I would never have thought that a film with so many bare breasts in it could fail to keep my attention; I guess you CAN have too much of a good thing.
Judging by the opening credits scenes, I figured this would be a hugely entertaining piece of gory sleaze: a woman tied to a cross has a spear thrust between her legs (freeze frame on blood gushing freely), the point emerging from her chest; and another victim, buried up to her neck, gets her head sawn off (more gushing blood). Bloody stuff indeed!
The film then starts proper, with a woman, Yumi (Yumiko Katayama), digging up the grave of a man called Genzo (Shin'ichirô Hayashi), and cutting open the corpse to find a key, which she needs to open her chastity belt. We then flash back to see how poverty stricken Yumi joined a brothel operated by madam Otatsu (Mieko Fujimoto) and her sadistic lackey Samejima (Haruo Tanaka), only to discover too late that the women there are tattooed and tortured, and then sold into slavery to a businessman called Clayton (Yusuf Hoffman).
Much of the plot focusses on the rivalry of two tattoo artists, Horihide (Teruo Yoshida) and Horitatsu (Asao Koike), and on the romantic relationship between Horihide and Osuzu (Masumi Tachibana), and this is where my mind started to wander. The film became extremely repetitive, with an endless succession of tattooing and topless nudity. One particular moment, where the two artists' work is judged by a dignitary, consists of a parade of tits and tattoos that seems to go on forever. Any film that can make me bored of boobs is doing something wrong.
Furthermore, considering the title, the film is actually fairly light on the torture, with some shibari (Japanese rope bondage), a little hot wax action, and a woman having her eyes poked out, but it's not until the very end that director Teruo Ishii delivers anything as brutal as that seen at the beginning. The final scene sees madam Otatsu tied between two trees that have been bent over and secured by ropes; when the ropes are cut, the woman is torn in half (a method of execution also used in the 1932 classic Tarzan The Ape Man and in Ruggero Deodato's Cut and Run).
5.5/10, rounded down for those dogs strung up in the market scene, the poor pups clearly destined for the cooking pot.
Judging by the opening credits scenes, I figured this would be a hugely entertaining piece of gory sleaze: a woman tied to a cross has a spear thrust between her legs (freeze frame on blood gushing freely), the point emerging from her chest; and another victim, buried up to her neck, gets her head sawn off (more gushing blood). Bloody stuff indeed!
The film then starts proper, with a woman, Yumi (Yumiko Katayama), digging up the grave of a man called Genzo (Shin'ichirô Hayashi), and cutting open the corpse to find a key, which she needs to open her chastity belt. We then flash back to see how poverty stricken Yumi joined a brothel operated by madam Otatsu (Mieko Fujimoto) and her sadistic lackey Samejima (Haruo Tanaka), only to discover too late that the women there are tattooed and tortured, and then sold into slavery to a businessman called Clayton (Yusuf Hoffman).
Much of the plot focusses on the rivalry of two tattoo artists, Horihide (Teruo Yoshida) and Horitatsu (Asao Koike), and on the romantic relationship between Horihide and Osuzu (Masumi Tachibana), and this is where my mind started to wander. The film became extremely repetitive, with an endless succession of tattooing and topless nudity. One particular moment, where the two artists' work is judged by a dignitary, consists of a parade of tits and tattoos that seems to go on forever. Any film that can make me bored of boobs is doing something wrong.
Furthermore, considering the title, the film is actually fairly light on the torture, with some shibari (Japanese rope bondage), a little hot wax action, and a woman having her eyes poked out, but it's not until the very end that director Teruo Ishii delivers anything as brutal as that seen at the beginning. The final scene sees madam Otatsu tied between two trees that have been bent over and secured by ropes; when the ropes are cut, the woman is torn in half (a method of execution also used in the 1932 classic Tarzan The Ape Man and in Ruggero Deodato's Cut and Run).
5.5/10, rounded down for those dogs strung up in the market scene, the poor pups clearly destined for the cooking pot.