Hantsu x Trash (2015-16)

 

Director: Hisashi Saito

Screenwriter: Keiichirō Ōchi

Based on the manga by Hiyoko Kobayashi

(Voice) Cast: Maaya Uchida as Chisato Hagiwara; Yūma Uchida as Yōhei Hamaji; Kenta Matsumoto as Nakajima; Saki Yamakita as Maki Hayami; Shizuka Itou as Manami Miyoshi; Yurika Kubo as Mai Shinozaki

Ephemeral Waves

 

As an anime fan, as with other mediums and their sub-genres, you do find your coming against tropes which are not defendable. Do not expect a defense here with one of the more prominent ones in anime here, which studio Hoods Entertainment’s Hantsu x Trash really emphasizes, the type of sex comedy which includes content which would be viewed as sexually inappropriate conduct from male characters to female ones. This is however something you do not just find in Japanese animation but found in comedy from other countries, my British heritage bringing up the cases in our past in television and cinema which can be pointed to for this. The tropes in anime are those that have been commonplace - such as male characters peeking at girls in the shower, inappropriate groping and things we have rightly challenged as unacceptable in the modern day as time passed - which would be a struggle to explain to an outsider of the medium to stereotype. By the third episode of this curious straight-to-video fragment, this sadly fully falls into this type of comedy, but I also get an example where, even when I will gladly give the production a kicking for these aspects, I also find material even accidentally working in unexpected ways even if on a morbid level. In this case, like a lot of sex comedies in anime, how many no matter how tasteless feel like a young male character's sexual neurosis as a premise with that the gag to mock.

Deciding to choose this as a subject may surprise some readers, of all the titles to flag up in the non-anime reviews, except that I have always been fascinated by what I have called the "ephemeral" and strange, this an example which cannot be defended for most of its length, but is definitely a "curiosity". From the get-go, there will be the preface now to not have to repeat this, of it being very questionable content. I will also admit finding it fascinating in terms of a sex comedy that did get some morbid laughter from me, not spoken as a hypocrite but that, when it is not about objectifying its female cast, is also however a story about dumb horny men obsessed merely about the bared female breast who are the real butt of the humour. It is tame even in the 2010s when this was released next to what you could get on PornHub and other adult sites even animated, and does present this whilst the punch line is with the male characters being inadequate, pathetic and/or idiots who are punished for their behavior. The punishment is insufficient, even if one character does get a baseball bat up an intimate area, but how much of this feels swashed in the tensions of our lead becomes the central part of this.

It also presents my fascination with dragging up ultra obscure items you the reader may have never heard of, as this is obscure even for anime fandom and is likely not known of at all by many who even know some of the obscurer cult gems in film. These three episodes, two over twelve minutes, the third over fourteen, were just meant to be promotional items, part of a trend of creating tie-in anime that comes with the manga, the first bundled with the 8^th volume of the manga on October 6^th 2015¹, the second bundled with the 10^th volume of the manga in June 6^th 2016², and the third and final one bundled with the 11^th volume of the manga on November 4^th 2016³. Together, they are not politically correct, a sex comedy about the high school male water polo team who is more interested in the female water team, though I will say ahead of time that I have suffered through far more tasteless and sexist content I have unfortunately come across than this. This does feel closer to American sex comedies of the past in tone, only with the presentation of the jokes seen in anime. The issue with this is not the premise but where the humour comes from, in that spying on the female team bathing, as in the third episode, is something that in real life would rightly be challenged. The other part of the humour is more interesting, and becomes more striking in what is barely more than one whole episode of a story which never gets any semblance of a plot until near its end. What little you get here is that these male characters are figures who even find the sight of seeing a bared breast a monumental moment of their life, the kind of joke that transcends history and is not problematic to do as a joke because the target, close to the bone, is the heterosexual males themselves.

The source material was originally published Weekly Young Magazine, originally also the home of the original Akira manga which became the legendary 1988 feature film. It is also a publication that in the 2010s published the likes of Does a Hot Elf Live Next Door to You? (2019–2021) by Meguru Ueno, which just emphasizes that sex sells. Let us get the elephant out of the room that, deliberately including the review outside of the anime sphere, there is a dangerous cliché to dismiss Japanese pop culture like anime for being perverted, where in reality pop culture in many countries, not even touching their fans’ interpretations, have their layers of explicit (or implicit) eroticism or horniness to them. A lot of the dismissal of Japanese pop culture for “perversity” is a red flag for implicit racism, even if we who love anime admit so much of it you would be embarrassed to be caught watching or if more for those with a greater open mindedness to fetishes and comfortable in their sexuality. Factor in too that, in Japan, Studio Ghibli films rule the roost and their longest running animated show, still going since 1969, is Sazae-san, a work by Machiko Hasegawa that follows the titular character, the matriarch of a family, and if about family situations for comedy. These really fetishistic and erotic works in anime and manga, whilst prolific, are an undercurrent to animation, with Hantsu x Trash a real obscurity. Hoods Entertainment made their bread and butter on titles like this, which might not help the argument, but for all the stuff an outsider would raise their eyes at from their catalogue, such as The Qwaser of Stigmata (2010), infamously the animated show about breast milk powering one’s super abilities, we forget that whilst titles like this are brazen and proud to tackle subjects like this, mainstream sex comedy can be as perverse if using humour a self defense mechanism to justify the scenes. Case in point, once ago in my teen years we had American Pie (1999) as a mainstream film, where the title comes as a punch line to someone actually fornicating with a pie as a joke. That film was done with a mocking sense of shame which just differentiates the line between comedic effect and proudly over-the-top sexual fantasies, especially when you consider the most explicit sequence, with actress Shannon Elizabeth as a foreign exchange student who has the prominent nude scene, is presented in the same tone as Hantsu x Trash would have had. That it allows the viewer reveal in the nudity, but ends with a male lead being so out-of-his-depth a potential loss of virginity is as abruptly neutered for him as it could have happened, with his bruised emotional state the joke.

