The walls also have…

Images from BLIND BEAST. The ol’ factory.

Seriously, if you only rent one movie this year in which a blind sculptor kidnaps a young woman and imprisons her in a nose-lined warehouse, please please please MAKE SURE IT’S THIS ONE. I’m not sure how good it is, but it’s very individual.

Director Yasuzo Masumura seems like quite an eccentric figure. GIANTS AND TOYS, his shouty industrial satire, was pretty strange, BLIND BEAST lollops headlong into some apocalyptic realm of psychosexual lunacy, and I was most impressed of all with RED ANGEL, a sweatily intense, despairingly romantic doctor-nurse love story set amid the severed limbs of World War Two. I was with it all the way up until the portrayal of “comfort women” — Masumura characterises these forcibly-conscripted army prostututes as giggling imbeciles, when the reality is they were Chinese women abducted and raped by Japanese forces. It’s a bit like showing the nazi’s “Joy Division” as happy hookers.

In the UK, where veterans’ groups are forever pushing for an official apology from the Japanese government for war crimes against P.O.W.s, there’s a sort of low-level awareness that Japan hasn’t quite faced up to its past the way Germany has. One can’t imagine anyone portraying the nazi’s “Joy Division” as happy hookers, for God’s sake.

RED ANGEL is an amazing piece of cinema nonetheless, but I’m totally uncertain if I should even try to see past this colossal, shall we say, error of taste?

I mention it here because nobody else seems to have. It’s a moment that, for me, pushes the film into nasty BIRTH OF A NATION historical-revision territory, although at least the film hasn’t caused the kind of actual real-world harm Griffith’s monsterpiece provoked, and the criminal moment in the Masumura is arguably incidental to the main themes, which I don’t have such a problem with. Whereas Griffith’s problem is absolutely central.

“Have you ever seen such brutality?”

One great thing about Derek Raymond’s hard-boiled cockney crime novel He Died With His Eyes Open, is all the CULTURAL REFERENCES ~

“I’m a man that likes a charver if ever there was one, but my life, that put me right off — I couldn’t’ve got it up that time, not if she’d bin Clordia Cardinal.”

Clordia Cardinal.

— and —

“‘What’ll it be?’ he yelled above the Joan Armatrading.”

At times, Derek Raymond’s two-fisted existentialism reminds me of the old BRUTE! books — “Classified Pulp Nasties” from a little later in the eighties, which parodied Spillane-style hard man stuff by pumping the sex and violence to nauseatingly hilarious heights of depravity ~

“It was violent. It was brutal. It was nasty, vicious and inhuman. But it was fair.”

“I felt my floodgates open and a pint of hot stuff gushed out.”

“Before he croaked I gave him the works. Gun. Fist. Foot. Bollocks. The lot.”

“Just then a bloke erupted into the snug with a fiver. The music stopped. Jaws dropped, and darts hung in mid-air. ‘DRINKS ALL ROUND!’ he roared. ‘FOR ME!'”

“Afterwards, we both lay there and stank.”

“Dick Champion ran a bath and got in it. ‘WASH!’ he roared to himself.”

Horrible, homophobic, homoerotic and homo neanderthalis, BRUTE! was the thing of its day, the ne plus ultra reductio ad absurdum of Thatcherite values. It can be experienced in clean, non-flammable digital form HERE.