#19 - Inferno of Torture (1969)

 

Inferno of Torture (1969)

(dir. Teruo Ishii)

Set in 19th century Japan, the owner of a brothel of tattooed geishas pits two rival tattoo artists against each other in order to produce more beautifully tattooed women to sell to Europeans. This is a sexploitation film with some scenes of gore scattered in. I don't normally have any interest in this sort of thing, but this was directed by Teruo Ishii who also made some of my favorite Japanese cult films from this era (Horrors of Malformed Men and Blind Woman's Curse) so I decided to give it a shot, and it's... okay. Perhaps obviously from the subject matter it's pretty degrading to women, although I wouldn't say it's much worse than most other exploitation films from the era.

It opens with a really crazy scene of executions that are about as fake looking as you'd expect from a low budget film made in1969, but it's fun in an over-the-top way. It then cuts to a woman digging up a corpse and cutting it open to retrieve a key to her chastity belt... I had high hopes that this was going to be totally nuts, but unfortunately the remainder of the first half of the film is basically just gratuitous shots of boobs and tattoos without much plot. The tattoos are actually really cool at least, some are obviously painted on but some are real and they look great.

The plot picks up in the second half, but still never lives up to the promise of the first 10 minutes of the movie. There is a fun scene at the very end though with dancers wearing glowing body paint (I'm sure they didn't have blacklights in 19th century Japan, but it looks great so who cares), and we do eventually get the titular inferno. This is nowhere near the level of the other films by Teruo Ishii that I've seen, but it has its moments. If this sort of film interests you, it's not bad, but it's not good enough for me to recommend it to anyone else.