Episode One introduces our protagonist Yōhei Hamaji, a poor guy doomed like many male protagonists in these sex comedies to have a crush on a girl in his school but be under the confused whirlpool of his hormones. He is an archetype that transcends various story types from one country to many, from Japanese animation to US eighties sex comedies, that of a likable prat who is less problematic than his peers, far unscrupulous in their horniness, but still curious about the opposite gender. It is to the point here that if any girl or woman was to show interest to him, his cluelessness will cause him embarrassment in his attraction to them. Like characters in any adolescent romance, his true love is his senpai Chisato Hagiwara⁴, one of the committed members of her water polo team, even if like the other men in his team he has hormones, and like them really has a fixation on the female breast.  This is the fetish of the anime, and these short episodes have no qualms in the slightest in their lewdness, and drawing them in various states, but it also is not that different again from other sex comedies from other countries. In British sex comedy, even in our more tame sex humour, alongside a lot of older and younger men who got bothered by the idea of having sex, many of the jokes with them included a fixation on busty female characters. This is the tamest of things for Hantsu x Trash to have a fetish with, even next to other more extravagantly made and longer anime which, even if not further explicit, a probably more lewd even when there is no nudity. If anything, especially writing this as a heterosexual male writer who can self critique himself, it causes one to look at the obsession with cleavage size by men with a surrealism to it. When you step back, it is peculiar a part of the body of a gender is an obsession symbolically in terms of desire, even in art let alone anime like this gunning for the low hanging jokes.

Episode One shows the trope common in Japanese anime that, whilst still objectifying the women, the men are punished painfully for comedic effect, which has always been a curious side to Japanese anime and manga in their sex comedy in that they constantly undercut their male characters. In work targeting men audiences in their gazes, they depict their stand-ins as completely immature figures a lot of times. Even what could be seen as a gay panic running gag undercuts itself in presentation here, where Yōhei keeps imagining erotic fantasies of Hagi-chan, whilst recuperating in the nurse’s room, only to keep envisioning Nakajima, a team member who looks in his late thirties with sunglasses permanently on, at the end as the one appreciating his caresses. It is the main joke for that episode, whilst for the rest of the three the crisis for him is that, whilst Hagi-Chan is the woman he loves, Yōhei is someone clearly who has both an obsession with large breasts, and is emotionally immature. It is to the point he finds himself coxed whenever any woman, with an ounce of confidence in her desires or an accidental situation, causes the hormones to kick in and turns him into an utter dimwit. What could seen a tasteless homophobic joke in the first episode, with imagining Nakajima every time he fantasies about women in his life, comes off more like a Freudian barrier to Yōhei’s desires, the Super Ego kicking but with an added accidental tone suggesting his denied bisexualility. In a smarter, and more creative anime sex comedy, this would have been a joke that would have been something to run with, here is just due to the strange tone in presenting it without thought to its accidental layers causing my mind to leap to these conclusions. That he loves Hagi-chan for her personality, whilst burning for her physical beauty and curvaceousness, but would not mind buffing his team leader’s nipples even if he tries to deny it. It is for reasons like this I find interest in these less great sex comedy anime, with how for so many even when they come from the crass side, to always objectify the female characters, to go for the crap joke, that there is however a rife amount of psychosexual neurosis to the humour that, if weaponised properly, would be great comedy in another context. That is the one thing that I can appreciate even for something which is quite a cheap production to tie-in to a manga, which does look of its budget in the minimal use of locations, and how the second episode does look the weaker in production in comparison.

One joke from the first episode exemplifies what this could have done if it was not going for the low hanging fruit, the lead’s mind envisioning Chisato being seduced by one of her teammates Shinozaki, someone who is very physical with her friends. In a more complex show than the fragments we got, this would have been compelling, even if tasteless, for imagining the sexual id of a guy who is confused in a lot of ways about his sexuality even if there is one girl he loves dearly. In context it can be viewed as a cheap ploy at lesbianism as a fetish for men than someone’s real sexuality, but could have been a joke that worked in imagining how absurd his desires are, especially as his own superego cock-blocks him every sequence in the first episode, the joke his own disjointed and confused fantasies than at the expense of the female cast. That is as much trying to stretch out a sex gag which most would roll their eyes by excusing it through a layer of amateur interpretation, but that becomes the most interesting thing, even if by accident, through how much of this does follow this. Constantly it becomes a curious gag anime about the strangeness of the male libido, even if the work is not great. It becomes instead less that actual quality of the work which is of interest, but what it accidentally does.

This is still an anime about the male water polo team being perverts, even with episode three having them trying to spy on the female team so Yōhei learn the nipple colour of the woman he loves, which is the episode where I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. It is where the loose string salvaging this anime fully snapped, even if it does led to one male character gets punished by having that baseball bat up a painful area. One recurring joke I will defend in these episodes, because they are all at the expense at the male cast, is the idea they have, because they are all sexually naïve, that they presume just touching a woman in the right way on their breast will cause them to orgasm. Even for a virginal reader of this review, I would hope they realized this is not something that would work; even presuming touching a guy on the chest would have a similar effect should be considered to, because anyone presuming that with the instantaneous effect is being an idiot and a terrible lover. One character who could been seen as problematic nowadays is the female teacher character, neither helping in breaking teaching ethics as in episode two, she even makes a promise to let the male team touch her breasts if they won a match, three seconds only each, and has a desire for Yōhei beyond the boundaries of teacher-student relationships. That set up for episode two, and the disappointment that the entire male water polo team are this stupid to think they can be romantic gods in just touching someone once, is however the one joke even in an un-pc anime which I will defend because it is entirely about her absolute disappointment, and what utter idiots the male characters are portrayed as.

Every time it was entirely when a clear theme was up front as the joke, of how every male character here is as thick as a brick, even Yōhei, is where you see a spark here. It is the kind of premise which, for all the content here with is clichés from previous anime and not aging well, still hits close to home as a joke at mocking the male heterosexual libido. More so, as I have seen titles which have casual edged into sexual violence and far more misogynistic content, this feels more antiquated. Plus with this Super Ego slant to how the joke always punished the male characters, even if the plots here are not defendable and yet reward with their explicitly topless nudity, does make this have a sick sense of humour against the audience who would have wanted these episodes for the casual nudity. Here there is a scene of all the swim team on the floor just from touching their teacher’s breasts, or that she has beaten them all up for not following the three second rule, the exaggeration here of these male character coming off as something itself ridiculous to laugh at, that image in itself the encapsulation of what is clearly the joke but also unintentionally the theme, even a neurosis, running through this.

