised death, directed by Japanese New Wave fave Yasuzo Masumura. Review: The late Yasuzo Masumura was a protean figure in the world of cinema. Though Japanese, in the early 1950s he attended Rome’s…