« Coffee Break | Main | Sex Hunter: Wet Target »
December 11, 2012
I Love it from Behind!
Bakku ga daisuki!
Koyu Ohara - 1981
Impulse Pictures Region 1 DVD
For those who've been watching Impulse Pictures' Nikkatsu Roman Porno series, here's the answer to the question of that music played during the opening collection of film clips. Hachiro Kai's jaunty, MOR jazz score might bring a smile on the face of viewers, both for its familiarity and to hear it in its original context.
Some readers may recall the existence of the Plaster Casters. There's also a 1970 documentary that featured the girls at work titled Groupies. A very memorable sight was a lineup of the girls', um, artwork, with a row of plaster casts made from the penises of various British rockers, towered over by a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix. I'm not sure if the Plaster Casters provided inspiration for a plot point in I Love it from Behind!, or if there is, or was, similar activity creating ink blots that require no psychoanalytical interpretations.
Please be advised that the title is both attention grabbing, and has little to do with what actually happens onscreen. The main character, Mimei, comes from Sapporo to Tokyo for a month to achieve her ambition of one hundred such ink blots prior to getting married. Mimei stays with a friend from college, Rei, currently having a lesbian relationship with the otherwise virginal Masumi.
Rei's aversion to men stems from a harrowing experience with an office coworker with a taste for sadomasochism that involves rope play, and a very close shave, with the insertion of a dildo in the end. Here's where the may get problematic for contemporary viewers. Following a mild scene of sapphic love between Masumi and Rei, Mimei discovers the two, pronounces their love as abnormal, and initiates a plan to, um, straighten out her friends. Rei and Mimei hang out at a pickup bar run by Bunta, who appears extremely femme, allegedly for business. Mimei's idea for curing Rei is for the pair to turn the table on various guys, drugging them, tying them up, shaving their pubic hair, and jamming dildos with large dollops of butter. Supposedly this last bit is suppose to turn these guys gay. It should be mentioned that the shaving is all done with straight razors, no pun intended, and to put this in a greater cultural context, when it's the woman with the razor, I'm certain that this was intended to invoke memories of Sada Abe, famous for severing her lover's penis, and the subject of several then recent movies, most infamously, Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses.
On the lighter side, Mimei meets the studliest man in Tokyo, with the pair setting out to beat a record time of fifty-five hours of almost non-stop sex. While several of the sex scenes use pixelation to hide any bits forbidden by Japanese law, Ohara also manages to keep things within the required limits using bunched up sheets, and plates of food. Also noteworthy is that star Junko Asahina career lasted significantly longer than that of many Roman Porno and "Pink" actresses.
While some might groan at the less than enlightened view of LGBT sex, and a final scene that hints at more perversion to come, I Love it from Behind! is a reasonably entertaining sixty-five minutes.
Posted by Peter Nellhaus at December 11, 2012 08:15 AM