I have not really even described the visual appearance of this show, and that is for a reason, as it is a cheaper tie-in production, where at times you do see it is a cheaper production. It also barely covers a premise, really a tie-in to the manga for that reasons. A story is hinted at, a romance between a sex fixated Yōhei who yet wishes to be a good person for Chisato, a romantic triangle set up in the finale episode with another girl on the water polo team with a crush on him. Her story is with the added touch though it does play it for a dubious reason; that being her appearance as a physically attracted young woman to boys has caused a huge emotional crisis, undercutting her confidence in herself unless she was able to get past that she stands out physically to men and be able to be self-confident and/or dismiss them. This is another moment that in another anime would have been the right moment to challenge, even in a comedy, the uncomfortable idea of guys even at a young age sadly getting into objectifying the girls in their classes without realizing it in their own clueless hormonal problems. Not many of the cast are set up beyond this, though the premise of a sap like Yōhei trying to balance between water polo and his libido is a premise that could be good, as most could, if focused and were trying for more than clearly here. That this is not really a water polo genre story, and likely is not in the source manga, is itself disappointing because, as a genre hybrid, a sports show combined with absurd sex comedy and romance would work, or least be something really original.  Even if it had stayed perverse and lewd, in a better world, and anime has been able to do this with confidence and without shame, you can have stories which are proudly horny but also emotionally rich and good. It can be to the point they could be dismissed by outsiders to anime as showing the medium as perverted, but in their existence anime can be proudly pro-sex, positive about that and equal opportunity in progressiveness.

The result, just over thirty minutes, could have been cut into a one-off straight to video tie-in, and it feels like a pilot to a series which never came to be, only establishing what is an initial set up. In terms of a comedy, I found aspects funny but with the caveat that this is going to put off someone who, understandably, cannot get past its tone and humour choices. Hantsu x Trash has one scene of a character losing his mind to the point he gropes a female character, which in another context would be offensive even next to the other scenes, but for the most part we are dealing with a type of humour here which has just aged badly. For the rest of this, the idea of someone being so clueless about the opposite gender, males here to women, but attracted to them that they do stupid things like spy on them, is something that can be covered but you could not portray with the same attitude that you still see in some anime like this. It was also something you even saw with 2000s sex comedies I grew up with from the West, even if you played the joke still as the males being idiots, so this problem was always not of just one culture. This particular example evokes a micro-series anime named Colorful (1999), and whilst the question of whether its content is defendable means revisiting it, it’s humour was less sex humour for the sake of sexualizing the female cast, but instead vignettes about men trying to see women in their underwear, or the garments under their clothes, but the jokes entirely about how ridiculous these men were, and the punch lines making them look like morons. Whether that has aged well or not is to debate, but you look to these works which are as much the joke is a guilt reflex of the creators, and they are fascinating even if Hantsu x Trash is very conventional even in the genre.

In the perfect world, these types of sex comedies would not involve this type of sexual harassment humour, and the depictions of sexual content even when kinky would be emphasized in terms of interesting character dynamics, psychological sides even for gags, or even positive depictions of sex. Hoods Entertainment even adapted a manga that would immediately come off as gross fetish material for anyone outside of the anime fan base but had a surprising level of depth to it as a deliberate contrast to this, showing they could do this. It was a work called Mysterious Girlfriend X (2012) about a young man who finds himself in a romantic relationship with a strange girl whose salvia is addictive to him, a strange fetishistic premise turned into a work around this fetish, brazenly, but where you still have a pair who really liked each other and embraced this quirk of the relationship.

You could have expanded Hantsu x Trash away from its questionable sex comedy humour into something as interesting, even if fetishistic, in terms of a sex positive comedy with a lot of goofy humour, but this is a slight production, obscure even by anime fan standards. It managed to produce far more here in typed words than what these thirty plus minutes should have. No premise, unless just undefendable as an idea, is not possible to make into something good and also without being tasteless, and sadly whilst one wishes there was an erotic water polo sex comedy out there which was more wholesome and progressive with this tone, even if still breast fixated, this review also presents another issue found in the Japanese anime industry. That, if you dig, you find so many animated fragments, usually built as tie-ins for manga and in some cases pure one-offs, which never had a conclusion and just exist as half-finished dreams. I can envision imaginary, superior takes on the stories, but the reality is that the actual animation is not this and barely in existence as was the case here.

 

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1) Hantsu x Trash Manga Bundles Original Anime DVD, written by Karen Ressler and published by Anime News Network on August 23^rd 2015.

2) Hantsu x Trash Risque Water Polo Manga Bundles 2nd Original Anime DVD, written by Karen Ressler and published by Anime New Network on April 24^th 2016.

3) Risque Water Polo Manga Hantsu x Trash Bundles 3rd Original Anime DVD, written by Rafael Antonio Pineda and published by Anime News Network on September 9th 2016.

4) Maaya Uchida and Yūma Uchida, the voice actors for these lead characters, are siblings, which is somewhat an odd casting choice as romantic leads. That is not a slight against either of them, Maaya the older sister and both prolific in their careers. It is just an odd choice which I hope they found funny in hindsight to what happens in the show. 

Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004)

 

Director: Andy Humphries

Screenplay: Andy Humphries

Cast: Johnny Vegas as Dave; Mackenzie Crook as Ferris; Mark Gatiss as Jeremy; Annette Bentley as Linda; Julia Davis as Shelley; Lucy Davis as Ruth; Evie Garratt as Joan's Mum; Robert Harrison as Kevin; Nick Holder as Gordon; Dominic Coleman as Tolly

Ephemeral Waves

 

You've upset the Gherkin man!

