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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