Entrails of a Virgin (1986)

Sometimes the title of a movie is so obnoxious that it’s enough to leave me shaking in excitement, throwing me into a frenzy of scavenging as I hunt a copy down. Perhaps that’s why I’m so obsessed with Japanese exploitation. With titles like Apartment Wife: Ass Slave (1985) and White Rose Campus: Then Everybody Gets Raped (1982) being the norm, I’m in a near-permanent state of manic internet scouring. The reasonably well-known and internationally distributed Entrails of a Virgin movies certainly have alluringly outrageous titles. But strangely enough, despite their availability, it has taken me until now to finally watch the first entry in the trilogy…

 

ENTRAILS OF A VIRGIN
original title: Shojo no harawata
Japan, 1986, Kazuo ‘Gaira’ Komizu

Entrails of a Virgin has quite the bad reputation. And I’m not referring to its infamy for its excessive exploitative elements. No, Entrails of a Virgin seems to be disliked by pretty much everyone, other than a handful of brave sickos. I’m not sure where this negativity spawns from – quite possibly, the DVD is attracting the wrong audience, an audience that expects a typical J-horror or torture-porn – because Entrails of a Virgin is magic. Entrails of a Virgin gives us the simple story of a group of unpleasant pornographers who, when their car breaks down heading home after a scenic photography shoot, wind up stranded in some serious fog in the middle of nowhere. They take shelter in a desolate building. While they’re busy fucking each other – actually raping each other, I should say – a muddy demon with a massive cock picks them off one by one.

I suppose if you had to label Entrails of a Virgin with a genre it would be “horror porn”, although that description probably creates an image of something quite different to what we actually get. For the most part, Entrails of a Virgin is filled with reasonably graphic softcore scenes. Most of these scenes are anything but titillating – the male counterparts are repulsive and there is almost no entirely consensual sex. And when it is consensual, it involves severed body parts – uh, yeah, more on that later. The sexual energy, or, in most cases, sexual aggression, is surprisingly real, making some of these scenes quite uncomfortable to sit through.

Early on in Entrails of a Virgin, a minor character describes his pornographic employers as “the worst people in the world.” An apt description, although somewhat ironic considering the line is delivered right after the character finishes violently wrestling a woman and completely humiliating her. But yes, almost every character in Entrails of a Virgin is reprehensible making their gory dispatching all the more satisfying. The only decent human being is the film’s protagonist, Rei (Saeko Kizuki). Saeko Kizuki, an AV actress with a filmography full of similarly nasty films, delivers quite an impressive performance, perfectly pulling off the role of the naive victim. The character interplay in Entrails of a Virgin is not exactly brilliant, but it’s certainly better than I expected and engaging enough. And the film looks better than it deserves to. The schizophrenic score does Entrails of a Virgin no favours, but it is shot with professionalism and on occasion director, Kazuo Komizu, demonstrates a unique visual flair. I can’t name many other films that feature an internal shot of cum spraying inside someone.

I suppose what most would wonder – and I’m guilty of this too – is how Entrails of a Virgin fares in the gore and gross-out department. Well, don’t go into this one expecting cartoonish geysers of blood; this will disappoint gorehounds in both its quantity and delivery. However, if you like your gore utterly sick and depraved mixed in with questionable sexual content, then this is the film for you. Entrails of a Virgin takes its time, but by the film’s final act, its deranged gore really kicks into gear. We have a woman madly masturbating herself with a severed arm, entrails being torn out of unexpected orifices and, most disgustingly, a demon-spunk bukkake. It’s a bit wrong, but these moments are actually oddly funny as well as being nauseating. While the film is as misanthropic as you’d expect from a nihilistic nasty from Nippon, there is a darkly comedic tone running throughout its short seventy minutes. If you can accept that this one leans more towards depravity rather than flat-out gore, then I heartily recommend Entrails of a Virgin!