Japanese Title: Yasagure Anego Den - Sokatsu Rinchi!
aka Story of A Wild Elder Sister - Widespread Lynch Law!
Director: Teruo Ishii
Female Yakuza Tale – Inquisition And Torture was filmed on an even lower budget than its predecessor, Sex And Fury, but director Teruo Ishii disguises the fact well. Ishii was not terribly enamored of sequels of any kind, and he scurries all over the map, throwing in bizarre, seemingly incongruous flights of fancy, encouraging his actors to ad-lib, devising imaginatively-staged swordfight displays, all in the service of transfiguring derivative narrative formula and threadbare production values. The story once again follows Ocho (Reiko Ike), apparently fully-recovered after her near-death at the close of Sex And Fury, assisted this time around by a lone wolf drifter (Ryohei Uchida) after they cross paths with a wicked yakuza boss (Tatsuo Endo). Fancying himself a bit of a ladies man, the dandy boss dresses in extremely-hard-to-look-at striped suits. He’s also a bit of a white slaver who employs his indentured whores as drug mules to transport heroin. Some deliriously beautiful, nearly psychedelic tableau - most of which are devoted to steamy, erotic sequences – punctuate the proceedings like clockwork. Depending on your taste, there is also a surfeit of poorly executed slapstick and scatalogical humor. In the last third of the tale, Ishii reaches such heights of frenzied lunacy, the narrative becomes nearly incoherent. He throws everything-but-the-kitchen-sink into the mix, including an out-of-left-field asylum sketch that almost resembles a parody of the opening scenes for his 1969 release, Horror Of Malformed Men. The final protracted slaughter, with the numerous shanghaiied prostitutes going topless for no apparent reason, then grabbing their swords to massacre the mobsters while being led by Ike and Uchida, all on ludicrously threadbare sets (think Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter nightclub climax) – well, one wonders how Ishii got away with it! The violent climax ping-pongs back-and-forth between intoxicating mayhem and uproarious kabuki-cum-striptease antics.
©2006 - Chris D.
