Entrails of a Beautiful Woman (1986)

'Oh, Japan! This mishmash of Yakuza thriller and horror flick (English title: 'Entrails of a Beautiful Woman') has a little bit of everything- rape, tentacles, strange designer drugs (Angeluh Rainu!) and a hermaphroditic monster. Not for the faint of heart, but well worth watching, if you have the 'guts'.This is most definitely NOT for those with a weak composition, but is a rollicking good time for those whose tastes run towards the more esoteric and decidedly unenlightened. Pairs well with 'Emanuelle in America', 'Ebola Syndrome', and 'Boxer's Omen'. At a brisk 65 minutes or so, it doesn't wear out its welcome and makes for a good night fun, even if you feel icky afterward. A bleach bath can take care of that, though!

Gaira's Entrails of a Beautiful Woman is an in-name-only sequel to his Entrails of a Virgin produced the same year. Basically what we have here is a Nikkatsu pink film merged with insane 80s J-splatter, ie: loadsa rape 'n' gore! When Yoshimi's sister mysteriously disappears she decides to do some snooping about and discovers that the Ichiyama Yakuza Clan have sold her as a slave in Africa, although by the time she learns this she is being gang-raped by that same gang and shot up with "Angel Rain", a powerful drug that causes her to really dig being raped. After the lads fall asleep she manages to escape and goes straight to her psychiatrist, Hiromi. Yoshimi proceeds to tell Hiromi what has happened then promptly jumps off a bridge to her death.Hiromi plots to get revenge for her patient and seduces one of the yakuza before placing him under hypnosis which compels him to kill the rest of his gang the next time they call him stupid (?!). He doesn't manage this and ends up mutilated and hacked to pieces. Then the clan track down Hiromi, gang-rape her then shoot her up with some Angel Rain which, instead of making her horny, transforms her into an inside-out-hermaphrodite-demon that goes on a killing spree, gorily butchering the yakuza that raped her (and the leaders girl too).From all the wonderfully sleazy rapes to the inside-out-demon rippin' through a chicks stomach with his/her fanged cock in an obvious Alien homage and punchin' through a dudes head; Entrails of a Beautiful Woman is one helluva good time! I actually dug this one far more than Entrails of a Virgin - it's a lot less disjointed, faster paced and brings more gore to the table too.Director Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu seems a really interesting & intelligent character also - in the interview on the Synapse disc, when asked what prompted him to make such a film he lurches into a long and rambling answer in which he touches on philosophers such as Descartes & Rousseau, as well as topics such as the duality of man, Japans lack of a focused religion, and many others that you wouldn't really expect from the man who created this sex 'n' gore epic.

This movie, I would like to say, was completely great. I can see how many people would think that it's just a shocker film. This isn't completely untrue, but it's as much of shocker fiction as Chuck Palahniuk's books are. One of my favorite movies of all time, Bijo no Harawata is a certain type of crudely made movie that you can have just about any reaction to. It's scary, funny, silly, gross, full of off-the-top material and to some people, arousing. The fist time I saw this, it was with my friend, and his mother had brought it home for him to see it. He said it was just some screwed up Japanese movie, but I saw so much more of it. It's badly made, yes, but it has a certain type of poignancy as to be beautiful, too. As the Director says himself, this is a shocker movie made for a certain reason. Its like atrophy. If you leave audiences soft, then the entire human race is going to be soft. I think this is a good philosophy, and I agree with it one-hundred percent. Bijo no Harawata is the type of movie that gang rapes the hell out of fitness, yogurt, and all of this new-wave stuff.

Kazuo Komizu strikes again with "Entrails of a Beautiful Woman", the sequel to "Entrails of a Virgin". This time around the story is based around a psychologist (Megumi Ozawa) who decides to take on the Yakuza to avenge the suicide of a doped-up and raped patient that winds up on her doorstep one day. When she gets over her head and the Yakuza capture her, she learns their insidious plat of doping up girls and selling them into slavery. It apparently ends badly when she overdoses from the cocaine. But she soon melds with another body to be disposed of to become…dum, dum, dum – "Super Slime Hermaphrodite Zord"! This he, she = it makes mince meat out of the yakuza and saves the day…not really.Well it is better than "Entrails of a Virgin", but not by much. Most of the film (a whopping 67 minutes) consists of rape and sex with fogging and the usual ho-hum stuff. Almost towards the end we finally get our gore groove on with a few cool sequence (like an Alien-inspired penis-monster through the stomach scene and a gooey asphyxiation) but it still suffers from a hyper low budget feel that makes it fun but can't elevate it from z-grade soft horror-core fare.