The Angel Guts Collection 3 - Angel Guts: Red Porno

Getting into the second half of Third Window’s Angel Guts Collection takes us into the Takashi Ishii written, Toshiharu Ikeda (Mermaid Legend, Scent of a Spell, Evil Dead Trap) directed: Angel Guts: Red Porno. 

Shopworker, Nami (Jun Izumi), is asked by a friend to cover for her at her second job, which turns out to be a porn shoot. Seems a big ask. The subsequent photos end up in a successful magazine featuring Nami in S&M situations. Though unwilling to return to another porn shoot, she's sacked by the manager she’s having an affair with. All the while she thinks she’s being stalked, perhaps by loner Muraki (Masahiko Abe), who has started to now blatantly and obsessively follow her. 

If ever a film wore its title on its sleeve it would be Angel Guts: Red Porno. There's both a lot of scenes with red lighting and a lot that’s close to downright pornographic. In comparison to the previous film (Red Classroom, Nami) the film suffers because it’s more focussed on the sexual aspects, though often in situations with people who are alone – so yes, cue a lot of scenes of masturbation even if of course only so much can be seen on screen. Considering the director is Ikeda these scenes are well shot, often cleverly constructed, even if quite extreme for a mainstream film, but even so it’s still just autoeroticism. Ikeda knows how to use a camera so this is not dull fare, but the story just seems to be lacking a bit too often. It also fails to work at the same depth of psychological interrogation the prior films brought to the fore. 

Nami has an affair with her boss. Muraki is a loner that his neighbours find suspicious – women's underwear is being stolen and they assume it’s him because they find him odd, oh and he watches one of his neighbours masturbating (in one of the more explicit sequences you can expect to see - though does make you think: for god’s sake why not close your curtains!). Sometimes what seems to save these scenes is an odd sense of squishy realness to some of the extremeness, or style – Muraki placing Nami's porn mag under the red light of his kotatsu to make it pornier - seems quite in-keeping for the character while also being stylishly shot. 

For all the explicitness on display it is worth noting that the film does not try and just make everything sexualised. The one act of sexual assault seen is short and brutal and awful; but it is meant to be that; nothing about it is sexualised, it is deranged and the perpetrator is  a genuinely damaged person; the film’s dialogue notes how often activities that seem more harmless lead to worse actions – like children who torture animals often do far worse as adults – so those that steal underwear often gravitate to worse and more violent sexual crimes; it's a relevant observation - Muraki's obsessive behaviour towards Nami and how his neighbours view him are grounded and appear to make him a genuine threat. So there is insight here, but it's pretty thin stuff compared to what we see in the first two films in the set.

There's also irony on display: the soundtrack repeats a soft jazz song, a story about two people falling in love at first sight and there’s no small absurdism to this, considering there’s very little love in the film and what's there can be pretty twisted. Nami’s apparent best friend is happy to send her unknowingly to an S&M porn shoot that could screw up her life; Nami’s boss is happy to sleep with her, then discard her when it’s convenient for him; Muraki half understands how his behaviour towards Nami makes her feel but still continues, and then he gets the worse treatment of all from his neighbours based on the fact he doesn’t meet their criteria for normality. 

Most of how the film works seems to be based on Ikeda’s direction and his camera. Scenes where Muraki approaches Nami and Nami runs away, believing him to be her stalker, is pacey and stylish, with surprisingly good use of space to show how trapped Nami feels, both in her head and in her life. Muraki - arguably unintentionally - trapping her in a toilet stall is shot from above. Nami seems to be stuck in a tiny, angled space with no room to move. We can understand her anxiety but also recognise that Muraki is not quite what she thinks, though he is definitely guilty of chasing her, of having no understanding of the impact he has on her through his own obsession, though you suspect if he did understand he’d be horrified. In many ways Muraki’s neighbours are correct, his norms are not usual, but is innocent of the crimes they imagine. 

Overall, Angel Guts: Red Porno is explicit, has moments where it shows insight, is skilfully shot and constructed by Ikeda but lacks a focus. True, the ending is almost tragic and sad where it could be tawdry and that’s in the film’s favour. At only 67-minutes it runs at a good old clip; narrative economy is something that again Ikeda uses well, often moving between scenes so we don’t have time to think. This matters, because scenes such as the opening it’s literally seconds from Nami’s friend asking her to cover for her, to Nami being tied up and photographed. If given a moment to think, the sheer absurdity of it would strike us – surely she’d had a chance to turn around and walk away? But instead we’re immediately in the action and witnessing Nami’s distress, something ironically perhaps that seems to make the eventual magazine so successful: she seems real.

Real, too, is something we see, even in the autoerotic moments that are again almost ludicrous (don’t ask about the table leg), a sort of absurd unreality of the otherwise mundane. Sadly, without the depth to make it meaningful, it's ultimately a lot of noise and flair with very little substance.