Ace of Spades by Motorhead is not what I expect opening a British sex comedy, particularly one about two guys in Birmingham delivering potatoes to fish and chip stores, but this is one of the most infamous British films of its time period, forgotten except how it was negatively dog piled upon. Likely greater controversy came from the fact it proudly wares being funded by the UK Film Council, a fund for British cinema production that was contributed to from tickets bought for the National Lottery¹; this means as well family of mine, who bought lottery tickets at this time, may have paid for this among others. The tale of Dave (Johnny Vegas), a slubby guy kicked out the house by his wife for being lazy, and Ferris (Mackenzie Crook), whose allure to the women (even the mother-in-law of his ex he is stuck living) is also his tragedy, alongside a series of other characters at the potato firm in vignettes - it is a bizarre film to return to, and not in a good way for me, just surprising it ever even got made in the first place. Beyond the non-metaphors for sex from the get-go, like "Fishy Fingers" the chippie to unsubtle pickle jar labels, it is gross from the get-go too on purpose, with the fixation of one side character, because of his old girlfriend's fetish for using strawberry jam in the bedroom, of said jam and fish in inappropriate ways. It is also far too niche and peculiar in its humour and tone to have ever appealed to anyone with hindsight, those not on the same wavelength with its gags, but the entire thing for me as a viewer also felt off entirely for other reasons.

It is immediately meant to be confrontation in the gross out humour, but its tone feels like it is missing what British director Jim Hosking got with The Greasy Strangler (2016) a decade on, a notoriously vulgar and twisted film in its gross out, but with the more gleeful edge of wittedness, and a John Waters influence clearly there, to lead it to being a success for a viewer like me. Sex Lives... is just peculiar and actually dour, even when the point is to find humour in the sexual neurosis of its male characters, the intent of its writer-director². The problem is as much because it is not really a sex comedy but plays to the tone of one as, whilst there is enough lewdness to warrant only 18 year olds seeing this back in the day in a British cinema, with the exception of one scene in a sex shop and nude photos on background walls, there is no nudity or explicit sex even as a gag onscreen like in a Confessions... era seventies sex comedy, but it is a lot of gross out comedy rather than playing to the deadpan nature of its series of men struggling with their libidos either. It de-eroticises sex, set in the council estates, reducing it down to shabby men and their existential crisis, replacing the flamboyance of a Carry On sex comedy with just saying "shag" instead, but without necessarily enough wit or just being vindictive in a funny way about the material.

Even in terms of just having as much sexual language as possible to be crass, even Judge Dread, to make an ultra obscure British-only reference, was a lot more elaborate than this, an English ska and reggae musician who, in the seventies especially, gain traction for taking the likes of fairy tales, and making songs around them with sexual innuendo and double entendres alongside just songs about sex. Considering Judge Dread was not subtle either, but more flamboyant on a song like Big Six in his big pun, that pretty much sets up the tone, although considering this film ends on someone wishing to kill a panda to have sex with it, because they would not be able to alive without being attacked, we are in a film which, directed and written by Andy Humphries, is idiosyncratic in a way that I look with a perverse form of admiration in for going to this level, but also never really running with it in anything more perversely clever or so twisted until it goes full circle into inspired. It never tries to go further, and speaking of the John Waters reference earlier, to really got bad taste this should have gone further until it became subversive and gross, rather than gross and merely crass. It is peculiar, in how it really does not follow a plot and falls into a series of vignettes, the closest things to this in tone and shock value being Freddy Got Fingered (2001) and Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (2012) for American equivalents, non-sequitur films where the humour is mostly bodily humour or weirdness at one tone, in which there is a tangent on everyone wondering how bees make honey (or if wasps do), or a young Mark Gatiss as an incel stalker that has not aged well. From The League of Gentlemen to some, Sherlock for others, and for me a series of horror documentaries on horror cinema and culture, Gatiss is one of the few mostly rewarding aspects, trying him damndest with the performance, and having one joke that lands, the failed attempt to kill his interest's dog by placing him on a chopping board on the kitchen top and threatening him with a knife.

It is a film, and I apologise for having to type this, where "proper fanny flavour" is a phrase used, and especially in mind that term means different things to different countries in slang, I feel embarrassed regardless for using dialogue which feels of an alien logic. For any time it gets the tone right for a crude working class story about horny guys - cutting in Buzzcock's Orgasm Addict, a deeply crude but funny punk song about wanking too much - to surreal non-sequiturs that do work, the nameless but majestic gherkin delivery man who, manly stud to all, is open to being with young women working at chip shops to elderly old women with his body, Sex Lives... can work but those are the narrowest moments where it manages to find itself. Most of the time it is depressing, without bringing even callous humour to the proceedings, merely leaving us to wallow in the lives of Dave and Ferris's characters, discussing wanting to have all the sex they want and wasting their lives in pubs, and not landing at all. It opens up a lot of male neurosis about men who are uncomfortable against sexually aggressive women who are, which is a joke which eventually reveals the female characters are archetypes, including Dave's tired wife, without anything really to them, not even fascinating mirrored distortions of what these men view the opposite sex as, but just two dimensional. The mother-in-law, the women who are just more comfortable in themselves, the woman who has group sex with multiple men, leading to one of the other few good jokes about the guys discussing where they parked their cars outside waiting for the orgies to happen, and the relationship between the chip shop employee and her husband are all there for punch lines which do not work. The later pair especially is kink shaming in parodying a consensual voyeuristic relationship where he likes to hide and she likes to mock-adultery with her boyfriends; strange as it is depicted onscreen, barring the lack of safety on his basement supports to lift him on the ceiling, or getting locked in his own car boot by accident, theirs is at least a healthy if peculiar sex life to theirs worth of a film that would funny weird, icky but funny in a sex positive way.

A film could be gotten a lot from the awkward reality of trying to have the sex life one imagines in porn, where two guys in a potential threesome with a woman find themselves more concerned about getting an allen key to fix the bed frame beforehand, but instead it cuts to Carl Douglas' Kung Fu Fighting in the middle of the act, which makes no sense and does raise that the song probably should stay in another time period if it keeps being brought out for films like this. Instead of being a world of desperate men panicking about their masculinity, it keeps skipping the more interesting concern here in favour of them going down the pub being meant to be celebratory, or a scene of dog poo being fired through a super soaker. It does not even get into the fact this is sexist, in that ultimately one of our leads, Dave, does not really deserve the happy ending he gets, or that Ferris' character never gets anywhere, not even a cynical gag in this repetition brought in to emphasis this non-conclusion. By the time we have a neon sex sign montage set to an American lounge ballad song, I again wonder how this managed to get produced, simply because even the 2000s, the UK Film Council for all the unconventional films they funded should have found this too niche or not sellable as a sex comedy as it was, rather than provide the money to the production they did.

