
Color , 1969,
92 mins. 23 secs.
Directed Teruo Ishii
Starring Teruo Yoshida, Yumi Teruko, Eiji Wakasugi, Yukie Kagawa, Asao Koike, Mitsuko Obata, Rika Fujie, Kenjiro Ishiyama
88 Films (Blu-ray) (US/UK RA/RB HD) / WS (2.35:1) (16:9)
It should go
without saying that anything directed by the outrageous Teruo Ishii is going to be worth watching, though the full scope
of his output hasn't even come close to being available to Western audiences. His feverish anthology Love and Crime (originally titled Meiji - Taishô - Shôwa: Ryôki onna hanzai-shi, or Meiji, Taisho, and Showa Era: Grotesque Cases of Cruelty by Woman) came during his particularly productive 1968-1969 period when he churned out no less than eleven films including cult favorites like Horrors of Malformed Men, Yakuza Law, Orgies of Edo, Inferno of Torture, and Shogun's Joy of Torture. The ero guro (erotic grotesque) aesthetic that was running rampant in these films is very much in evidence here as well even during the main titles, and as with his other multi-story efforts, it's an unpredictable, extreme rollercoaster that will make you dizzy by the end.
During a particularly unflinching autopsy scene we meet our guide, coroner Murase (Yoshida), who's fascinated by crimes involving female-centric homicide. We start with a bang at the Toyokaku Inn in 1957 where the ambitious Kinue (Fujie) gets Othello'd into manipulating, seducing, and murdering her way up the ladder, culminating in an outrageous fiery finale you have to see to believe. Then we get the legendary story of Sada Abe (played by Kagawa in the dramatization and the real woman herself in the present day), famously depicted in Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, who famously
severed and
kept the genitalia of her lover, Kichizo Ishida (Wakasugi), in 1936 after strangling him to death. The odd story out here is a short, arty segue into black-and-white for Yoshio Kodaira (Koike), a serial killer driven to attacking women at the end of the 1940s during the country's postwar disorientation. Last up is the story of Oden Takahashi (Teruko), depicting the last woman to be executed by beheading in 1879 at Ichigaya Prison after a particularly gruesome crime of blood-spraying passion (and featuring a very Ishii-esque makeup job for her husband suffering from leprosy).
Based on the title you'd expect this to be all stories about female murderers, though the third story (and the only one not in color) throws a wrench in that approach for reasons addressed in the special features on the first English-friendly release of this film, a 2025 Blu-ray from 88 Films with a particularly lurid cover. As you can tell from both the original title and the synopsis, it's touted as a fact-based look at murders from different periods in Japanese history from the 19th and 20th centuries with the Sada Abe one being both the most interesting (since it features the real woman on camera before she went out of the public eye) and the oddest since it's far more restrained and sentimental than its more famous adaptations (also including Noboru Tanaka's A Woman Called Sada Abe and Nobuhiko Obayashi's Sada). The first story is a pretty tough act to follow with its barrage of noir-inspired sex and
violence, but overall it's a fun, whiplash-inducing collection of tales with a framing device whose weird final moralizing
is about as sincere as the one in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
88 Films has been one of the better labels for presenting Japanese titles with their black levels correctly adjusted for U.S. and U.K. displays, and that's the case here as well with a very pleasing, rich-looking transfer that sports some truly shocking moments of colorful red blood. The DTS-HD MA Japanese 2.0 mono audio sounds fine with no issues to report, and optional English subtitles are provided. A marvelous new audio commentary by Jasper Sharp and Amber T. is a hugely entertaining and informative listen throughout, packed with useful context about the Japanese periods depicted here, the treatment of female criminals in Japan, the real-life cases at play here (some more accurate than others), and tons more. They're both clearly having a good time and make for an engaging pair all the way through. "Kiss of Death" (17m50s) is a new video "introduction" by Mark Schilling who walks through the film's place in Ishii's filmography at the time, the transitions going on in his work, the peculiar messaging in many respects, and the backgrounds of the cases. Finally you get a stills gallery and the subtitled Japanese trailer, which must have had audiences on the floor back in '69.
Reviewed on January 20, 2025