BEAUTIFUL GIRL HUNTER

BEAUTIFUL GIRL HUNTER (henceforth BGH) was one of the first DVD releases from Japan Shock Video, along with their EVIL DEAD TRAP I & II DVD's. It seemed an odd choice to me at the time, and having now seen the film I still think it seems an unlikely film to choose to help launch a DVD label. Norifumi Suzuki is a relatively undistinguished Japanese director of reasonably classy pinku eiga ('pink' films). His best known works apart from BGH are the crazy nunsploitation piece CONVENT OF THE HOLY BEAST (1974), a period sex film called 'Sentensei Inpu' (AKA 'Insatiable', 1971), the LADY SNOWBLOOD-esque SEX & FURY (1973), a Sonny Chiba film (THE EXECUTIONER (1975)) and a couple of 'Daimyo' films ('The Sex-Crazed Daimyo' (1971) and 'Shikijo Damiyo' (1978)). BGH is based on a manga by Masaki Sat, which was also used as the basis for an animated series.

A man is running through the rain, obviously being pursued. He climbs an iron gate and enters the grounds of a mansion. Cut to inside. He has tied up a man and a woman in their bedroom and is threatening them, trying to determine the whereabouts of their safe. He rapes the woman in front of her husband. Cut to many years later. Tatsuya is 20 years old, very rich and lives in a big mansion all alone. We learn that he is the child of the couple we saw at the beginning of the film. His mother and father are both dead, leaving him the mansion and the family's fortune. We see flashbacks to Tatsuya's youth, when his father abused him and beat him because he was the child of the rapist. The father ties up his wife and whips her, and has sex with a mistress in front of the bound woman, whilst watched through the keyhole by the child Tatsuya. The mother kills herself, and we learn that the father went missing whilst on a boat at sea with Tatsuya during a storm.
Tatsuya starts thinking about his childhood and other matters and decides to convert his basement into a torture chamber. He kidnaps and drugs his father's old mistress and ties her up. He rapes her whilst she is drugged, and when she awakens she taunts him. Tatsuya wears some very fetching blue Y-fronts throughout this scene!!! Later, Tatsuya has a birthday party. He leaves the party, ostensibly to get a bottle of vintage wine from the basement. When he gets down there, he stabs the chained-up woman in the film's most violent scene, blood spurts out like in a BABY CART film. He then has sex with her corpse. After this, he takes a shower and returns to the party with the bottle of wine. Apparently, all this was done in a short enough time that no-one notices his absence and Tatsuya now has "the perfect alibi". The police find the woman's naked body the next day and think that the crime is typical of those committed by Genpei, the rapist who we were first introduced to at the beginning of the film, who is also Tatsuya's father. We now see Genpei once more. He chases a girl and rapes her in a field, strangling her when he reaches orgasm. We see Genpei's hide-out, where he lives with several other criminals. They are planning some sort of crime in a city. Genpei sees a photo of Tatsuya in a newspaper article concerning the death of his father at sea, and realises that it is his son.
Meanwhile, Tatsuya kidnaps a school girl. He tortures her and rapes her. He has become obsessed with Hitler, and in a charming scene we see him masturbating over photo's of Nazi torture. The school girl seems to have become quite happy living with Tatsuya and begs him to rape her. He helps her with some Math's problems that she is studying. He lets the school girl go shortly afterwards, because she has learned obedience.
He next kidnaps a singer and her aide. He treats the aide well, whilst torturing the singer. The aide becomes involved and obviously enjoys the chance to humiliate her illustrious mistress. One day when Tatsuya is out walking, he sees the school girl with her friends. She is laughing and they talk of marriage. Her friends tell her that she is much more beautiful, and is better at her math's since she 'went away'.
One night, Tatsuya and his prisoners are having tea. The aide wants him to have sex with her, and whilst he is distracted, the singer hits him over the head with a stool. In the ensuing chaos, both girls manage to escape. However, Tatsuya captures one of them. Genpei has meanwhile arrived in town, where he was quickly recognised by the police and chased. He arrives at Tatsuya's mansion just as the escaped girl is leaving, and promptly picks her up and takes her back in. Tatsuya and his father get along well and abuse the two girls. Genpei kills the aide when having sex with her, and the other girl is next seen on top of a building naked, and seemingly drugged. Tatsuya is nearby, and shoot her with a 'scope rifle.
Finally, Tatsuya captures his half-sister and Genpei rapes her. Tatsuya then kills him. The girl and Tatsuya spend a night together and when Tatsuya awakes, she has gone. He finds a note, and she has killed herself. The End.

The above description should hopefully give the reader a pretty good idea of what to expect in this very Japanese film. Whilst it is not as explicit as later Japanese films of this type (the ALL NIGHT LONG or CAPTURED FOR SEX series for example), it is still fairly hard to take and a Western audience is likely to be appalled at the attitude to women displayed . This is often remarked upon, but is never clearer than in this type of film. The idea that a woman will come to enjoy rape is obviously a very dubious and quite offensive theme for a film. However, in Japan no such worries are found. This film concentrates more on S&M imagery than on strong torture scenes, and is therefore a more suitable introduction to the wonderful world of Japanese rape cinema than the above mentioned titles. If you don't like the ideas expressed in these films (and who exactly would?), then you're probably best off leaving them on the shelf.

