... aka: エキサイティング・エロ 熱い肌
... aka: Exciting ero: Atsui hada
... aka: Exciting Eros: Hot Skin
... aka: Gimme Shelter
Directed by:
Hisayasu Satô
Mother (Ran Minagami) is a stay-at-home upper middle class housewife. Father (Shû Minagawa) is a financially successful though frequently-absent businessman. Their 17-year old twins; son Eiji (Taketoshi Watari, who also wrote the script) and daughter Kiriko (Mamiko Hiboshi), are both in their later years of high school. But that is the only thing "typical" about this very demented family in this very demented 57-minute satire / soft-core sex flick, which may be demented by most standards but it pretty par for the course if you know anything about this particular director.
Things open with a small birthday party where something is evidently really off about all of these people. The parents prove to be comically oblivious to both of their children's needs and problems. Eiji doesn't even bother to come out of his room to have his cake while the parents follow their "Happy Birthday to You" song with pointing out what "hardships" Kiriko has caused them over the years. She responds by merely slipping on her headphones and just ignoring them altogether. Both parents are completely image-obsessed; the father with his role as upstanding, heterosexual breadwinner and the mother with her physical appearance and being a dutiful housewife.
Both of the teenage children have retreated into their own little deranged worlds. Son Eiji stops going to school, seldom leaves his room and keeps his door locked at all times. Inside, he stays busy watching atomic bomb explosions and tinkering around with a telegraph machine sending Morse code messages to someone. Anyone. Maybe no one. He's so dulled by life he eventually sticks live wires up his nostrils just to feel something and eventually goes completely mad, shaves off all his body hair (including his eyebrows), swallows a razor blade, gorges on food and sexually assaults both his sister and his mother, capping one of those attacks off by biting off a tongue!
Kiriko aimlessly rides around on her bike during the day and spends her evenings at home listening to music and masturbating to porno mags next to her stuffed Snoopy doll. She also has some rather unhealthy fantasies about chainsawing her parents and of her brother raping her. At school, she attracts the attention of a sadomasochistic female science teacher (Kiyomi Itô), who turns out to be just as fucked up as the rest of the characters. She sneaks off to the school toilet to masturbate with a Tabasco-sauce covered tampon (!!) and then initiates Kiriko into some kinky sex that involves slapping, choking and demeaning her, licking her eyeballs (??) and eventually full blown sex on the school roof. She caps that off by raping Kiriko with a large syringe and then squirting the blood all over her face afterward!
The father has started to only want anal sex from his wife ("No! Not there!") which ends up being because he's actually a self-hating closet homosexual who hits on men on his bus rides to work, tries to pick up a teenage boy and shoplifts sports magazines so he can knock one out in a public restroom. The mother constantly watches TV until it finally just explodes, works herself up into a sexual frenzy doing an aerobics routine in the kitchen and stuffs herself with lettuce and tomatoes. The entire family eventually descend into an orgy of incest, rape, torture, murder and suicide.
Many people are gonna find this twisted sex flick disgusting and in the poorest taste imaginable... and understandably so! However, it's also so over-the-top in how it shoves its grotesque absurdities in your face that other viewers will enjoy the dark humor and glee it takes in blaspheming the outwardly "respectable" nuclear family who put on one face for the world at large but are something else entirely behind closed doors. In that regard this is actually closer in spirit to some of the work of David Lynch and Todd Solondz than your usual pink film, which are frequently just as sleazy and rape-obsessed as this one yet lack the satirical edge.
This was one of hundreds of releases from busy soft-core studio Shishi Productions and one of dozens of pink films from Satô, who made some of the more interesting films in this category and has rightly been singled out by cult film fans for his transgressive, inventive contributions to the genre. Sadly, most of his early work has never been officially released here in America nor have most been restored and released on DVD or Blu-ray, as is the case here. The best print that's currently available is a washed out VHS copy, though I've seen a lot worse. At least it's widescreen and has English subs.
★★1/2
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