BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Cooktopi The acting in this movie is really good.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

christopher-underwood Most impressive bloody drama of operatic proportions. Doubly wronged our heroine ends up a geisha with a tarantula tattoo upon her back. Apparently the first part of the Japanese word for tarantula means prostitute and so she feels she has no alternative but to remain in the profession into which she was forced. What she can do though is take revenge and hey does she take revenge. This is beautifully photographed action all the way and it gets plenty bloody, with a wonderfully over the top ending that makes you want to stand and applaud. How much this is a tale of an exploited woman and that of a woman overcoming adversity will be up to each viewer to decide. Gentle eroticism is a bonus and if this is not quite as crazy as the same director's Blind Beast it is just as audacious. Bold, bright and beautiful.

GyatsoLa Fascinating movie from Yasuzo Masumura. A perverse little story about a headstrong girl tricked into becoming a high class geisha. A crazed tattoo artist puts a stunning spider tattoo on her back and insists it takes over her soul. She relentlessly devours the men in her path - but is it the spider, or is she evil anyway? Or is she gaining just revenge on the men who see her as property? The movie doesn't give answers, but fascinates all the same.It is by no means perfect as a movie - the characters are not well fleshed out, and the story is excessively melodramatic, even by the standards of the genre. Some of the characters motivations just don't make much sense. But it is superbly shot and staged making it far more than just a cheap exploitation pic. Masumura was a terrific film maker who knew how to make the most of any script, and this one is no exception. Its certainly not the best of his movies, or the among the very best Japanese movies of the period, but it still holds a creepy power and is often beautiful and sensual to watch, so I'd certainly recommend it.

GrandeMarguerite "Irezumi" (which means "tattoo" in Japanese) is an erotic costume film from one of the bad boys of '60s Japanese cinema. Director Masumura used a full palette of primary colors (with very vivid reds) to tell us about the story of Otsuya, a beautiful young woman from a middle-class merchant family who is abducted into geisha work, and who catches one day the eye of Seikichi, a tattoo master who marks her back with a huge, monstrous spider. From that moment on, Otsuya will take her revenge with every man who shared her bed.If you have an appetite for perverse stories, try this one. To play Otsuya, Masumura used beautiful actress Ayako Wakao, best remembered in the West for her part in Mizoguchi's "Street of Shame" (1956), where she was Yasumi, the cold-hearted and money-greedy prostitute. She inspired Masumura throughout the '60s, and "Irezumi" is one of their best collaborations. Adapted to the screen by Kaneto Shindo (the internationally acclaimed director of "The Naked Island" and "Onibaba"), the script goes far beyond Junichiro Tanizaki's original short story. In Tanizaki's work, a sadistic tattoo artist searches for his ultimate canvas, a beautiful girl, to create his masterpiece. The girl is innocent until the tattooer finishes "pouring his soul" into her tattoo, which represents a huge tarantula (it is better to know that "tarantula" in Japanese is "jorôgumo" and "jorô" stands for "prostitute", as both attract men to suck their blood). She becomes thus the "femme fatale" of his dreams. In "Irezumi", we never know if Otsuya is evil by nature or if the tattoo is the cause of her misconduct and bad manners, and that's the most fascinating aspect of the film. As it is a "pinku eiga" of the '60s, don't expect graphic sexual scenes but highly suggestive shots (which are more than enough) and enjoy this shameless film. As for me, I still haven't decided yet whether it is a misogynous film or its complete opposite. And what about the spider? It's a... uh, very special piece of art.

dourdou As a character Otsuya is willful and self-centered and her beauty sparks desire in every men who simply are puppets to her. As her geisha her training is not even hinted, being one is just resumed in the movie as a woman whose will and beauty empower her to command her wishes to any man. Her might and her vampire-like behaviour is represented by her tattooed black spider which both fascinates and repulses her lovers who nevertheless got voluntarily caught into her web. The only man she seemed to love is Shinsuke but even him got corrupted by her evil as she finally gnawed and sucked every traces of strenght in him. However some ambivalence resides in her character by the inner desire to find a man who could match her and fully accept her that is both her soft and "spider"parts.