Three Films Make A Post: From the Executive Producers of

Actually Happened! Most Terrifying Psychic Phenomena. Psychic Research Team Report. Relived. (2004): Its title is clearly the most exciting thing about Jun Tsugita’s short in minutes but long in tedium attempt at POV horror. If you like watching paint dry, you’ll just love watching a guy in an apartment doing nothing while nothing happens. Well, alright, there’s a ringing doorbell and various things only our protagonist can see, and the very end of the thing has a decent jump scare, but this material would maybe add up to a ten or fifteen minute short. Fifty minutes of additional nothing are not great.

The Free Fall (2021): I know, Adam Stilwell’s weird, twisty little movie is not to everybody’s taste, but I found myself buying into this tale of amnesiac shenanigans, dreams, and Shawn Ashmore being creepy. Andrea Londo’s protagonist reacts entertainingly to the increasingly bizarre shit surrounding her, while Stilwell uses his – clearly very small – budget to create a mood of the very peculiarly dream-like out of little more than creative camera work, consciously strange acting from his cast, and some very bizarre ideas. I also really loved the sub-genre twisting (or is it revealing?) shift for the final act that’s just too fun to reveal.

Pronto (1997): You need to put a lot of effort into screwing up a crime movie based on an Elmore Leonard novel. Fortunately, this Showtime movie doesn’t make this wrong kind of effort, and writer Michael Butler and director Jim McBride get by nicely on Leonardisms and a very nice main cast that consists of Peter Falk (who seems to have a lot of fun, as he so often looked in the latest stage of his career), the always underappreciated Glenne Headly and James Le Gros as the first screen version of Leonard’s Marshal Raylan Givens. The plot skips along nicely, character traits and foibles become important for the plot in ways one wouldn’t necessarily expect, and there’s a very Leonardesque sense for the complicated morals of people living outside of the mainstream of law and morality. Plus, it’s often very funny indeed.

In short: Horny House of Horror (2010)

aka Fashion Hell

Original title: Fasshon heru

Little do the friends of freshly eloped - and virginal! - Nakatsu (Yuya Ishikawa) expect that dragging their unwilling (eloped plus virgin plus thinking paying women for sex is morally problematic does make a guy awkward in this kind of situation, it seems - who knew!?) buddy into a "massage" parlour to celebrate his leaving their amateur baseball team will lead to lost primary sexual organs, fountains of blood, and death.

For this very special parlour is owned by an unseen man who likes to watch everything going on there via hidden cameras and pays the three prostitutes working there - Nonoko (Asami), Kaori (Mint Suzuki), and Nagisa (Saori Hara) - not to have sex with men for money (we call that the traditional option), but to cut off their clients' penises and kill them (yup, in that order), so that he can then do whatever with those darling sexual organs.

Two out of three amateur baseball players are soon enough emasculated, but Nakatsu is lucky. His hesitation in betraying his fiancée and the fact that Nagisa isn't quite as happy with the penis-cutting business as her colleagues save his manhood. But will his semi-innocence be enough to save him, his friends and Nagisa?

If you're even only slightly acquainted with the ways of exploitation cinema, you will be not at all surprised that the bubble of Japanese film-makers surrounding saintly Noboru Iguchi not only have one foot in the regular pinku business, but also dabble in movies that fuse that genre's softcore sex with the merry gore and slight to outright craziness of their other films. Horny House (which actually is a better English title for the movie at hand than Fashion Hell, because the latter title is based on an untranslatable pun) was directed by Jun Tsugita, whose first real movie as a director (after a lot of writing work) it seems to be.

Despite my status as a self-declared admirer of this particular part of what's left of Japan's exploitation movie industry, I did not go into Horny House expecting much of it; there is after all a sad but long tradition of sex comedies being completely unfunny and of attempts to mix pinku (or any kind of softcore sex, really) and horror movies being generally without success in the sexiness or horror parts of the equation. Colour me confused when I frequently laughed about the (admittedly low-brow) humour, did not mind the (not actually made to be titillating) sex scenes and found myself looking forward to the next mutilation.

Most of the film's success for me lies in its more than decent script. While Tsugita doesn't seem to be anything special as a director (though he does nothing problematic in this role), he sure does know how to write a low budget movie taking place in about four rooms without having to bloat it up with half an hour of filler. For my tastes, Tsugita's sense of timing and escalation make much of the film, and turn what could be a drab experience into a pleasant seventy minutes. Pleasant, that is, if you like blood fountains, random Sonny Chiba karate movie jokes, and bitten off penises, and do agree with me that having a black censorship circle only on the tips of hacked off sexual organs is hilarious. Well, and the actors seem to have fun, too.

Plus, nekkid people.

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