At the time when the film was being panned, Andy Humphries actually wrote a defence of the film he made in the Guardian newspaper², making it a class argument that critics were middle class and hated the film, taken from real life experiences, for being working class including the cast not being "glamorous" in the idea form. Honestly, speaking as a working class person myself, Sex Lives of the Potato Men is a film, now forgotten, which I find fascinating to witness, but is narrow in its sense of humour, and neither sexy nor a dark comedy poking holes in sexual hang-ups to ever have worked, a form of strange humour like the American films I have mentioned earlier which is the one area of weirdness I can rarely get into. Jim Hosking, who I mentioned with The Greasy Strangler, got on my vibes, with non-conventional body types, crude and disgusting humour, and enough penises onscreen (including fake ones) to fill a sex shop, but it was also idiosyncratic and clever in its mix of the banal and the arch, whilst also being well made in its production choices from the music to the location scouting. Even knowing that Humphries made the film as dour on these male characters on purpose, which I have to admire, does not really get past that, for me, it never gets this humour across in a way I was won over at all and was lost as a viewer from early on with.

It is a cruel ending punch line to end this review on what Humphries made next, a documentary named Darts Players' Wives (2005), but his career has stayed in TV documentaries and works about British comedians of the golden eras between the sixties to the nineties, Sex Lives of the Potato Men's lasting effect sadly one unintentionally or intentionally putting him in this era of filmmaking only from then on. The UK Film Council itself, founded in 2000, would last until 2011, with way too many films to name behind their legacy. To just name a few, there is Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), a Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner, Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2006), Armando Iannucci's In the Loop (2009), Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008), Shane Meadow's This Is England (2007), Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001), even genre films like Christopher Smith's Severance (2006), with their last film The King's Speech (2010), which proved a last hurrah for an entire decade of British cinema I grew up in, and for the Council, by winning the Best Picture Oscar at the 83rd Academy Awards. If anyone remembers Sex Lives of the Potato Men, we quote the ending of Some Like It Hot (1959) - "Nobody's perfect..." - but this is a type of weird I do not enjoy. I just return to it, once despising it as "completely obnoxious and moronic", and finding its entire existence bizarre to consider instead with less hatred.

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1) Sex comedy film grant criticised, published by BBC News February 21st 2004.

2) If it's too smutty, you're too snooty, written by the director-writer Andy Humphries for The Guardian, published February 26th 2004.

Kekko Kamen (1991-2)

 

Directors: Kinji Yoshimoto, Koji Morimoto, Nobuhiro Kondo and Shunichi Tokunaga

Screenplay: Masashi Sogo

Based on a manga by Go Nagai

(Voice) Cast: Emi Shinohara as Kekko Kamen; Arisa Andou as Takahashi Mayumi; Jouji Yanami as Principal Toenail of Satan; Kazue Komiya as Gestapoko; Kikuko Inoue as Yuka Chigusa; Kiyoyuki Yanada as Mizutamari Tsuyokarou; Mika Kanai as Tanaka Hanako; Mitsuaki Hoshino as Teacher Ben Kyoshi; Tesshō Genda as Shuwarutsu Negataro

 

My designer is a pervert.

At Sparta Academy, a strict system of punishment is carried out by the head master, a masked jester known as Principal Toenail of Satan. Openly uninterested in any of the male students succeeding in life, and a pervert alongside his sidekick and teacher Ben, he employs bizarre punishment teachers to sexually humiliate female students who fall behind in their studies. One by the name of Mayumi Takahashi is a specific target for them, taking the constant brunt of the staff's interest. However, there is always a mysterious female figure there to protect Mayumi named Kekko Kamen, who wears a mask, a scarf, gloves and boots... and completely nothing else. As the synopsis describes, and images of either the anime, the manga or the live action films show, this is one of those franchises which could be embarrassing to talk about, and has not aged well. Go Nagai himself from the 2010s has had a renaissance around him in the West, especially since an adaptation of one of his manga Devilman Crybaby (2018), distributed by Netflix, took the world by storm. His work has gained admiration even before then, whether his giant robot anime, or characters like Cutey Honey who, even if she has had version playing into her transformations in a sexual way, is a magical girl character many love and even had adaptations made for different audiences. Here though we are reminder that, even if his work has been celebrated as subversive he has his whims and some of them are like Kekko Kamen.

It also needs to be stressed to how Kekko Kamen was actually a joke Go Nagai created to send to his manga editor at the time thinking it was be immediately be rejected¹. A parody of Gekkō Kamen, a legendary superhero figure and one of the first of Japanese superhero characters, it was meant to only get a reaction out of said editor only for that person to actually want to publish it as a continuing series. Nagai is not one to have shied away from the perverse in his work too. Between becoming a legendary figure in manga and anime, including his significance in giant robot stories, his first successful manga, Shameless School (1968-1972), was a sex comedy which made him a pariah of moral standards groups. However the fact that Kekko Kamen, this joke he created, managed to last for five volumes, had a 1991-2 anime for the video market, and eleven live action films, is probably something he is baffled about to this day as some viewers might too.

The premise, even if crass, makes sense for a sexy anime if with the notable concern in how this surrounds "punishment" and sexual humiliation, which is a contentious thing to deal with for this anime when experiencing it. There is an obsession in anime with the shame of public nudity, which is played for a joke in many cases and is still argued to be problematic, but is fascinating to scrutinise in terms of imaging anime high school being a melting pot of neurosis, hormones and these types of fears; here it is taken further than this. It is also an anime, whilst only four episodes long, under two hours altogether, which is a chore to sit through and is the worst thing to introduce as anime to someone who has never seen any, even if you were to choose one with sexually explicit content as the first. The fatal combination of how icky the premise is and how utterly lame it all becomes its downfall, as it tries to parody itself with four wall breaking gags and comedy that cannot overcome its icky subject. All four episodes follow the same template exactly. A new punishment teacher is introduced, they always torment the main female character Mayumi, and Kekko Kamen eventually steps in to save the day, usually with her nunchucks and with a finishing attack that cannot be described any more politely as nude spread legged suffocation.

