Beast-Man (Wolf) (1987)

aka The ryôjoku

aka Exciting Sexy Story: Beast Man Wolf

Our heroine of the evening is called to some village out in the middle of Japanese nowhere, for her twin sister has been killed. Apparently, the perpetrator was a wolf! Apart from the rapey local doctor, the villagers don’t seem terribly interested in the whole affair, so our heroine dresses up like an 80s action hero, shoulders her gun (!) and goes off into the woods where her sister died.

Where she gets beaten early on by a rainstorm, retreating into a lone cabin. The cabin’s owner is a woman in terrible age make-up, who goes off into a series of flashbacks that explain the local wolf lore: forty years ago, a young woman was raped by villagers. Their ringleader, some rich guy’s son (of course) then ties her to a tree so that she’ll be eaten by wolves. Instead, the girl kills and eats the lone wolf that attacks her. Then, another rapist appears (they really need to check the water supply around here), but gets killed by another wolf. Together, girl and wolf then eat the would-be rapist’s corpse, as you do. Sweet, sweet interspecies romance ensues – also the kind of bestiality that’ll happily get you into the FBI these days – and even produces a son.

Later, said son goes off into the world, seduces the daughter of the original rapist villager, and eventually turns into a gorilla suit with a sort of wolfish head to kill the father and (sigh) rape the daughter.

You wouldn’t believe who the old lady in the hut actually is!

This (and I’ve left plot elements out) is rather a lot of stuff to pack into a pinku runtime of barely sixty minutes, but veteran director Shuji Kataoka – who’ll end up with a filmography with more than 150 entries - has no trouble with that. The merry insanity of Beast Man Wolf zips along so happily, there’s never a boring minute. Not even in the butt and nipple-focussed sex scenes, for Kataoka, in good old pinku style, appears to relish the opportunity to shoot them in curious/artful/absurd ways that only accept repetition in the guys’ sex moves – so expect peculiar camera angles or a whole sex scene shot through what looks like a particularly ugly white, flowered drape. The, ahem, money shot here is of course the faked bestiality scene where normal blurring as well as a cut-out shaped like a yellow full moon do god’s censorship work, and which is absolutely made by the facial expression of the dog playing the wolf – he looks pretty happy with his life, and therefore has a much more likeable sex face than, say, Noboru Ando.

Add to this the absurd gorilla costume, the merry, straight-faced absurdity of everything, the handful of genuinely funny jokes, and Kataoka’s eye for cheap stylish flourishes of the Japanese gothic, and this is much more pure entertainment than you’d expect from this kind of pinku horror.