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Love & Crime Blu-ray Review

Writer's picture: Gabe PowersGabe Powers


88 Films

Blu-ray Release: January 21, 2025

Video: 2.35:1/1080p/Color

Audio: Japanese LPCM 2.0 Mono 

Subtitles: English

Run Time: 92:23

Director: Teruo Ishii


A truly innovative and unique filmmaker, Teruo ‘King of Cult’ Ishii’s prolific career encompassed almost 100 features, shorts, and television episodes, ranging from the children’s sci-fi serial Super Giant (Japanese: Sūpā Jaiantsu; aka: Starman and Spaceman, 1957-1959) to mainstream hit Abashiri Prison (1965), which inspired no fewer than 17 sequels. But his enduring legacy is a series of pinku eiga thrillers and ero guro shockers, including Shogun’s Joys of Torture (Japanese: Tokugawa onna keibatsu-shi, 1968) and its sequels, Orgies of Edo (1969), and vivid, freakshow genre mash-ups Horrors of Malformed Men (Japanese: Edogawa Rampo Zenshū: Kyoufu Kikei Ningen, 1969) and Blind Woman’s Curse (Japanese: Kaidan Nobori Ryū, 1970).



The same year he released the pseudo-anthology of Horrors of Malformed Men, Ishii directed a proper portmanteau entitled Love & Crime (Japanese: Meiji · Taishô · Shôwa: Ryôki onna hanzai-shi; aka: Meiji Era, Taisho Era, Showa Era: Bizarre Woman Crime History) that chronicled legendary, supposedly true murders from across Japanese history. The framing device is very Mondo-esque, revolving around a doctor (Teruo Yoshida), who, during the gruesome and unsentimental autopsy of his own wife, reveals via internal monologue that he is determined to discover not only the cause of her death, but the essence of murder. Consulting a mountain of evidence and a couple of pertinent on-the-street interviews, he introduces each story. 


Part one, which seems to have been an amalgamation of events, rather than a specific, on-the-books criminal case (post-extras edit: according to commentator Amber T., it was most likely based on Kau Kobayashi and the so-called Hotel Nihonkaku Incident, so the names and details have been changed), begins in 1957. Kinue (Mitsuko Aoi) and her boyfriend, Shibuya (Takashi Fujiki), plot the murders of the owner of the Toyokaku Inn and her perverted aging husband, whose bodies they hide in the foundations of the now remodeled inn. Driven by boundless passions, greed, and psychopathy, their happiness doesn’t last and, in true EC anthology horror fashion, they get what they deserve. 



Part two keeps things salacious, but dials back on the horror for the true story of Sada Abe. The real Abe’s life was a precession of tragic events, so the tonal shift fits. Following a sexual assault, she was sold to a geisha house by her family. She contracted syphilis as a teenager and spent the 1930s bouncing between roles as a prostitute, madame, and serial mistress, before entering a passionate, but toxic relationship with Kichizō Ishida (Junko Maki), who she eventually strangled to death and castrated. Ishii opts to create a framing device within a framing device as Abe (Yukie Kagawa) meekly recalls the salacious and melancholic details of their affair, including the murder, which it depicts as done at Ishida’s insistence (and was possibly an accident), during a court proceeding.


Abe’s crimes inspired a moral panic and several feature-length cinematic adaptations, including Tatsumi Kumashiro’s Nikkatsu Roman Porno The World of Geisha (Japanese: Yojōhan fusuma no urahari, 1973), Noboru Tanaka’s A Woman Called Abe Sada (Japanese: Jitsuroku Abe Sada, 1975), and Nagisa Ōshima’s celebrated erotic drama In the Realm of the Senses (Japanese: Ai no Korīda, 1976). Insanely, having been released from prison by the time of filming, Abe actually appears as herself in Love & Crime during an interview segment conducted with Teruo Yoshida for the framing segment.



This is followed by two shortsL one where a man is castrated with needle-nose pliers after rejecting the advances of his elderly wife and another where a woman castrates her husband with a pair of scissors. Part three then begins in earnest with Ishii exploring the life of one of Japan’s most notorious serial killers, Yoshio Kodaira, who acquired a taste for murder and rape while stationed in China in the late 1920s. He spent 15 years in a Japanese prison for killing his father-in-law. After his release, he exploited the country’s post-war confusion to rob, sexually assault, and kill between 8 and 10 women. 