Even with the Barbie Doll nudity, it is a fetish anime full of ripped underwear and titillation that is off putting because it is all at the expense of the female characters without their consent. This show was once cut for release by the British Board of Film Classification in fact because of this, only to be finally be released uncut on my shores in 2007 by ADV Films², a company that no longer exists which, even with their less edgy anime releases, definitely feel of the era with stuff that has not aged well or is cheesy to consider just in their promo trailers. The Kekko Kamen anime in its original form is not a work, even if trying for cheek and a sense of humour, you can defend, particularly as the first punishment teacher would immediately put people off the show. She is Miss Gestapoko, a BDSM queen from (sic) Auschwitz Academy and ranked by fully uniformed Nazis, as offensive as you can get but quietly buried afterwards, something which comes from the point of deliberately going for the most tasteless idea but in the modern day making the worse introduction to the premise as people will find this material even more problematic than before. After that, a bodybuilder whose muscles are the heroine's kryptonite, a female android and a stereotypical ronin samurai seem normal, but you still have to work around its modus operandi being non-consensual. There are moments which can be fished out of virtue, but this will be a huge struggling point for many, especially as the humorous tone can make this more an issue than if the show took itself seriously. Considering the lightness of the end credit songs, with lyrics penned by Go Nagai himself and sung in earnestness by the female singer, it feels disingenuous to what from the song's tone should have been a more light hearted and cheekier sex comedy about a female heroine.

Production wise, it is a cheap show. As much as I reveal in this type of crackerjack, cheap anime from this period, with Kekko Kamen it has also the villain of the week structure which presents a huge issue to for anything to progress. The tone, in another production, would work but is at odds with the subject matter, be it the composer Keiju Ishikawa's score, of its time and low budgeted but still more interesting and diverse, or that the only progressive aspect is how Mayumi crushes over the girls around her, including Kekko Kamen herself. Jokes about Kekko Kamen's nudity and voluptuousness aside, this part of Mayumi's character, crushing over multiple female characters and the whole gimmick of the show could be subversive in another tale. That in itself becomes a thing to consider for this show, how even if with a gaze over young women, this sex comedy could have actually succeeded if one of its key aspects, the sexual humiliation, was removed, a trait that is clearly something more acceptable from a different time period which we look even more damningly on nowadays. A more light hearted and openly erotic tale, still about an evil school full of punishment, but where one girl's relief from it all is an older girl who is a literal superhero, who kindles your romantic longings even when she is brazenly nude all the time, would have worked. Arguably one of the punishment teachers without the content, the robot, would have worked in this tone too; the beautiful girl, the best in class, willing to help you study, only to suddenly start insulting you one night because your grades are still struggling can be one of the few serious and nightmarish aspects which could have been retained. Even the really crass joke that an off-switch is one of her breasts, because her creators were perverts, could stay, but it is when the show has to linger on a female character being restrained against her will and tormented, even if no way near as extreme as a Urotsukidôji title, where the work loses credibility. Controversially, even Urotsukidôji was meant to depict the horrors of demonic entities, and its problems were an undefendable bias to titillation than being proper ero-guro transgression, whilst Kekko Kamen should have been fluffy and silly, causes one to feel gross, and is arguably less defendable because of this attitude.

The origin of this premise does explain this adaptation's lack of legs, already burnt out by its halfway point, even though there is enough here which could have been salvaged. It is telling how Go Nagai views school for example, even with mind how he specifically named it Sparta Academy; even if you only known of the ancient city-state of Sparta through Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 1998 graphic novel 300, or the 2006 film adaptation, it is damning even as a joke premise how the Japanese school system is viewed by Nagai as like a militaristic civilisation, where the weak perish and only warriors of education may survive. Aspects like this which make the work a little bearable and could have been good can be found, be it the parody of Gekko Kamen itself, that Toenail of Satan has nightmares of Kamen entering his bedroom while he is sleeping to give him permanent testicular pain, despite also having masochistic tendencies wishing for Kekko to be his dom, or the fourth wall breaking jokes which work, like the villains complain how Kekko is not using her theme music (which can be heard in this world), or how Mayumi's friend Chigusa Yuka can break the fourth wall, aware of the viewer and able to talk to the screen away from the rest of the cast.

The show even without its problematic centre can also be viewed as very sexist, such as the premise of Kekko being weak against a bodybuilder's physic, and that it takes her the whole episode to realise she can close her eyes to fight him, which would need to be factored in for this premise to ever work. It is juvenile, even if it was not a premise meant as a joke, and there is a sense that a lot of this comes off far more problematic nowadays than it already was as we have rightly reassessed how problematic content like this is. Coming from someone who believes that almost any idea, no matter how bad or tasteless it is, can work if the tone or point of the premise is exactly right, Kekko Kamen is completely misguided in presentation and point. It should be, even if an embarrassing anime to show others, a light hearted comedy. One without the Nazis, without the uncomfortable harassment fetish, without the awful jokey nature and something which, even if the idea of a super heroine who parades herself completely naked barring a mask and accessories is still juvenile, was fluffy and silly. A sex comedy with a farcical edge to it, even one which bordered into the pornographic area of anime, could have worked, everything that this anime never was sadly. Considering its origins as a gag, the chance of sustaining it was virtually slim from the beginning and the anime proves it, even in how that the final episode teases how, if the tapes sold well in Japan, more than what was released would be produced, something which never came to be. It is a bad work to consider Go Nagai from, but sadly for a time, this might have been one of the few adaptations, least in the United Kingdom, that existed from someone like him who is a huge name in the manga and anime mediums. Whilst examples like this in his career show his flaws, his well regarded reputation for when he created characters that could be emotionally attached to and be reinterpreted in so many ways is a far more interesting side to look at than something which is just tasteless and off-putting.

