Rating: N/A
Dir: Takafumi Nagamine
Star: Aya Katsuragi, Noboru Mitani, Tomorô Taguchi, Keiko Usami
December 2024 update It now has an IMDb entry, and I just discovered a fan-subtitled copy on Youtube. The bad news… even with subtitles, it does not make an enormous amount more sense. The synopsis offered in my review, from thirty-one years ago(!), is more or less accurate. Izumi (Katsuragi), who looks like she may have just graduated from Sukeban Deka, moves into a block of flats, in which Doctor Takasaki (Mitani) is doing his Frankensteinian experiments. There’s a murder, a police investigation, and Izumi falls for the monster.
The ending does make a little more sense. Because of the closing net, Takasaki and his assistant Kyouko (Usami) have to leave for pastures new, but the Doctor decides to go back to the lab one last time. Which is when the fiery death of both him and his creation occur. Director Nagamine apparently has a rep for odd-ball DTV films like this. A little later, he’d direct a number of live-action movies based on legendary sleazy comic-book Kekko Kamen, created by Go Nagai. But quite what he was trying to do here, along with any notion of the potential audience, remains as obscure as it was when I first saw it.
2003 update: I’ve been unable to find any information regarding this film, and suspect the title under which I received it was entirely unofficial – all suggestions and data are thus very welcome..
[14] If the preceding film [Two Girl Warriors in Hara-Kiri] seemed strange – and if it didn’t, I recommend therapy – then at least it was clear what was going on. But in ‘Pretty Body’, the puzzle is less what is taking place than why. The whole creature resembles a cross between Flesh for Frankenstein and The Rocky Horror Picture Show; if you can imagine trying to watch the latter in a language you don’t comprehend, you’ll have an idea of the mood instilled by Pretty Body.
A girl moves into a flat in a seaside block occupied by some indubitable odd-balls, most notably the couple who engage in icky sex reminiscent of Society and the mad ear doctor on the floor below who is assembling a “monster”, although that’s the wrong term as it looks more like something out of the Chippendales. The girl accidentally meets the creation, and becomes fascinated by it, to the extent of crawling through the air-conditioning to meet it. When she finally does, they sing a duet. They are interrupted by the doctor, who is then set on fire, and the creature’s brain swells up and explodes. The film ends with the heroine throwing an eyeball into the ocean.
Ever feel like you were missing something somewhere? Also involved (somehow!) are a schoolgirl who gets her intestines punched out, a point-of-view shot from inside an ear and a monster-as-ventriloquist variety-show sequence. It’s all crammed into 54 minutes, which makes me wonder about it’s origins – too icky for TV, too short for a movie (and not letterboxed either), it’s just an all-round curious animal!