Day 6 - Japanese Porn Night (Amputation Special)

 

In The Realm Of The Senses - a red cloth to a German policeman

Sometimes things just fall into place so neatly. Tuesday night turned into Japanese porn night for me, when I watched two Japanese movies involving a lot of sex and a bit too much amputation. The first was the dire competition movie Caterpillar, in which a WWII soldier returns home deaf, dumb, and with both arms and both legs amputated. Unfortunately, the one limb he still has is the one that got him into trouble in the first place - despite having come home highly decorated as a war-hero, flashbacks tell us that he was a rapist, and his vicious crimes may have led to his injuries.  I managed to sit through the amputee sex with his long-suffering wife, but left when he finally went nutjob and bashed his head on the floor for what felt like half an hour.

But talk about out of the frying pan - what happened to be next on my schedule? None other than Nagisa Oshima's astounding sado-masochist classic In The Realm Of The Senses, being shown in the Retrospective section. This film, certainly some kind of ancestor to Caterpillar, but superior in every way, was confiscated by the German police after its first Berlinale screening in 1976, and faced censorship everywhere it went. But pornographic as it is, it is unlikely to make you very horny. At least not when things start winding up towards the end. Weirdly, it is a kind of anti-Caterpillar, because the male lead gets to keep his arms and legs, but is less fortunate in other areas ...