 

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1) Conférence public de Gô Nagai à Japan Expo 2008 ! (in French). Written by Gemini and published by Review Channel on July 8th 2008. Archived from the original on August 22, 2008.

2) The Melon Famers page of Kekko Kamen for BBFC Cuts K: Kb-Km

Ghost Talker's Daydream (2004)

 

Director: Osamu Sekita

Screenplay: Katsumasa Kanazawa and Kenichi Kanemaki

Based on the manga by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro

(Voice) Cast: Masumi Asano as Misaki Saiki; Tomokazu Sugita as Souichiro Kadotake; Yukari Tamura as Ai Kunugi; Daisuke Kishio as Mitsuru Fujiwara

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) / A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

"This anime adaptation had always been one of interest for me because I was a fan of the source manga. Found discounted in a British bookstore, the source manga by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro, whose work was adapted into Twilight of the Dark Master (1997), an obscure Akiyuki Shinbo helmed horror OVA. It is also lurid, about an albino dominatrix named Saiki Misaki who, in-between her sex worker career which also includes writing for a porno magazine, is using her ability to see and communicate with ghosts to help a branch of the local government exorcise buildings and environments. The source manga is violent, sexually explicit and sleazy, and tackles subjects like sexual violence. It was also however a work which looked exceptional, with the illustrations by Meguro, and had managed to be the right side of lurid by being smarter, building a world whose images could be ghoulish as much as it played to sex comedy. Sadly, published by Dark Horse, they only got to volume six before the series was cancelled for English language release, never continued up past through the remaining four volumes, and managing to end on the worse cliff-hanger as well to emphasis this fact involving a haunted apartment complex..."

The anime, as the review gets into, does not sell the manga well. It is lurid, very lurid, and suffers from the fact it scrapes the surface of the material, not the most interesting content, and struggles from its clear lower budget next to the source material's art. It is also, however, an adaptation I had always been curious of, and as a fan of what little of the source material got an English translation, I have to admit there was enough here to appreciate. It is absolutely a manga, not only one I wish had its entire run available, which needed a better adaptation if you could snap your fingers and unleash it.

For the full review, follow the link HERE.

How to Make a Doll (1968)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Herschell Gordon Lewis (as Sheldon Seymour) and Bert Ray

Cast: Robert Wood as Percy Corley; Bobbi West as Agnes Turnbull / Dream Girl; Jim Vance as Dr. Hamilcar West; Elizabeth Davis as Mrs. Corley; Brett Jason Merriman as Mr. Turnbull; Geraldine Young as Mrs. Turnbull; Margie Lester as Dr. West's Dream Girl

An Abstract List Candidate

 

 I never take a hammer in the tub. It rusts you know.

Written by Herschell Gordon Lewis under a pseudonym, as "Sheldon Seymour", (who also did the "Special Computer Sound Effects"), How to Make a Doll is a very obscure film from him and an incredibly weird one to boot. It is a sex comedy from in the late sixties, with no nudity even compared to his early sixties output, and a very peculiar premise that has not aged well. One you could yet imagine Jerry Lewis reimagining at this period, but instead by the director if Blood Feast (1963) with imaginable curious results.

We introduce Professor Percy Corley (Robert Wood), our protagonist, his world one where at a university campus students are necking and heavy petting even in his class, to a rapturous crowd of peers ignoring his teacher writing at the board lecturing. Even he does not notice himself until he trips over the couple on the floor, a very clumsy man with a bad habit of catching his tie in his own front door, not even bothering to re-open the door afterwards but having scissors always on him to cut himself free. Percy is also someone able to succeed in his knowledge about X and Y, but not of "Gs and Bs", and love in general ("Could it be girls are better than text books?"). He is the sole single person on the campus, where he even finds a couple making out in his own three wheeled red pod of a car.

A 32 year old virgin living with his mother, thankfully Percy is more self loathing than an angry white man, instead Herschell doing a film with no gore, post the likes of The Nutty Professor (1963) on a low budget. I was always here for his eccentricities and odd characters, so I am the target viewer for this film even if it was a disaster, but his film of building a supercomputer just to create women is strange, particularly as the humour is odd, with a lot of peculiar dialogue strung together like stream-of-consciousness ("cucumber pie"?), and is a film not of plot, but a lot of prolonged and protracted scenes. Making women with a computer is sexist, and with one unfortunate gay joke, when the first attempt at a higher life form is a man, and one voice from the computer clearly meant to be "Asian", this is a film from an obsolete era. But this predates Weird Science (1985) too, so Herschell was ahead of his time.

What this also shows was that, when presented with little, he will goof about as, from the moment we get to the pop art and multi-colour science laboratory where the computer is found, he both has the theme (decades before) of downloading one's consciousness into machinery, whilst also providing the noises of said computer, including gibbering, laughing and almost sounding like a mule, creating effectively a farce that in not meant to be taken serious. Or that, to simulate sex, screws and plugs (in stop motion) demonstrate it in the most blatant of ways. This, like Something Weird (1967) shows Lewis could be creative but also bizarre.

Unlike Something Weird, How To Make a Doll is a film entirely of padding, tangents and repetition, which makes this arguably one of the most difficult films to recommend from him unless you are a hardcore fan or like true cinematic oddities to watch. By the halfway mark, nothing actually progresses once the computer is introduced. Plot wise, this technically does have an event transpire, that Percy is forced into nearly being sexed to death (or wooed to boredom) on the whims of the computer, wishing to have him be a lady's mind so the experiences can be downloaded into the machine's mind. It repeats for so long however that it enters negative time when this happens, where the film progresses through its neither run time nor feels long, just drifting off into a cinematic fugue that might appeal to some, may not appeal to others.

