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A failing stockbroker sells his wife off for sex to help pay his debts. After both the wife and husband meet an untimely demise, their young daughter, Mariko (Miki Hashimoto) forgoes her own aspirations to become a sex worker and exact revenge on the businessmen who ruined her father and her life.

From a sensual, establishing scene that plays out like a Maurice Binder credits sequence to a 60’s Bond film, Blue Film Woman hints at something that it never truly reaches. This is a revenge flick tinged with a cautionary tale, but it never accomplishes either to any degree of satisfaction. The first half of the narrative sees Mariko spiralling down a pit of misery that begins as her father becomes indebted to an opportunist loan-shark.

Soon after, there’s a fatal car accident, a suicide, sexual assault involving a mentally handicapped man, it’s all rather grubby and unpleasant. As with many Pinku flicks of the era, the camerawork is leery, lecherous and provocative. It promotes the idea of an oppressive patriarchal system in which a woman cannot end up on top. In which money is the dominating force. In which the house always wins.

On the cusp of the sexualised revenge movies of the 1970’s, Blue Film Woman misses the chance of having an empowered female character win out. Even at her peak, Mariko claims a hollow victory. How she has used her body to exact her revenge but in doing so, has perhaps lost part of herself. This is far cry from the Female Prisoner Scorpion franchise that would come a few years later, in which Mieko Kaji pushes back against an oppressive system and wipes the floor with those in power. If anything, Blue Film Woman is a tragedy.

Visually, this is a movie that uses groovy trickery of the era. From coloured lamps to projected images on naked torsos, there’s a haze of youthful debauchery about the club scenes that are so, “of the time”, but rooted in reality. The score flits between noir’ish rhythms to sitars, which again evoke the summer of love and all things hip. It’s this exotic, mystic quality that director Kan Mukai attempts to imbue his film with. It’s modestly manufactured but it gets the job done.

Of the four Pinku movies I’ve caught recently; Blue Film Woman isn’t the worst, but it definitely feels like a missed opportunity. But then again, I’m pretty sure the filmmakers weren’t really going for the whole, female empowerment gig.

Blue Film Woman is available via Third Window Films.

Charismatic everyman Joseph Gordon-Levitt thrived as a notable name in blockbuster epics (Inception) and indie favorites (500 Days of Summer), but his waning presence in Hollywood has left his career in a curious state. In the German thriller 7500, Gordon-Levitt’s first starring vehicle since 2016, the actor’s versatile abilities carry an effective, yet uneven boilerplate thriller set in the sky. 

7500 follows Tobias Ellis (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a proficient pilot who has happily settled down with his flight attendant fiancée Gokce (Aylin Tezel). His daily routine is forever changed when a group of terrorists board the plane, including a weary young man Vedat (Omid Memar) who begins to have doubts about his actions.  

Considering its subject matter, writer/director Patrick Vollrath effort could have easily drifted into trashy, exploitative territory. Thankfully, his debut feature places a keen eye towards realism, eschewing genre standards in an embrace of authentic moments. Utilizing quiet ambiance and a mixture of cinematic styles (jumps between tight-knit shots to coldly captured camera footage), Vollrath holds his audience’s attention throughout, never glorifying the horrifying realities shown on screen. 

7500 delivers a commendably empathetic effort in capturing both sides of the fence. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance affectively carries the narrative, capturing the blur of mental states during this spiraling situation while properly dialing his emotive cadence. The pain and guilt Tobias feels during the initial incident is portrayed throughout, with violent outburst morphing into a solemn acceptance of the losses that has occured. 

Going toe to toe with Levitt is Omid Memar, delivering a breakout performance as a terrorist faced with his agonizing actions. Vollrath’s script thankfully offers some dimension to Vedat’s journey, displaying him as a byproduct of a systematic effort rather than a callous killer. It all builds to a tense third act standoff between Tobias and Vedat, with the characters connecting over their respective pains while operating in a frantic frenzy to survive.   

7500 takes off without a hitch, but there are limitations to its approach. Vollrath’ commendably grounds the narrative in its close-quarters setting, but that choice comes with its fair share of dry spells during the film’s dramatically insipid frames (it’s a shame that aside from Tobias and Vedat, the characters are flat and one-dimensional). The script also fails to escape cliché-laden genre beats, landing at its inevitable conclusion without much inventiveness. 

Even with its limitations, 7500 soars as a tense, workmanlike thriller, elevated by its delicate balance between thrills and realistic moments. 

A Perfect Host: The BRWC Review – A group of friends rent an isolated lake house owned by a fitness-obsessed man with mysterious intentions.

One of the biggest tell-tale signs that A Perfect Host was going to end up being an amazingly bad movie is shown to us right in the opening scene as a deep-voiced narrator spouts endless expository dialogue and talks down to the audience while we witness a slew of shots of the outdoors and various different neighborhoods.

For some, this opening might set the tone for the rest of the film – a chilling, dark, cold opening that doesn’t give you any breathing room, and throws you in with the pack of wolves right from the start. But for others, it will come across as extremely lazy, incredibly rushed, and a poor form of storytelling. That’s how I viewed the opening, and really, the entire movie after it.

The instant it starts off, it is upsettingly obvious that the entire movie is going to be rushed. With a running time of only one hour and sixteen minutes, including credits, there really isn’t a lot of room for any kind of character growth whatsoever. In fact, the characters here are some of the most one-note characters I have seen in a horror movie in a long time.

They don’t have any sort of backstory solely because writer/director Chad Werner was too focused on keeping the film quite compact and tight that it created a problem. The movie feels relatively short and has some sequences that I’m sure people will enjoy if they are willing to turn their brains completely off, but for those that are looking for a genuinely fun and interesting horror flick are going to have to resist the urge to turn it off in the first ten minutes.

But all of the poor character elements aside, it just simply tells a boring and uninteresting story. It is painfully familiar and borrows off of so many other, and better mind you, horror films from the past. The premise of a group of people going to an isolated lake house is nothing new, that’s for sure. It would’ve been a little bit better had they taken that concept and injected some new life into it (such as the excellent Cabin in the Woods), but they never do that.

Instead, it goes the predictable and formulaic route at every possible turn. The “horror” scenes are completely unscary and rely far too much on jump scares. To make matters worse, the acting, line delivery, and the dialogue, in general, are all terrible are always come across as cringe-worthy.

Online, I have seen some people say the film is self-aware and admittedly over-the-top, and while that might be the case, it doesn’t benefit the film whatsoever. I’ve seen lots of great films that were silly and self-aware, but this wasn’t one of those movies. The only good thing it has going for it is its running time, which comes as both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it means you won’t have to put up with the film for long, but it is also a curse because it means that the film has absolutely no room for growth.

A Perfect Host suffers greatly from its short running time and boasts an incredibly silly, over-the-top script and features painfully boring horror sequences.