Angel Guts: Nami is a furious, fevered indictment of systems too broken to repair and too exploitative to escape from with clean hands. Noboru Tanaka and Takashi Iishii's sights are set firmly on the culture of sexual violence in contemporary Japanese society - "rape and its consequences."
Produced the same year as I Spit On Your Grave, you can see Nami as Nikkatsu's own murky meditation on the implications of sexual violence in the wake of women's lib. Of course, Japan's own relationship to misogyny is based in different understandings of gender and sex, so the conclusions we arrive at here are far different. Where rape-revenge offers catharsis, Nami only fuels viewers' rage and misery until it leaves them deliberately in the lurch.
Nami is a phantasmagorical picture that owes a great deal to both Italian horror maestros - specifically Argento and Bava - and the rising popularity of the American slasher. Sequences in Nami evoke particular "kills" in murder-driven movies, only they don't end in a ceremonial gutting or slitting. Instead, rape is used as the main cudgel to bludgeon viewers with, in elaborate and upsetting sequences of stylized sexual violence unlike anything I've seen on film. Bondage plays a heavy part, from an elaborate BDSM show in a smokey parlor to a visceral and violent assault in a junkyard next to a landing strip. The latter sequence is particularly effective, as a group of men tie a girl to a stake so that the jet engines above might drown out her cries for help. Upsetting stuff.
Perhaps the most deranged bit here, though, involves a pool of formaldahyde, corpses, and a rapist with a dissection fetish. This sequence is where the film's grip on reality is loosened, and we're led to understand that our perception of the narrative isn't exactly the truth. But what is? As we gawp in horror at one of the most audacious lesbian rape scenes put to film, we're equally terrified by the circumstances that got us here. The heroine's dogged persistence on finding "the truth", even at the expense of victims, is explicitly what puts her in harm's way. Yet even this becomes a point of uncertainty, as it's obvious Nami is being coerced and goaded into this line of work by an editorial board that's eager to turn her into the next headline.
Films like Angel Guts: Nami define why the medium is so important to me. It quite simply could not and would not get made in America. The inflammatory, contradictory, honest appraisals of sexual violence and its root causes are nakedly honest, conveyed through impressive physical performances and the film's dreamic mise en scene. Colors warp and bend, pierce out from the shadows and lead the viewer deeper into the shadows, as Tanaka and his camera crew frame this nightmare with an artist's eye. American film obfuscates its content so badly that rape is barely discussed, and when it is, it's presented as a po-faced prestige film with big names attached to it - or it's a fucking metaphor.
But Nami is testament to the metaphors that can exist within more literal content. When a picture's restraint lies not in its content, but in the things it doesn't say aloud, this is the true potential of the medium. Angel Guts has a reputation as a needlessly gristly, upsetting franchise reserved for YouTube icebergs in the West. It's spoken of in the same breath as Guinea Pig, another Japanese series widely misunderstood for its visual content and characterized as vile misogyny. The reaction here is surface-level, a demand that we don't have to think about bad things if we don't want to. However, I'd posit thinking about bad things is a damn good way to prepare yourself for dealing with them.
If you don't like to look at rape in film, you won't ever have a meaningful critical engagement with sexual violence. It also means you likely haven't been.