Far weirder is that the film's main plot ends, only for an extended epilogue to take place of Percy meeting and dating a woman which takes up a considerable chunk of the film. One with an extended joke of him having broken glasses, and a lengthy piece of meeting the parents, all lasting a long time and entirely for a final joke involving a bunny swimming costume, breaking the reality and causing one to wonder what was real originally. The resulting film is beguiling in being a mass of random, disconnected pieces, pieces of Percy being obsessed with bunny rabbits from never having pets as a child to the homemade machine that can materialise anything. That the professor behind the machine, who becomes one with it, has an extended gag of him trying to explain his work, only to go on tangents which lasts a considerable time and has enough strange dialogue within it meant to be funn.y It is fittingly part of Lewis' career, as his career once you dig through it is full of films you would never get in the modern day like this. It is however, even if finding it entertaining, a peculiar creation that, surprisingly, managed to get on the list of the 2016 Arrow Video blu ray restorations of Lewis' work. Bless them for this as this is usually the kind of weirdo production that will baffle people.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalistic/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Bubbles Galore (1996)

Director: Cynthia Roberts

Screenplay: Cynthia Roberts and Greg Klymkiw

Cast: Nina Hartley as Bubbles Galore; Tracy Wright as Vivian Klitorsky; Daniel MacIvor as Godfrey Montana; Shawna Sexton as Dory Drawers; Annie Sprinkle as God; Andrew Scorer as Buck Lister; Sky Gilbert as Rip; Peter Lynch as Dick; Ed Fielding as Jimmy Remington

In terms of oddities forgotten in time, a Canadian comedy crime sexploitation film, set at Christmas, with real life adult film star and pro-sex activist/educator Nina Hartley as a former star turned porn director, with porn star/ sexologist Annie Sprinkle as God, is as idiosyncratic as you can get. It's a very low budget film with some quirks to say the least; those who can appreciate this however would get a lot out of a really low budget and resourceful pulp film that's difficult to categorise. Notably this is a film by a female director, who co-wrote the script, that's proudly sexy but hates its chauvinistic male porn producers and goons with a passion, which means the entire notion of the cinematic gaze in terms of gender is upended whilst being proudly feminist in its own erotic way.

I had no knowledge of Cynthia Roberts. I didn't even know the film was Canadian, set in a wintery environment around Christmas, until you see the red and white maple leaf flag proudly waving in one scene. Bubbles Galore is also very much an improvised production, stealing shots in a real hotel and outside environments, mostly set in rooms whose distinct bright lighting have a pronounced affect on the mood. It looks like a George Kuchar film shot if it met the mid-nineties - plastic colours, a fuck ton of pink lighting, and low budget digital layering effects are to be expected.

Premise wise, Hartley is Bubbles Galore, who is in the midst of trying to shoot a film with Dory Drawers (Shawna Sexton), who despite being a visibly voluptuous and attractive woman is a virgin, leading Galore to want to teach her to play the perfect innocent protagonist of her new film. Her assistant Vivian Klitorsky (Canadian mainstream actress Tracy Wright) is openly gay, a cynical person who is however in love with Bubbles, making her uncomfortable when Galore is more interested in Dory romantically during the production. A scuzzy porn filmmaker, who once had Bubbles as his star, is jealous and wants to sabotage her film to force her back as his property, even if it means targeting a veteran male star, now a drunk with erectile dysfunction, to plant a mole on her set.

Casting Nina Hartley was the film's wisest choice from the get-go. Alongside her work in pro sex education later in her life, Hartley is fascinating as someone who started in the eighties but is utterly different from the outsider's stereotype of what a female porn star. Looking closer to a school teacher, helped by a calm but subtly authoritative voice, Hartley in interviews has sounded as an incredibly strong voice, in the early nineties onwards making it a mission to teach sexual education to adults, and bucking trends in ageism as she still works in the adult medium. She could have also starred in mainstream cinema as she's good in the film. Really, really good, commanding a film where a lot of the cast can be broad, only Wright contrasting as the sarcastic assistant who shares a charismatic chemistry with her. Hartley is great, and with Wright, the large part of the film being a romantic tale between them makes the eventual honesty they show in their love for each other sweet.

In completely honesty, whilst I really enjoyed the film, Bubbles Galore is a mess at times, one which like a few micro budget films I've seen is obsessed with long scenes of nothingness. It's a playful indulgence you have to come to enjoying subjectively in the end to be fully able to appreciate this type of cinema, moments repeated and sprawling in a pleasure of insignificant things to the tip of experimentation. The best example, the closest thing (if done more) Bubbles Galore would've become abstract, is a never ending montage (with individual shots repeated over and over again) between Bubbles doing a sexy photo shot for a feminist magazine, the lead villain having an incestuous side revealed with a fantasy of his mother playing out, and what can only be described as two of his thugs roughing up the old drunken stud, to make him complicit to their goals, by pinning him to a hotel bed as one twists around his elephantine (and rubber) knob whilst the other wanks into his face.

The biggest surprise many would have seeing Bubbles Galore is, from a female creator, that it's a film openly embracing titillation and transgression, which will come as a shock as the 2010s onwards have seen this type of material as problematic, not even considering a women actually directing and co-writing it. The film is softcore, everyone barring Wright naked at times, with the exception of oral sex which I am going to presume, considering they are used at least for one character, is done with the male cast having fake stunt cocks. The transgression is much more shocking nowadays, especially as Bubbles Galore is meant to be a pro-sex comedy. The male characters barring the old stud, an old flame of Bubbles, are scumbags using some exceptionally sexist and crass language, objectifying women. There is, which is never explicit, a rape scene which might put people off, notably in mind however in a film where every female character is entirely sympathetic, always on the side of the underdog we route for, and literally under the eye of a female God with female dancing angels. So the film does come from a mind that the sex when positive is very positive,  fun on the porn shot with Hartley in a devil costume by a Christmas tree at one point and a hunky skinny guy in a bear costume, and Bubbles romances with two other characters played as romantic and sensual.

The result is a curious mix, coming from an era of indie transgressive filmmakers like Greg Araki etc. where bad taste and genre pulp were blended together, here with the notable difference however that it's a feminist film of sincerity and camp. The kind for an acquired taste certainly, but encountering a pro-sex film made by woman on and off-screen is certainly a distinction still, one full of vibrant colour and energy that wears its low budget with pride.

Abstract Spectrum: Camp

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None