Naked Blood-Movie Review

Naked Blood

Dir. Hisayasu Sato
Japan 1995 DVD Running Time: 76 min.

Known as one of Japan's 'Pink Shitenno' (loosely translated as the Pink Best Four), and to westerners as the Japanese equivalent of David Cronenberg, Hisayasu Sato has over 5- films under his belt that are largely concerned with violent subgenres of porn.

Naked Blood, which abandons porn altogether in favor of a uniquely Japanese homicidal mania, is a tale of misguided hopes and blood-spattered redemption. A teenage scientist whose father mysteriously vanished before his birth undertakes to create a drug that will turn pain into pleasure, thereby eliminating pain from the human experience altogether.

After secretly subjecting three young women to the experimental drug, he watches in horror as they turn to excruciating levels of sadomasochistic behavior that emphasize their personal obsessions.

Apart from being a conceptually rich film, Naked Blood is also the possible paramount of Satos usual visceral extremes which in this case include a woman frying her own hand in tempura batter and eating it!

This is a bizarre, disgusting, apocalyptic work that beautifully coalesces the modern Japanese splatter film with the stylish blood-letting (or should I say spraying) of the 70s Samurai flicks that preceded them. For anyone interested in Asian cult cinema in particular, and cinema vomitif in general, Naked Blood has to be seen to be believed!

Kier-La Janisse

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