KOFUN!!
(“Aroused!!”)
Production: Japan, 1968
Director: Okuwaki Toshio
US release title: Naked Pursuit
Category: Sex
Okuwaki’s erotic film – he previously scripted Shojo No Zekkyo (“Scream Of The Virgin”, 1966) and others – is an attempted melange of sex, crime and rebellion in the mould of Koji Wakamatsu, Japan’s greatest revolutionary 60s director. The film starts with its own coda, showing a man previously arrested for strangling a policeman during student protests now accused of sexual assault; while police try to persuade his victim to press charges and harangue the man, his mind drifts and we see his violent crimes superimposed over footage of the 1968 Tokyo riots. Cut to opening credits, after which we flash back to the man who, having escaped custody after his initial arrest, is now on a ferry bound for a remote island, handcuffs still dangling from one wrist. Here he comes across a young girl who is contemplating suicide by jumping from the cliffs; he grabs her and attempts to rape her, struggling with her in the black sand. She flees, he chases, and eventually catches and violates her as the action is filmed in slow-motion and the soundtrack is distorted by heavy reverb. Riot flashbacks and violent zooms are also cut in at intervals. After this the man handcuffs the girl, but she escapes – now half-naked – as a police aircraft swoops overhead. Later she manages to handcuff her pursuer as he sleeps, but soon returns and leaves him the means to free himself and rape her again – thus taking control of the situation, which now becomes an absurdist game in which she calls the shots without the man even realising. Okuwaki piles on more repetition as the final pursuit, with both man and girl now stark naked, leads to a third “rape” in full view of the police. At this point, in an apparent nod to Wakamatsu, the film abruptly changes to colour for its final sequence. The girl walks away – close-ups of her naked buttocks, her naked breasts, and her inner thigh streaked with blood – leaving the man to ponder just who got fucked by who. Actor Masayoshi Nogami, the rapist from Kofun!!, reprised his violent role in Okuwaki’s Ijo Boko Ma (“Perverted Rape Devil”, 1968) – Kofun!! is just one of the many erotic crime films directed by Okuwaki between 1967 and 1969. Some of Okuwaki’s other more extreme films included Keiho 208-Jo Ijo Bokozai (“Penal Code 208: Abnormal Sex Assault”, 1968) and Misshitsu No Hadaka Onna Gomon (“Torturing A Naked Woman In A Dungeon”, 1969).
Posted by Lady Belladonna
