... aka: Nurse Diary 3
... aka: Nurse Diary: Beast Afternoon
Directed by:
Naosuke Kurosawa
The third and, I believe, final entry of Nikkatsu's "Nurse Diary" series, this follows Nurse Diary: Wicked Finger (1979) and Nurse Diary: Nasty File (1980). Aside from the whole nurse angle, there doesn't appear to be any connecting threads plot-wise between these three films and each have different directors and are in completely different genres. The first is an erotic comedy, the second is an erotic drama and this last one is an erotic, surreal, Cronenberg-esque sci-fi / horror / murder mystery tale. Director Kurosawa is best known for the memorable ZOOM IN: RAPE APARTMENTS (1980), which featured an arsonist, rapist and serial killer running around a housing development setting women's vaginas on fire. It know it may be hard to believe but this one manages to be even more out there!
Going where no mad scientist has ever gone before - not even Freud and Jung! - hospital director Dr. Shun'ichirô ("Hide Ekado" / Eimei Esumi) has created a metal ring that he claims will allow him to enter the "Dream World." Too bad he doesn't get a chance to try it out as he and his nurse assistant, Naomi (Miki Yamaji), are promptly hung from the rafters of the lab. Though Shun'ichirô's noose breaks before he dies, he promptly disappears soon after. Meanwhile, Reiko (Jun Miho) is having sex with her boyfriend Jun (Kôzô Murao) in a graveyard when she's scared by a spider. The incident causes her to tense up so much that she and her partner become locked together. They're then forced to waddle their way to the nearest hospital with their pants around their ankles to be professionally separated.
That traumatic incident causes sexual problems for Reiko. A Rorschach test determines she's developed a severe case of "genophobia" (a fear of sexual intercourse) and she's ordered to go to the Tachibana Clinic for a week of treatment. Little does she know but she's actually there to serve as a guinea pig. Someone sneaks into her room her first night there and inserts a small red bell into her vagina (!) with tongs while she's sleeping. The following day, a female doctor - Dr. Akizuki (Maiko Kazama) - inserts the small metal ring, the same one the doctor was murdered for, inside with the bell. Akizuki explains that the ring is equipped with a microcomputer and special censors and works as a "dream playback device" so they'll be able to project and then psychoanalyze her dreams. As for why it goes inside of her lady bits, the doctor claims women use their wombs (?) to dream. As we can see, this is going to be an extremely medically accurate tale.
After the insertion of the ring, the bell is activated later that night and Reiko has a bizarre erotic dream involving paint pouring into water, laughing, spinning white masks with different colored eyes and sex with one of the hospital workers, Dr. Katsuragi (Hideo Shirayama), whom she only previously met briefly. Her next dream gets a little darker and involves a knife, a bloody hand grabbing her by the throat and getting rejected for a ménage à trois by Katsuragi and hospital chairwoman Ikuko (Maki Kawamura), who's married to Shun'ichirô but having an affair with Katsuragi. Each morning after the dreams, Reiko is taken into another room and has the ring removed. It's then placed into a computer and projects her dirty dreams onto a screen for anyone to see, something she's understandably mortified by!
While their experiments are a success, Katsuragi and Akizuki have run into another problem. They're scheduled to go to New York City to unveil the Dream Ring at a medical conference but they have no way to explain how it was made or how it actually works. However, it's revealed they're keeping Dream Ring inventor Shun'ichirô prisoner in a cell in the basement of an abandoned building, and he's gone a little bit mad. Hoping to change that and snap him back out of it, they have him hooked up to electrodes and Dr. Akizuki is tending to his every need, whether that be having sex with him or quenching his thirst by allowing him to drink her urine straight from the tap (!!!) Secretly she still pines for his assistant Naomi, whom she was carrying on a lesbian affair with, and hopes to avenge her murder.
From the attempts to use vagina bells to hypnotize patients into becoming knife-wielding instruments of revenge to the outrageous fiery finale featuring the male doctor, female doctor and scientist's wife all attempting to "cure" the crazed inventor with strenuous group sex, this is twisted erotica as only the Japanese do it.
Super-bizarre, super-stylish, sometimes sexy and more than a little pervy, this features gobs of T&A and soft-core sex (though always shot in an interesting way), gratuitous POV shots from inside a woman's nether regions, a weird electronic music score (possibly stolen from another film, though I'm not so sure) and lots of clean, interesting surreal visuals. Laughably absurd? Sure! But in that great, straight-faced kind of way where everyone involved go all in on the weirdness. This is also much more imaginative than most erotica produced in the U.S. and Europe at the time, so bonus points there.
There was an English-subtitled DVD release for this, as well as for the first "Nurse" title, from Impulse Pictures / Synapse here in America in 2006, both as part of their "Nikkatsu Erotic Films Collection" series. However, for some reason they did not release the middle chapter. Actually, I could find no evidence of any home video release for that one.
★★★
No comments:
Post a Comment