OK, so none of those things are necessarily orifices, and furthermore, my intention to introduce "'talia" as a hip slang truncation of "genitalia" is misguided at best … though you'll never think of Talia Shire the same way, will you? What I was trying to say was that Blind Beast is an all-around mindfuck, glorious in its visual style, depraved eroticism, and psychological weirdness. It has elements of Secretary, Boxing Helena, Misery, Blow-Up, Psycho, and even "The Avengers"—Japan's New Wave was clearly a lot hipper than all the samurai movies you assumed comprised the entirety of Japanese cinema prior to 1990. The story concerns a blind sculptor (Eiji Funakoshi) who kidnaps a famous model (Mako Midori) whose body he believes is the perfect basis for creating a new type of art based on touch. At first, she resists, but gradually she descends into a dark relationship with her abductor, ultimately going blind herself and discovering an ecstatic existence based on physical pain. The film hits a bit of a skid in the middle as the artist disposes of his meddling mother—here, Funakoshi's overacting gets a bit out of hand—but the last third of the film is some seriously wondrous S&M craziness. The lovers become so ensconced in their blissful misery that by the end, she actually asks him to cut her arms and legs off—and he does! Twisted, twisted shit. I won't even speculate what it means in terms of a statement on women … but I will say that I've never been so turned on by brutal dismemberment.
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