Fantastic Fest 2008

Check out all the films in this year's Pink Retrospective. Click here for a show listing. Among the first all-color pink films, Kan Mukai's BLUE FILM WOMAN looks like it is making up for lost time, exploding into its super-saturated hues from the very first frame, as the credits appear over a score dominated by bongos and sitars and the screen is crammed with distorted 8mm images taken from a mock blue film, flooded with prismatic blotches of primary reds and blues and silhouettes of naked female bodies - not unlike a more lysergically-inspired version of a Bond movie credit sequence. The plot of BLUE FILM WOMAN is an equally delirious mishmash of horror, sexploitation and trippy nightclub sequences, centered around the family of a stockbroker whose unexpected financial crash results in him offering up his wife to his sleazy, saurian creditor Uchiyama. After prodding and pawing over her in the standard fashion for films of this genre, Uchiyama then locks her up in the garden shed inhabited by his mutant son Hiroshi, who arrives from the reafters clad in carnationi-colored robes. She manages to escape from his clutches in the nick of time, only to be mowed down by a passing car. With her father now reduced to a gibbering wreck, it is left to the daughter Mariko to seek revenge for her mother's untimely demise. Rising from her job as a nightclub go-go dancer, Mariko winds up as a high-class call-girl catering for a group of prosperous businessmen, whom she blackmails to help her bring down Uchiyama after their nocturnal dalliances are captured on camera. (Jasper Sharp, Midnight Eye) Jasper Sharp, pink film scholar and author of the new Fab Press book "Behind The Pink Curtain - The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema" will be in attendance to introduce the film. Expect to learn a lot about this shadow world of Japanese film culture. Very special thanks to Marc Walkow of Outcast Cinema for crucial programming and logistical assistance.

Check out all the films in this year's Pink Retrospective. Click here for a show listing. A young girl, already a jaded sexual veteran, embarks on an odyssey of self-discovery to find out the true reasons for her dissatisfaction and total desensitization. This parable is told in a jagged avant-garde style that must have baffled the target audience of businessmen seeking cheap thrills on their lunch hours. GUSHING PRAYER begins with an extended group sex scene in which the story's young protagonist, Yasuko, is very much the centerpiece. As she lies beneath the thrusts of an enthusiastic adolescent classmate, her friends call on her anxiously from the sidelines "Can you feel it? What does it feel like?" Yasuko however, confesses to feeling nothing, in fact appearing frozen to all feeling. And so, on the threshold of womanhood, with all the weight of adult expectation and responsibility which that entails upon her, upon the goading encouragement of her peers, she sets out on an odyssey of self-exploration in search of complete sexual satiation. (Jasper Sharp) Jasper Sharp, pink film scholar and author of the new Fab Press book "Behind The Pink Curtain - The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema" will be in attendance to introduce the film. Expect to learn a lot about this shadow world of Japanese film culture. Very special thanks to Marc Walkow of Outcast Cinema for crucial programming and logistical assistance.

Check out all the films in this year's Pink Retrospective. Click here for a show listing. After the death of his son, aging dairy farmer Shukichi is left to run his farmstead with only his young daughter-in-law Noriko to help. Struggling under the onset of senility, when his prize heifer Hanako also passes away, it is left to Noriko to cushion him from the emotional shock. Every morning as the sun begins to rise, she creeps off to the cowshed, disrobes and gets down on all fours in anticipation of her father-in-law's arrival with the milking pail. So addled by old age is Shukichi that he is unable to tell the difference. This natural state of affairs soon falls under threat, however, when his scheming daughter turns up from the big city plotting to grab the land all for herself, claiming that her father is in no fit mental state to look after a farm. Given the strange events she witnesses in the milking shed, there's few who will argue... An erotic film for those rough and ready types who don't mind getting their hands dirty, it relocates us far from the standard anonymous suburban environs of most modern-day pink movies to give us a glimpse at life in Japan's rural hinterlands. What director Goto has done here, to quote Spinal Tap, is to "take a sophisticated view of sex by putting it on a farm". Well, one might laugh, but cast and crew alike all strive to keep matters as straight-faced as the far-fetched premise allows, and even more surprisingly, they just about get away with it. The rural sex movie is not a particularly well-ploughed furrow, but though Goto's film occasionally teat-ers on the ridiculous, it is nonetheless outstanding in its field, and quite unlike any udder. (Jasper Sharp) This screening courtesy of www.pinkeiga.com . Jasper Sharp, pink film scholar and author of the new Fab Press book "Behind The Pink Curtain - The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema" will be in attendance to introduce the film. Expect to learn a lot about this shadow world of Japanese film culture. Very special thanks to Marc Walkow of Outcast Cinema for crucial programming and logistical assistance.

Check out all the films in this year's Pink Retrospective. Click here for a show listing. An exercise in manga-style outrageousness that is guaranteed to offend everybody. The black clad S&M Roper is a kind of bondage super hero who has a supernatural genius for tying women up in configurations that leave them helplessly aroused. When the all girl gang, The Bombers, kidnap a man for their personal sex toy S&M Hunter accepts a mission to infiltrate The Bombers' hideout and show them the ropes. It should be noted that S&M HUNTER is a hugely politically incorrect film, loaded with swastikas, delirious patriarchal anxiety, Catholica used for sexual purposes and worse, but few will be able to resist its spiraling craziness for long. The climax, in which the rope-mad antihero employs a 200 foot tall construction crane to execute his bondage masterpiece has to be seen to be believed. Not for the weak! (Lars Nilsen) This screening courtesy of www.pinkeiga.com . Jasper Sharp, pink film scholar and author of the new Fab Press book "Behind The Pink Curtain - The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema" will be in attendance to introduce the film. Expect to learn a lot about this shadow world of Japanese film culture. Very special thanks to Marc Walkow of Outcast Cinema for crucial programming and logistical assistance.