Rampo Noir (O.V. Ranpo Jigoku)

Japan, 2005

Directors: Akio Jissoji, Atsushi Kaneko, Hisayasu Sato, Suguru Takeuchi

Genre: Horror, ero-guro

Plot

The film is divided into four unrelated segments.

“The Mars Canal” – Very brief, these are dreamlike sequences of a tormented individual escaping naked through a rocky landscape while recalling in flashback mode tortures committed against a lover, until he reaches a sort of large crater.

“The Mirror of Hell” – The most interesting of the four on a plot level (and the longest). Two women (who know each other from participating in a traditional tea ceremony), die under mysterious circumstances, their faces dissolved into a shapeless mass. Detective Kogoro Akechi (Tadanobu Asano) finds the link between the two cases; the two had looked at each other in strange mirrors, made by a disturbing character they both knew, the young Toru. This madman had crafted the mirrors to include a kind of microwave that caused whoever looked into them to perish. The segment includes a kaleidoscopic visual effect due to the continuous presence of mirrors in the scenes of the medium-length film.

“The Caterpillar” – A woman, in order to prevent her soldier husband from going to war again, has mutilated him by amputating his arms and legs (and tongue). The madwoman, in addition, subjects her victim to multiple humiliations, including whippings. Pathologically jealous, she does it supposedly “for love”; and even has sexual relations with her deformed spouse whom she calls “my caterpillar”. Finally, with the complicity of a strange individual friend of hers who considers the unfortunate man “a work of art”, the degenerate decides to mutilate herself and become a “caterpillar” as well. At the same time, her husband’s amputated limbs, preserved in formaldehyde, are displayed before the three of them.

“Crawling Bugs” – The protagonist (Asano again, in a different role) is the chauffeur of a prestigious actress, whom he drives by limousine from work to her home or (sometimes) to the “special place” where she meets her lover. The chauffeur is secretly in love with his boss, and suffers from a strange psychosomatic skin disease that causes intense itching and eczema; the symptoms flare up especially when he comes into contact with other people (it is therefore part of a kind of social phobia). In order to keep the actress close to him without suffering from the itching, he ends up killing her by strangulation and then tries unsuccessfully to embalm her, only causing her to bleed to death.

Commentary

Each of the four segments is directed by a different director, and have no nexus except for the presence (in all four films) in different roles of the long-haired Tadanobu Asano.

These bizarre Japanese “sleepless stories” compiled in “Ranpo Jigoku” (or “Rampo Noir”) are inspired by the macabre work of Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965), a writer of crime and mystery novels with sadistic touches. The real name of this author (some of whose writings are still banned in Japan for their extremely perverse character) was Taro Hirai, being “Edogawa Ranpo” a pseudonym based on the Japanese pronunciation of “Edgar Allan Poe”, whom Hirai admired.

The literary work of Ranpo and other authors was classified in 1930’s Japan as “ero-guro-nansensu” (“erotique-grotesque-nonsense”); a typically Japanese subgenre that would also make the leap to the big screen with products as interesting as “Strange Circus” (also from 2005) by Shion Sono or this “Ranpo Jigoku”, of unquestionable visual quality.