As he did throughout Horrors of Malformed Men, Ishii changes up film stock and style, opting to strengthen the faux-documentary concept with stark black & white photography. The segment is augmented further with the inclusion of actual archival documentary footage, further blurring the lines between fact and fiction. In one particularly clever moment, Kodaira (Asao Koike) takes a victim to the movies, where they watch footage from a post-WWII tribunal, seemingly in reference to his own wartime criminality. This blunt approach magnifies the cruelty of Kodaira’s actions, draining them of the ‘fun’ sensationalism seen throughout the Toyokaku Inn segment. Truly a bleak portrait of a killer and somewhat ahead of its time in terms of its frankness. I’m specifically reminded of Gerald Kargl’s Angst (1983), John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), and their progeny.



The film ends on a short jidaigeki note with the tale of Takahashi Oden. Dubbed the ‘Poison Woman,’ Oden was accused of poisoning her husband and was the last woman in Japan to be put to death by beheading in 1879. Ishii shifts things back to sensationalism and embraces the guro side of the ero guro equation, loading the final section with nasty images of Oden’s gooey-faced, leperous husband, who is accidentally scalped during a fight with her lover. Oddly, Oden’s actual crime, the poisoning of her husband, isn’t depicted.


Oden’s story had previously been adapted to film for Nobuo Nakagawa’s Wicked Woman Oden Takahashi (Japanese: Dokufu Takahashi Oden, 1958) and was later the basis of Shôgorô Nishimura’s Crimson Night Dream (Japanese: Koyamu, 1983). Ishii’s favorite weirdo, choreographer/performance artist Teruo Yoshida (who appears in both Horrors of Malformed Men and Blind Woman’s Curse), has a brief appearance in Love & Crime as the executioner that beheads Oden.


Bibliography:

  • Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film by Chris D., including an interview with Ishii (IB Taurus, 2005)

  • Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema by Jasper Sharp (FAB Press, 2008)



Video

Love & Crime has never had a US release until now or even on English-friendly home video, as far as I can tell (there are Japanese and French DVDs with zero English subtitles). 88 Films’ Blu-ray debut (which is premiering in the US, UK, and Canada) features a 2.35:1, 1080p transfer provided directly by Toei. The image quality is about average for Toei-born boutique label releases. Print damage is minor, but almost always present, details are tight, despite the textures appearing a bit soft. Ishii and cinematographer Motoya Washio tend to change up the look from episode to episode. Some of the changes, such as the switch to black & white during the Yoshio Kodaira section, are obvious, while others are minor, relating to saturation, which means colors and black levels aren’t always consistent, but they also don’t need to be.


Audio

Love & Crime is presented in its original Japanese and uncompressed LPCM mono sound. The sound quality changes slightly from the color segments, which have cleaner mixes and crisper dialogue, to the black & white section, which has a rougher vocal quality and thicker sound design (i.e. the use of buzzing cicadas to emphasize tension). The brief final chapter also sets an intense mood with an array of effects. Masao Yagi’s score features plenty of driving rhythms, jazzy interludes, and mournful romance themes and is an unsettling force throughout the film. 



Extras

  • Commentary with Jasper Sharp and Amber T. – The indispensable author, critic, co-editor of Midnight Eye (with the similarly indispensable Tom Mes), and all-around Asian cult expert is joined by the Fangoria staff writer to explore Ishii’s work and themes, the careers of the cast & crew (several actors appear in multiple Ishii projects), the making of the film (Sada Abe was unsurprisingly cagey about appearing in the film), the true histories behind the murders (their research goes far beyond my own glances at Wikipedia), and the broader historical context of the eras depicted throughout the film.

  • Kiss of Death (17:50, HD) – In this new introduction, Mark Schilling, the author of The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films (Stone Bridge Press, 2003), among others, discusses Love & Crime’s documentary-meets-melodrama approach, the social upheavals that inspired Toei producers to make the film, the continuing public obsession with Sada Abe, and Ishii’s tenure at Toei.

  • Theatrical trailer

  • Image gallery


The images on this page are taken from the Blu-ray and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.

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