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All Night Long 2: Atrocity (1995)

Dir: Katsuya Matsumura.

A bookish schoolboy named Shiniji is being bullied for protection money by a gang of sadists.
The gang does not just stop there though; they also kidnap, rape, torture and murder anyone who crosses them or just catches their eye. The gang is led by a homosexual teenager who becomes obsessed by Shiniji.

Shiniji meets two other boys who offer to help him out with the money he owes. They go back to Shiniji' s apartment (his parents are away on vacation) to have a party and the two boys invite a girl over named Sayaka (Ryoka Yazuki, here using her Kadomatsu pseudonym). Suddenly the gang appears and Shiniji and his friends are kidnapped....

 

The second chapter of Matsumura's unconnected trilogy delivers the extreme sequences that the first chapter, for the most part, failed to do. It's not an easy film to watch, and as you do, you question whether you should be. The scenes of sadism are unflinching and are given a strong sexual tint, be it with the female nudity or with the gang leaders attempts at seducing Shiniji.

As you may expect, the humiliation heaped upon the female characters is uncompromising. They are treated like animals, stripped, raped (off screen), drugged, and beaten. In a particularly nasty sequence the leader urinates on Sayaka while she huddles in a bath and after a final beating the first girl is shown wetting herself. This explicit use of body fluids is taken to its extreme conclusion when, after a rare off screen torture/assault, the bed sheets are shown splattered with blood and feces. This misogyny is of course infamous in this type of Japanese film, but to Western audiences it never fails to be something that is hard to stomach. Although to be fair, in the case "Atrocity" the violence perpetrated on the Male cast is extremely nasty as well. The gore on show is hideously bloody and very frequent. Blood spurts from crushed skulls and splatters from knife wounds during some intense death scenes.

But wallowing in this extremity is a very serious movie. Shiniji is a deeply complex character. We abstractly learn about a dark secret in his past, and his character remains a disturbing enigma to, and beyond, the end of the film. And he does seem to represent the deeply disturbed mindset amongst a growing number of Japanese youth. The gang leader is also a complex creation. He openly despises his gang members and thinks nothing of them. His desire for Shiniji is violently intense and yet he does not hesitate in torturing him. And the homosexual seduction and later assault of Shiniji adds an intriguingly different slant to the normal heterosexual psycho/victim interaction.

So, it's not a film of mindless violence and sadism by any means, it does in fact have many dark, twisted layers to it's characters, but the uncompromising and graphic violence, so disturbingly common in modern Japanese cinema, is still there in large quantities. And as such it's a film that should not be approached lightly.