V-Cinema Essentials 7: The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses

When I first glanced at the final three films in the V-Cinema Essentials boxset, I noted that two were directed by prominent names. One was Hasebe but the other one... well my memory could not dredge it up, but as the credits rolled for The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses, there it was, Teruo Ishii. 

So no matter what I thought this is going to be interesting. Teruo Ishii seems a good fit for V-Cinema, at home with violence, sex, perversity, absurdity but also capable of crafting a quality product. His Horrors Of Malformed Men is brilliant as far as I’m concerned. 

In The Hitman: blood Smells Like Roses, having witnessed his fiancé murdered by getting caught up in a yakuza gunfight, truck driver Takanashi (Hideki Saijo) starts a turf war, and as the yakuza start to kill each other off he plots his revenge.  

It’s no surprise but a bit unnecessary to start the film with what can start to feel like an obligatory rape scene. A young girl is grabbed by the yakuza but to Ishii’s credit he doesn’t get lost in this element, often keeping the camera set so that the act is obscured by crates so not to sexualise the attack, rather he impresses that the yakuza are bastards and of course it gives the opportunity to introduce Takanashi as he kills the rapists and walks calmly off into the night. 

The arc of the film follows the progression you would broadly expect; we have the obligatory flashback to his fiancé and her death, but it’s handled briskly and the short scene setting up their relationship is done with humour. Her death is appropriately senseless but also effectively illustrates the yakuza’s disdain for the lives of others. There’s an obvious Death Wish aspect to the film, as Takanashi is an everyman and drives a truck, but that said he’s also a drop-out (intentionally, so he could to marry his girlfriend) from the Self Defence Force and a crack shot, so there’s a rationale (regardless of how much you buy into it or not) why he’s skilled and comfortable with firearms.  

But anyway, not everything is smelling of roses (see what I did there, yeah a cheap segue but I’ll take it). He finds himself saddled with Rumi, a Shinjuku hustler, who latches onto him as they both find themselves hiding out: Rumi from the yakuza who believe she’s ratted them out and Takanashi from the police. As Rumi steals Takanashi’s bag, and he’s chasing after the red-coated woman, there’s a lovely moment where the camera pans around him, across him and the shots cut together to beautifully illustrate his confusion and the onset of panic as he struggles to work out where she's gone. It’s Ishii putting into practice all his experience even if often he’s not too showy; though as you would expect we find ourselves in some seedy bars with women dressed such that it leaves little to the imagination. 

The sex and seediness surrounding the yakuza and which pervade the film are not necessarily gratuitous though. When escaping the police and hiding out in a soapland bathhouse, Takanashi is a man out of place, in love with the image of his fiancé, the last thing he wants is a strange woman getting into the bath with him and it’s in counterpoint to the aging yakuza we’ll see later with the younger women. She calls him papa and he addresses her as little girl, all very icky at best and clearly a cash arrangement. Ironically our soapland beauty takes a shine to Takanashi and takes him home but even then there’s something of an insight into her life, how she has to keep in shape to keep her job and her pride at decorating her tiny apartment, not much of which seems evident but it’s all she has. There’s no glamorising of it.  

That said, the narrative has some baffling aspects. We’re introduced to ‘Dick’ (Tetsuro Tamba), a detective with an encyclopaedic knowledge of criminals who ends up on Takanashi’s trail. How he comes to be on his trail is anyone’s guess, that part seems to have been edited out of the film. Even when Takanashi ends up in his soapland discomfort, he’s only seen once, from a distance, by a police officer. No one knows him. Yet Dick is on his tail. 

Arguably this a good thing as Tamba brings some gravitas to his role and is ultimately a humanising figure; he also gets to provide us with an ending that feels fitting to the film. It also helps because - let’s be honest - Hideki Saijo as our protagonist is not bad but he struggles to fully engage the screen. He’s there for his ageing good looks rather than being scintillating  to watch, though to an extent this works, because he is a man who is, for the most part, dead inside, even if perhaps Rumi threatens to stir something. 

The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses may not be classic Ishii, but it has moments of his hallmark absurdist swirling mix of sex and violence and he fits into V-Cinema like a glove; he makes of the film a brisk 85-minutes that does everything it needs then steps away. Though it's worth mentioning the end credits because... it's a series of softporn images of women, or women with guns, to a heavy rock soundtrack that I think shows you Ishii knew who his audience for the film was, even if the film isn't quite so on the nose as its credits.