Love and Crime/Review

From The Grindhouse Cinema Database

< Love and Crime
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The graphic, maybe even slightly shocking introduction scene of Love and Crime is set in a mortuary. Naked body of a young woman is lying on a table, waiting for an autopsy. A doctor arrives, puts on his gloves and begins his work. Opening credits roll next to the blood spilling images.

What we see during the first few minutes of Teruo Ishii’s Love and Crime is almost like a celluloid depiction of the changes that were taking place in Japanese cinema in the late 60’s. Movie studios were losing their audiences to the television and had to come up with new strategies to attract people into cinemas. Sex, violence and directors like Ishii would be the answer. Starting with his Tokugawa series (kicking off with Tokugawa onna keizu in 1968) Ishii went looking for the limits, seeing how far the studio would allow him to go.

Love and Crime was released in 1969, the year when Ishii directed no less than eight feature length movies. He made brief visits to Nikkatsu studios in form of the Rising Dragon series (which concluded in 1970 with the Meiko Kaji starring Blind Woman’s Curse) but all of his Toei films fell strictly under the exploitation banner. Love and Crime follows the structure of Tokugawa onna keibatsu-shi (The Joy of Torture) (1968) by telling several short stories of love, passion and violence, all narrated by Ishii veteran Teruo Yoshida (Inferno of Torture, Yakuza Law).

The first story, which is also my favourite of the bunch, is a dark horror tale set in the early 1960’s. It follows a married woman (Aoi Mitsuko) who hooks up with a young man (Takashi Fujiki) and together they go for a killing spree. The characters are rather interesting and Ishii’s directing is captivating. He doesn’t hurry too much and allows some moody scenes. The use of music, and also the lack of it in certain scenes, creates nice old school horror movie atmosphere. The classic murder weapon, axe, is also used to a memorable effect.

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In the second episode Ishii re-imagines the famous, often adapted Abe Sada story, later made familiar to international audiences by Nagisa Oshima in Ai no corrida (Real of the Senses) (1976). Ishii’s take unfortunately suffers in comparison because of the limited running time. The likes of Oshima, Tanaka (Jitsuroku Abe Sada) and Obayashi (Sada) would have the full running time for ”depicting” the famous true life events while Ishii only had 25 minutes to spare. The result is a decent but slightly underwhelming episode that has one rare selling point; a brief present day appearance by the real life Abe Sada. The core of the story however is set in 1930’s, with the lead role played by Yukie Kagawa.

After the Abe Sada story comes a very brief two part episode that runs only a few minutes. I believe Ishii only included this to arouse some conversation as there is not much storyline, just two single events. What follows however is the the longest running seqment in the film. Shot in black & white the fourth episode is a war time set story of a serial killer (Asao Koike). The beginning consist mostly of murder scenes, but the storyline gets notably more interesting when the killer meets a young woman (Yumiko Katayama) whom he doesn’t kill right away. The cinematography in this episode quite very good. The b/w image is used well to create a cold and minimalistic atmosphere and the framing is often impressive. War time stock footage is used to some extent.

The last story runs about 12 minutes and is maybe the most disturbing of the bunch, thanks to the main character’s husband, a seriously sick / deformed man. The storyline isn’t especially impressive but some images and contrasts are effective. Tatsumi Hijikata of Blind Woman’s Curse and Horrors of Malformed Men appears briefly as an executioner. Although not one of the best episodes this serves a moderately satisfying ending for a good film that feels maybe a little more than the sum of its parts.

Reviewed by Hung Fist

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