JapaneseAsamiSaori HaraMint Suzuki
Horny House of Horror
Medium: film
Year: 2010
Writer/director: Jun Tsugita
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Keywords: boobs, rubbish
Actor: Asami, Saori Hara, Mint Suzuki, Yuya Ishikawa, Wani Kansai, Akira Murota, Takashi Nishina, Demo Tanaka, Toshi Yanagi
Format: 75 minutes
Url: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1806906/
Website category: J-sleaze
Review date: 12 December 2012
It's another trashy Japanese schlock-fest. I'm not a fan.
It's a parody of the 1980 horror film, Motel Hell, which itself has been called a satire of other horror films like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (This is incorrect and Kevin Connor had actually wanted to make a serious horror film. He just didn't have much money to do it with.)
The Japanese version's story involves three men in a brothel. One of them (Yuya Ishikawa) is about to get married and his beautiful bride-to-be is at home, waiting for him. However the other two (Wani Kansai, Toshi Yanagi) think it would be a laugh to make him pay for sex with a prostitute. Right at the beginning, this is where the film lost me. Ishikawa doesn't want to go in, but they make him. How? He's bigger than them. He really doesn't want to do this. A better actor than Ishikawa could have sold the scene by layering subtleties under his surface outrage, but unfortunately we get none of that. Instead the movie simply breaks. I didn't believe that the character Ishikawa was portraying would have let himself be dragged into this whorehouse and the fact that he'd done so killed all my sympathy for him immediately.
Later, there's more discussion. Ishikawa explains himself. Nice try, but no. He's there because the filmmakers want a nice guy alongside the scummy ones in their Horny House of Horror and they weren't too worried about plausibility en route. Later I also didn't believe that he wouldn't have punched his friend in the face and taken his phone back.
This isn't any ordinary brothel, mind you. The title might be a clue. These girls do fatal things to penises. Naturally they're all played by past or present Adult Video stars: Saori Hara, Asami and Mint Suzuki. The most famous of those is Saori Hara, who's apparently with Maria Ozawa one of the two most downloaded AV actresses in China. She's since announced her retirement from show business after a nervous breakdown following the 2011 tsunami. Here, she's okay. Does she act? Not noticeably. Does this matter? Nope. She's the most important of the girls, but her screen presence is bland (although she has the biggest breasts).
Asami is the best reason to watch this film. I've been a fan of hers ever since Sukeban Boy and she's on form again here. She's been in plenty of these schlock-fests (The Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, Erotibot, Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead, etc.) and she throws everything into them. As with Doctor Who, it's all about tone. Asami has a ton of screen presence, with lots of energy. Here I particularly liked the way she swaps between trashy thug and cute duck-faced innocence.
Finally there's Mint Suzuki, who can't act at all. She's doing her best and she's bouncing around with the best of them, but she's hollow.
The story is even flimsier than I'd expected. Male victims get entertained in scenes with lots of nudity and digital fogging of genitals, until something bloody happens. That's about it. There's a final act which mixes things up a bit and has a revelation that would have had me hooting in a better film... but I'm afraid I didn't care. It also doesn't help that I think we're supposed to be cheering on the men at the end as they fight and kill women, despite the fact that I despised both sides equally and, if anything, was probably cheering for Asami. In the end, the film isn't misogynistic. I vaguely approved of the final line-up of survivors vs. victims, albeit without really caring. However I hadn't enjoyed watching the fight scenes with men hitting women.
Incidentally the original Japanese title is an untranslatable pun. I prefer the completely different English one.
Absolutely not a recommendation. The J-schlock genre at its best can achieve greatness (Sukeban Boy, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl), but unfortunately it's just as likely to be mediocre. This one got me offside right away, then kept me there throughout. I didn't react to stuff that might have made me laugh in another film, or else I actively disliked it. The eyeball-punch is stupid. The scene of women's bottoms is distasteful. It's full of nudity, but it's not as if the world has any shortage of that and in any case they've wimped out on the genitals. (Actually seeing bad things done to penises would have been funnier.) Don't bother.