From another viewpoint, it has to be said that BGH is a particularly attractively filmed variation on this theme. Suzuki's direction is assured and the cinematography is lush, colourful and very easy to look at. Yasuharu Hasebe's infamous rape tetraology provides an interesting counterpoint to Suzuki's film, being made at around the same time but imbued with a very different directorial style and taking a more surreal approach to deal with similar themes. One complaint that could be levelled at BGH is that the narrative isn't exactly gripping stuff, and the ~100 minute runtime is pushing it a bit for this type of film (Hasebe's films usually clock around the 75 minute mark). Some interesting ideas are expressed - the fact that Tatsuya is presented as being powerless in his fate, doomed to carry out the same type of crimes as his blood father, makes things a bit more Freudian, and the strange relationship that he develops with this evil relative is explored with some intriguing scenes. But then we must come back to the objectionable aspects of the film - the imprisonment, systematic abuse and rape of a schoolgirl being presented as a 'good thing', leading to her becoming more beautiful and clever has got to be the film's most appalling concession to Japanese culture, but there are plenty of other things to object to - the abuse of women being presented in a deliberately erotic style, the idea that women are only of use as objects to rape, the fact that Tatsuya is left unpunished at the end of the film, the notion that women secretly want to be raped - all are entirely unpalatable to Westerners brought up on a diet of Political Correctness.

Overall, there is surprisingly little violence or gore in the film. The one nasty scene, which I have already described above, seems quite out of place in an otherwise quite tame film. Also, the fact that it involves necrophilia is strange, when no other reference is made to this throughout the film, and nothing more is made of it. There is no annoying optical censoring in this presentation, because no attempt is made to show genitalia. The women always have underwear on, even in the most unlikely situations, and whenever they haven't, the camera is cunningly positioned so as to avoid the problematic area. The film was made in the late 70's when the Japanese filmic moral code was still very much in force (it's still quite strong today), and therefore it would have had to be made outside of Japan (c.f. Nagisa Oshima's AI NO CORRIDA (1976)) in order to be more explicit.

If you are a novice to this type of film, then this probably is a good introduction to the genre. If you've seen some of the harder Japanese entries mentioned above, then you'll find this quite a tame ride. Either way, if you like well-photographed, reasonably arty Japanese exploitation, you're not going to go too far wrong with this one. Just don't show it to your girlfriend as a 'date movie'!!!!

DVD Specification
Original year of release - 1979
Approximate running time - 99m 29s
Aspect ratio - Widescreen (~2.00:1)
System - NTSC (colour)
Rating - 16 (Holland)
Sound - Dolby Digital Stereo (2.0)
DVD release - Japan Shock Video
Region Coding - Region 0 (code free)

DVD Extras
Original Theatrical Trailer
Photo Gallery

DVD Ratings (out of 5)
Picture - 4
Firstly, this is far and away Japan Shock's best DVD transfer so far. The picture is lovely and clear, the colours are bright and vibrant, and there is very little grain. This is strange, since BGH is the oldest of Japan Shock's DVD releases (made in '79, seven years before GUTS OF A BEAUTY, its nearest neighbour in terms of date) and is also its most minor release to date (in that the film is not one that is generally held in very high regard, or even one that many people would have heard of). There is no anamorphic enhancement, but then I'd have been pretty surprised if there had been. However, there is one problem with the transfer - the aspect ratio is seemingly incorrect. The packaging states 2.35:1, but viewing it on a widescreen TV, with the picture blown up, I could see quite clearly that it is not as wide as it claims to be. It's more like 2.0:1 or 2.1:1. When, after viewing the film, I checked out the trailer included on the DVD, I found that my suspicions were confirmed - the trailer (which looks gorgeous) is presented here in full scope (2.35:1), a clear indication that the film itself is not in its correct aspect ratio. What is the reason for this? Who knows. It's more than possible that the only print Japan Shock could obtain was already in this slightly compromised form. This isn't a huge problem, but it stops the DVD scoring a '5' in this section.
Sound - 3
Dolby Digital Stereo. Fine. No hissing or scratching, perfectly clear. To be honest, the film doesn't make much use of sound; there isn't even much music, so it doesn't play too important a part in the proceedings. More than adequate.
Extras - 2
Nothing much. A trailer which, as I mentioned above, looks lovely, and a photo gallery consisting of 10 pictures. Not very impressive, but then I don't suppose that there is a wealth of supplementary materials available for a title like this.
Overall Rating - 3
In some ways it is a shame that Japan Shock seem to have made considerably more effort with this decidedly minor entry in the Japanese exploitation canon than they have with any of their other releases to date, including the massively influential EVIL DEAD TRAP which was a poor transfer to say the least. However, if you like a reasonably classy, reasonably nasty S&M/rape film (and who doesn't?!?!?) then you could do much worse than to pick this up. If you're not a fan of such fare, then there is nothing else here to tempt you. An excellent transfer then, of an interesting, but not very cinematically important exploitation film.

AKA
DABIDE NO HOSHI: BISHOUJO-GARI (Original Japanese title)
STAR OF DAVID: BEAUTY HUNTING (Direct translation)
STAR OF DAVID

Alternative versions
Outside of Japan, the only official release the film has had was on VHS from Japan Shock Video. This used the same print as the DVD, and is still available.