Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood & Madness in Japanese Cinema (1988) - Jack Hunter
Related: Eros - Thanatos - hell - exploitation film - erotic horror - Japanese exploitation - Jack Hunter
Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood & Madness in Japanese Cinema (1988) - Jack Hunter [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Description
An illustrated guide to Japanese exploitation cinema. Profusely illustrated with over 200 explicit and rare photographs, Eros in Hell comprises a unique guide to the most prolific, fascinating and controversial underground/ alternative cinema in the world. --Book Description
This is a highly distressing book. For as much information as the reader discovers, the sense of lacking mounts, creating more questions than this book has means, or intent, to answer. It is best to think of Eros in Hell as a primer for the reader interested in getting a taste of extremism in Japanese cinema. The high points of the book include the chapter on Koji Wakamatsu and the "underground" films of Shinya Tsukamoto, Shojin Fukui, et. al. Meanwhile, the rest of the book founders under the weight of excessive footnotes¹, goofy interviews of Japanese filmmakers by Parisian photographer Romain Slocombe² and a pedantic chapter covering the minutia of Nagisa Oshima's AI NO CORRIDA (IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES).
For readers with more than a passing interest in the Japanese New Wave Cinema, I recommend picking up David Desser's Eros plus Massacre (named after Yoshishige Yoshida's film). Hampered by its aggressively wide scope and passive acceptance of misogyny, Eros in Hell does a terrific job of stressing the need for a comprehensive look at the radical reaches of Japanese Cinema. (ISBN: 1871592933)
¹ All of the footnotes in Eros in Hell would work much better if integrated into the text.
² Slocombe is best known for his photographs of Asian girls in bandages and, apparently, he feels a need to bring up his fetish with everyone to whom he speaks. -- impossiblefunky for amazon.com