Love & Crimes (1969) 88 Films Blu-ray Review

Verdict

Summary

It’s never an easy or fun watch, delving deep into depravity and the worst humanity has to offer. For a film made in 1969, this was an eye-opener, but it’s not something I’ll easily forget and packs a punch.

Plot:

A pathologist performing an autopsy on a woman investigates who she was and uncovers a handful of crimes perpetrated by women over the years.

Review:

A female corpse is rolled into a morgue and a pathologist (played by Teruro Yoshida) slices her open to determine her cause of death. As her blood pools around the table and he opens her up, he soon gets a clue as to what might’ve happened, but the case perplexes him because in Japan, there have been rare cases of young women committing heinous, violent crimes, and this woman, apparently, was guilty of such a crime. He goes down to the records room and unseals some documents and reads about four shocking incidents where women did horrible, unspeakable things, or were victims of horrible, unspeakable acts.

The first case, entitled “The Toyokaku Inn Incident” details a series of murders in an inn where an older man and his younger wife run a respectable inn. He’s a lazy man who philanders with a hot young woman who works at the inn, and his wife runs the place, though the business is struggling to survive. She refinances the place and gets a big loan to refurbish and expand the inn, but before all of that comes to fruition, her husband hires a handsome day worker to kill her, along with his lover. The three of them seal her body in the walls of the inn, but after several months, the place stinks, and while the inn is under construction, they remove her body and dump and bury it in the woods. This leads to the next murder: The old man is killed by his lover (who is set to become the beneficiary) and the hitman, who has cuckolded him by becoming the new lover. But it doesn’t stop there, as the woman kills the hitman out of greed, which leads to her arrest … and the burning down of the inn.

The second story is called “The Sada Abe Incident,” which is perhaps the saddest of the cases, and perhaps the most notorious. A humble woman named Sada Abe (who actually existed and from which her true story spawned several films) works at a wine and dine restaurant and catches the eye of a depressed married man, who courts her and becomes her lover, but only at her workplace. She falls hard into love with him, but he insists on autoerotic asphyxiation, and when she kills him (at his insistence and demand that she do so), she is heartbroken and flees, but not before severing his manhood as a keepsake. She tries to restart her life somewhere else, and sadly becomes a prostitute out of destitution, but she finds an older man to restart her life, but then that ends badly as well, which ultimately lands her in custody where she confesses to her crimes. She is institutionalized and released years later. We see the real Sada Abe in an interview.

“The Kodaira Incident” is the third story and is the most grisly and trigger-inducing, as it details a creepy serial killer who preys on young, vulnerable women during World War II. He chooses women over the course of several years, singling out those who are literally the most hungry, as he marks them as easy targets. He gains their trust, takes them to a remote location, and rapes and strangles them to death. Eventually, after racking up a sizable body count, he is discovered after he victimizes a young woman and her mother, who take him in when he promises to help feed them. This was also based on fact.

Finally, the last case is “Oden Takahashi,” which is a true story about the last female prisoner who was beheaded for her crimes. Oden is a beautiful young woman who is forced to marry a man, who soon develops leprosy. He becomes so hideous that she literally can’t stand the sight of him (or be touched by him), which drives him insane with lust and jealousy as he tries raping her almost on a nightly basis. She takes a lover, who is at her home one night when her husband attacks her. Her lover kills him, and they flee, where she tries starting a life somewhere else. It only gets worse, as her immorality and past sins multiply and fester, leading her to commit more crimes. When she’s caught, she’s sentenced to death, and she’s decapitated.

For being only about 90 minutes, Love & Crime covers a lot of ground, and it’s vividly portrayed in a way that would make Tales From the Crypt blush. It’s shockingly graphic with its rape, sex, and nudity, presenting men as beastly creatures, and women as victims of circumstance. It’s never an easy or fun watch, delving deep into depravity and the worst humanity has to offer. For a film made in 1969, this was an eye-opener, but it’s not something I’ll easily forget and packs a punch. From filmmaker Teruo Ishii.

88 Films brings Love & Crime to Blu-ray / DVD in a limited edition issue, with only 4000 copies produced. The two-disc set comes with a booklet, a commentary, a filmed intro, and a reversible sleeve with alternate artwork.