Blind Beast

Time again for upgrading my old DVD to the Arrow Blu-Ray release of Blind Beast (1969), another Yasuzo Masumura film originally released in the UK by the now defunct Yume Pictures, and of the original five Masumura films Yume put out, Blind Beast always felt like the most "outsider", as Blind Beast is a damn perverse film, more so than some of his other work. So right up my alley then. 

Model, Aki (Mako Midori), is on display: sexually provocative, S&M inspired photos of her grace a Tokyo gallery walls. Also residing there is a sculpture, one that Aki is disturbed to find being pawed by a strange man, Michio (Eiji Funakoshi). Later Michio kidnaps Aki, holding her in his workshop where he wants to find a new art, an art for those that touch because Michio is blind. Unable to escape from Michio or his mother (Noriko Sengoku), Aki finds herself drawn into a dark world of blind pleasure and pain.

Based on a short story by Edogawa Rampo, Blind Beast couldn’t be a better exponent of cinematic ero guro nansensu (or erotic grotesque nonsense) if it tried. Like Teruo Ishii’s work, especially Horror of Malformed Men - which came out the same year - Blind Beast is a deeply strange film and one with enormous scope to be deeply, deeply unpleasant, in the wrong possible way, after all you have a lone woman unable to escape an arguably insane mother and son. But is Michio mad? Instead, the story posits Michio as having lived alone with his mother all his life, with no friends, no girlfriends and in many ways possessing the thought processes of a child, rather than someone who is insane. Michio barely seems to register that he has kidnapped Aki and like a child cannot understand why she might want to escape his artist’s workshop. Though many would not want to escape it for the workshop is perhaps one of the more remarkable film sets you are likely to come across: walls decorated with arms protruding out, another with legs, another with ears, another with mouths, another with breasts... and in the centre two giant forms, one supine, the other prone, giant tactile naked female forms that our protagonists can clamber over, get lost within. It’s a good thing that this set is so visually bewildering for almost the entire film takes place in this one room, and in fact we only ever spy four characters throughout and one of those is a receptionist at the art gallery, who is seen for but a second. 

So Blind Beast is a three-hander, but never once does it feel stagey. Perhaps the 85-minute running time helps here because it means the film rockets along, never pausing for breath – sometimes literally when Aki tries and fails to elude Michio, as she clambers over the giant supine female form that so dominates Michio’s workshop. More important is that Aki is not just some victim, if anything she slowly comes to dominate Michio and she herself plays power games, manipulating the relationship between Michio and his mother. There is nothing said in the film about the relationship between the mother and son that is more unusual than she has raised a blind son apparently almost entirely in isolation, but Aki plays on likely unrealised incestuous feelings that the mother may have and later comes to have a rather perverse romantic relationship with Michio, but one that is not some Stockholm syndrome love affair, even though it is one that then takes it down some very distinctly sadomasochistic avenues, something that is thematically in tune with the photos we see of Aki as the film opens, with their overt S&M overtones. 

If the star of the film is the set, next up may be the sound design, often having a somewhat nightmarish quality to it, especially when Aki first finds herself exploring Michio’s workshop with its plaster body parts sticking out from the walls like Salvador Dali on acid. Ther performances, especially Eiji Funakoshi as Michio are replete with a kind of artifice. This is no bad thing, but it does mean that you should not come to the film expecting naturalistic acting, instead you’ll find a kind of hyper-theatrical performance, not melodramatic but like the overall film, ones that searches and finds a certain overwrought tone and feel.

Blind Beast will not be to everyone’s taste but it is certainly not the nasty piece of work it could easily have been if in the hands of a less skilled director than Masumura and while it’s not as good as some of his other works such as Red Angel or Irezumi, it’s still a fascinating piece of erotic grotesque nonsense that is worth more than a second watch, or a third, or a fourth.