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Kogyaru-gui: Osaka Telephone Club (1997)

Dir: Naoyuki Tomomatsu.

Starring:
Kozue Aoki
Yuuki Fujita
Nobuyuki Hasegawa
Michiru Katô
Tadao Kawamoto

Two young Japanese guys are doing odd jobs for a gang of sleazy rape porn merchants.
One of them is a nerdy sex addict while the other guy (who has been traumatised by a shocking event he witnessed as a child) calls up phone sex lines.

One day the ‘phone sex’ guy is visited by a gorgeous, naked, ’Angel’ (with scars where her wings should be) who seduces him into killing (often dressed as a schoolgirl!)
He also finds out that he can only climax after he has murdered…..

 

Four years before Naoyuki Tomomatsu hit success on the international front, with comedy zombie flick “Stacy”, he directed this far more grotesque little beast that has zero chance of the kind of worldwide, pretty mainstream, distribution “Stacy” garnered.

The plot seems pretty simple (if suitably off the wall and surreal, as is often the case with these Japanese experimental dips into extremity) but in actuality it’s delivery is anything but.
Nothing is ever really explained about, well, anything and characterisation almost reaches the lofty heights of zero.
Forget any explanation about the ‘Angel’ or the visions of the childhood trauma. This is basically just an exercise in finely crafted extremity and grotesqueness with a bizarre non-plot to hang it all on…otherwise it would simply be a sadists ‘best of’ compendium!

The haunting music score (by Kazuhiko Mori  and ‘Alice Sailor’) certainly adds a twisted ambiance to compliment the explicit images and the cinematography (like the film itself) is a mixture of the lovely and the ugly.

The lovely comes in the form of the frequently naked Japanese young ladies (especially the actress playing the ‘Angel’, who is a true ethereal beauty and filmed in many dreamy set-ups), the ugly often comes in what happens to them.
As is typical in extreme Japanese cinema rampant and truly sadistic violence against women is present and correct.
In a film full (even in it’s 60 minute running time) of nasty events the most unpleasant is the fate of one of the ‘video’ gang’s victims. After rough sex (taken from behind while being made to suck another guy off until she spews ejaculate) she is brutally kicked on the floor and is then given a forced enema resulting in the guys leering and laughing at her as her bowels unloads on the floor. It’s quite simply as brutal and sadistic as this type of stuff gets and we can at least take solace in that the sex and beating are faked, even if parts of the enema climax look disturbingly real.

The rest of the sex is loud and energetic but non-violent, but here the violence comes in the form of the murders.
We first see ‘phone sex’ guy slice up a man with a box cutter, in shockingly bloody and violent fashion, before being treated to the sight of his ejaculate spurting out onto his victim’s bloody face and slit throat.
But after that it’s basically the women who are his victims.
A highly energetic sex session in a car (with the woman riding herself to shrieking orgasm, even though he has just punched her in the stomach, making her throw up over her naked breasts) turns into a nasty murder that is really effective due to the fact he has just been lying there impassively during the sex, thus making his sudden jump into brutal life for the murder all the more shocking.

The goriest killing (pretty damn good FX by Susumu Nakatani) is reserved for a naked woman who ends up trying to force her spilt entrails back into her stomach after she is sliced up. It’s utterly obscene and yet grotesquely fascinating in it’s over the top explicitness and the sight of ejaculate landing on the gaping stomach and it's spilt cargo is the putrid cherry on top.

More killings and sexual encounters are crammed in to the film, but nothing ever makes any real sense and ultimately, even though it’s technically astute and compellingly explicit (although indefensibly misogynistic and sadistic), “Eat the School Girl: Okasa Telephone Club“, is a missed opportunity to deliver a story, and characterisation, that could have matched the powerful visuals to create a more satisfying wallow in the extreme.