The Films of Hisayasu Satô: Volume #1

One of the most esteemed and transgressive filmmakers ever to work in Japan's explosively popular Pink Film genre, Hisayasu Satô crafted erotic films that were both genre-defying and artfully-minded. While Satô's work is infused with horror and thriller tropes, it boasts a punk and avant-garde aesthetic singularly his own. In this debut release, Pink Line begins to explore this immense body of work with three of Satô's most outlandish and profound features, each newly and exclusively restored in 2K from their 35mm original camera negatives with newly-translated English subtitles, all under the supervision of Satô himself.

In LUSTMORD (aka Pleasure Kill), Satô commences his meditation on the fusion of sex and death. Eiji, a reclusive and awkward teenage boy, is fixated on creating a serum capable of breaking down the barrier between pleasure and pain, much to the dismay of his research physician mother. Deciding to conduct his own experiments, Eiji slips the serum to several women, but is unprepared for the horrifying results. Later remade by Satô as the straight horror feature Naked Blood, this early directing effort conjures a remarkable waking nightmare approach, as the impending threat of violence and insanity permeates every scene as it builds towards a typically cynical and cryptic conclusion.

RE-WIND (aka Celluloid Nightmare) functions as Satô's tribute to Michael Powell's masterpiece Peeping Tom. After a grisly, point-of-view snuff videotape is found in a refrigerator, a young man becomes obsessed with discovering who made it and whether or not the brutal murder was real. As he delves into Tokyo's underground video scene, his own perversions come to the fore as he grows ever closer to uncovering the shocking truth, alongside a female reporter who calls herself Crime Hunter. Fusing gruesome gore and raw sex while wryly playing with the artifice inherent to the video format, RE-WIND remains one of Satô's most powerful and impressive early works.

LOVE LETTER IN THE SAND (aka Pervert Ward: Torturing the White Uniform), is Satô crafting a noir-inspired erotic thriller, using blazing, heavily-gelled color. During a month of unusually heavy rain in Tokyo, a mystery assailant has been brutally assaulting and killing people with a metal bat. When a handsome young man with amnesia is found outside an area hospital, the nurse who discovered him begins to suspect that he may in fact be the assailant. But her own strange erotic fixations with him, and the questionable involvement of the doctor tasked with the amnesia victim, lead them all down an increasingly twisted path of deeply-rooted trauma and violence.

directed by: Hisayasu Satô 
starring: various
1987, 1988, 1988 / 58 min, 64 min, 61 min / 1.85:1 / Japanese DTS-HD MA 1.0