Part of the NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: 1960s NIKKATSU ACTION CINEMA Retrospective

"An important rediscovery on many fronts." - Tim Lucas, VIDEO WATCHDOG

One of director Koreyoshi Kurahara’s boldest departures from studio convention was this frantic, black-and-white portrait of youth culture gone wild, starring Tamio Kawachi as Akira, a punk who hangs out at a jazz coffee house, living and breathing the wild Western music. One day he picks the pocket of a hooker's client (with her cooperation), but is caught and sent to jail. There he meets the like-minded Masaru (Eiji Go), and when they get out, they steal a car in the Ginza and pick up the hooker, who arranges the same scam with her latest John. Celebrating, they drive to the beach, where they find the reporter who snitched Kawachi to the cops, together with his artist fiancée Yuki (Noriko Matsumoto), whom they grab and take to the beach, where Kawachi rapes her. The lawless trio then rent an apartment together with money from selling the stolen car, living together and sharing sex as they would cigarettes. But one day, Akira runs into Yuki at the jazz bar, where she tells him she is pregnant with his child. To Akira this announcement is just another crazy riff in the jazz solo that is his world, but actions, he will see, do have consequences: sometimes violent, fatal, and absurd.

Released not long after Godard’s BREATHLESS, THE WARPED ONES (also known as SEASON OF HEAT) has similarly amoral characters, frenetic pace, and dynamic hand-held cinematography, but Kurahara’s vision is, if anything, more extreme, even to the point of existing in a world of its own, beyond normal comprehension. Kawachi’s punk, especially, transcends the usual social and moral categories, like an animal in human form. (Kurahara reportedly told Kawachi to think of his character as a "hungry lion roaring at the sun.")

A fascinating experiment in style (not to mention the limits of human behavior), Kawachi's famously uninhibited performance catapults the film into the highest ranks of "bad youth" cinema, and perfectly captures the essence of Beat. A stylistic and amoral high point of early 60s cinema, THE WARPED ONES was actually released in dubbed form in the US by Radley Metzger's Audubon Films as THE WEIRD LOVEMAKERS.

Synopsis adapted from the FAB Press book NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: NIKKATSU ACTION CINEMA by Mark Schilling. Films, posters, and still photos copyright Nikkatsu. All rights reserved.

A larger edition of the series was originally presented at the 2005 Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy. The 10th anniversary edition of the festival will be held April 18-26, 2008.

Special Thanks to Marc Walkow.

Presented by Outcast Cinema.