Horrors of malformed men

"Banned for decades! The most notorious Japanese horror film EVER made!" What a grand sales tag that is, all in upper-case characters: could a movie possibly live up to it, even one called Horrors of Malformed Men?

Its director, Teruo Ishii, was a cult figure in the erotic-grotesque sub-genre of Japan's "pink" movie industry of soft porn, in which firm nubile breasts were flaunted with pseudo-aesthetic abandon. Initially an indie phenomenon, its large audiences appealed to Japan's mainstream production companies, including Toei. The studio funded Ishii's "eroduction" of a screenplay he'd co-adapted from a sensational novel.

The plot is mostly not bad enough to be laughable, but a horror movie it is not. It is a tale of a medical man imprisoned in a lunatic asylum where bare-topped young women scream. He escapes and discovers he has an unknown recently-deceased brother, whose wife has her way with him, then dies, as has another young woman. His unknown father has webbed fingers and has exiled himself to a rocky island where he's developing a paradise comprising deliberately malformed humans, including two-sexed Siamese twins joined at their back.

Daubed with much white mud, lurid make-up and contorted limbs, the malformed are portrayed by one of Japan's strangest fringe groups, Butoh performance artists. A post-War anarchic form of modern dance, influenced by contemporary homosexual culture and anti-Western feelings, Butoh (originally a term describing ballroom dancing) and its white-painted practitioners found favour in the West (and were a featured aspect of an offbeat 2008 German romantic film, Cherry Blossoms). One of the dance form's leaders jerked and jumped, leered and laughed manically in full Butoh fashion in Ishii's film, playing the demented outcast father.

The movie also incorporated a detective story, introduced as a deus ex machina at the end, thereby tying up lots of loose ends and silly plot devices, explaining them all, laboriously, to the audience and the very confused movie characters, using a series of colour filters and shadowed close-ups. The last few minutes do become almost joyously laughable, when the unintentionally son and his sister choose to die atop a fireworks storeroom, their body parts (including clasped hands) soaring above the island, calling out to their much-abused but not malformed mother.

Why was the movie banned, for four decades? Breasts (naked or knife-carved), incest, perverted surgical experimentation, lesbian caresses and cavorting maidens were not graphic, and it's somewhat cheering to learn that Japanese censors decided the film was horribly insensitive to the feelings of handicapped people.

Ever since the first recognised pink film (Flesh Market in 1962), directors working in the genre usually knew its limitations better than Ishii did this time. The genre survived industrial ups and downs and still thrives in Japan. Eventually, of course, the "pink" movie phenomenon did get around to churning out gay-themed movies too (Legend of the Big Penis: Beautiful Mystery is a 1983 movie that will have to be seen to be believed).

This movie was lead actor Teruo Yoshida's penultimate career movie. He made one the following year (1970) and only reappeared once again, for the same director, 25 years later. There may be a strange professional tale or coincidence to be discovered, because Ishii also took a long career break, being uncredited between 1979 (when he was 55 years old) and 1991, when he returned, making six more movies. He wrote, produced and directed his final movie in 2001 at the age of 77: Blind Beast v Killer Dwarf, a low-budget effort focusing on Tokyo's all-girl Asakusa Revue company and bodiless limbs.