Re-Wind

Do you all know about pinku eiga? Japan’s “pink film” genre goes back to the ’60s and maybe isn’t a genre at all: the underlying imperative that unites these movies, which run the gamut from action to drama, is the display of naked flesh. But bleak thrillers and horror films hold some dominion in the pinku pantheon, which is vast and, like most exploitation catalogs, required decades to receive due appreciation. A titan in his field, the prolific Hisayasu Sato authored a number of intriguing, artful, imaginatively transgressive pinkus. The one I’ve spent the most time with is Re-Wind, originally released in 1988 as Celluloid Nightmares or Abnormal: Ugly Abuse. Its ensemble of characters are linked by apparent snuff videos that beguile everyone who beholds them, generating a network of mediated voyeurism. Re-Wind shamelessly cribs from both Peeping Tom and Videodrome—both being excellent films to crib from—though it is more appalling, grotesque, and horny than either of those precedents.

A VHS tape clutched by a dismembered hand protruding from an abandoned refrigerator is discovered in an empty lot. It shows a rape and murder transpiring through a gauzy curtain of video static. A man and a woman watch it and are immediately aroused. Rather than the tape that makes people die (see Ringu), this is the tape that makes people fuck (again, see Videodrome). He licks her breasts and strokes her vulva through her enveloping white panties. She later asks him to put her in handcuffs and take her from behind. This is all captured quite slowly and methodically: it’s one of the pinkest parts of this pinku, and another is soon to come. Two workers at a video club—the clients rent tiny rooms where they masturbate in front of televisions—watch the same contraband videotape as the previous couple. The woman cheerfully suggests they “commit incest.” Are these two actual siblings? This pink sequence is strictly oral, with faces buried in crotches, licking genitals through, once again, underpants. As always, the solution to getting around the censors—the display of genitals being verboten—winds up being more erotic than the images the censors sought to prohibit.

So far, Re-Wind is more sex than violence, but the latter eventually overtakes the former. A reporter who calls herself the Crime Hunter wants to uncover the source of this snuff tape and the sleazebag underground scene it came from. Sato concentrates much of Re-Wind’s 64 minutes on sensation. Camera gear and amateur video aesthetics are fetishized and weaponized: a blade juts out from astride a lens, a tripod becomes a lance. Exposure to video violence seems to prompt hallucinations: an unsuspecting diner encounters a bowl of noodles crawling with maggots. Appetites get the best of these characters and every one of them—and, by implication, us—are captured to varying degrees in this web of perversion and sociopathic urge, where it is only our entertainment technologies that separate us from direct involvement in the vilest predation. 🩸