Sloth: We begin with a disclaimer - those who find movie reviews long winded and boring stop now and read no further, just go on to other posts. Proceed at your peril. Those interested, read on. Yow. That is going to go double for my review. Maybe triple or quadruple. But here is my review of a VHS version of XX: Utsukushiki Hyoteki, my copy of which was entitled XX: The Stalker. It took me a while to locate it, but the English-language version is called Beautiful Target. I should also mention that I haven't actually seen the English language version. ----- Beautiful Target (1995) This will be an unusual review, since my copy of this movie is not the English language Beautiful Target, but the Japanese language XX: Utsukushiki Hyoteki, and I don't understand Japanese. So my grasp of the plot nuances is going to be imperfect at best. The movie hits the ground running, GIMP-wise. A young woman is bound by wire underneath a leaking shower head, so her body is wet. I'm a sucker for wet bodies, although nervous perspiration is my preferred moisture agent. Wires bind her wrists apart above her head, and wires are cutting into the flesh at her throat. It looks like the entire wire apparatus that binds her is interconnected, so that if she moves her arm it pulls at her other arm. The bad guy is videotaping her discomfort and she looks both uncomfortable and terrified. He runs his gloved hand over her nude body (chest area only). He steps up and rapes her in the bound standing position. The camera pans up the back of her body while this is all going on. She makes some nice noises. Then he shows her a sharpened chisel-looking tool (his murder weapon of choice) and the scene fades with him stabbing her. The plot of the movie involves cops trying to find this guy and a pretty forensic pathologist (Yoko Natsuki) getting involved in the investigation and drawing the attention of the rapist-murderer. A tough but attractive young woman who is a pimp also becomes involved, but I'm not sure why. I only know what one of the IMDB reviews tells me. She and the forensic pathologist strike up a relationship that includes a nice lesbian love scene, which I don't go into detail on but it is hot. The young woman pimp also becomes a target of the killer. The next great GIMP scene comes when the killer breaks into the apartment of the forensic pathologist. He surprises her in bed when he tapes her mouth with duct tape. He tries to tape over her eyes to blindfold her. She scrambles out of bed. He blocks her escape. She reverses direction but he grabs her from behind and successfully blindfolds her with duct tape. She flails free and falls to the floor of her bedroom. The killer pulls her hands behind her back and binds her thumbs together with a zip-tie. (I never looked at zip-ties the same way again.) He releases her and she falls to the floor, then scrambles up against the wall, struggling vainly to get her thumbs free. The killer walks to her and stands over her, then reaches down and rips open her pajama top to expose her breasts. He rips the top in the back as well. She tries to inch away, but he catches her again, turns her over onto her back, pulls off her pajama bottoms, and then rips off her panties. I like it that he did them separately. The torn top is still bunched up around her elbows. Then, in a move that I wish all movie rapists would emulate, he turns on the room light. We are treated to a nice view of the bound victim in bright room light (she has hard, remarkably pretty nipples), as the camera pulls back to reveal her full body. Then we discover why he turned on the room light when he pulls out his video camera and starts taping her. The scene alternates between full color and blue-tinged video viewfinder mode for the rest of the scene. I would have preferred all full color, but the viewfinder mode lets you voyeuristically leer along with the killer as you see what he sees. The killer runs his gloved hand over her body and face as she struggles vainly to elude his touch. He pulls out his chisel weapon and runs it over her body, starting at her flat belly and up to encircle her nipples threateningly, then along her neck and under her chin. He slowly sets the chisel aside and from the back we see him move as if he's opening his pants. It is hard to tell if he is positioning himself or thrusting into her, but I think the former. Then the doorbell rings and all the good GIMP-ness stops. Turns out it is the attractive young woman pimp at the door. The killer decides to continue another day and we follow the action as the pimp stands around downstairs outside the apartment building until a resident comes along and she can slip into the locked outer security door. She makes her way upstairs. She finds the apartment and enters, switchblade knife at the ready. She looks into the bedroom and sees the forensic pathologist naked, bound to a chair with her knees wide apart (but with her crotch in shadow), each ankle bound to a chair leg, and her hands bound above her head. The light is on as well, so it is a well-lightened scene. She is still blindfolded and gagged. The pimp walks in and takes a moment to enjoy the view. She cuts one foot free, and the bound victim promptly closes her legs in what I found to be a delicious movement. Sort of like she may be naked and tied and helpless but any shred of modesty she can manage she will. Next the blindfold is removed and the wrist restraints are cut, but when she goes to pull down her arms the pimp holds her hands in place above her head and slowly cuts the zip-tie that binds her thumbs together. Once free, she scrambles to the corner and grabs a shirt to cover herself. The plot continues with I'm sure significant details being worked out, but it is all in Japanese. Somewhere in this part there's a lesbian sex scene between the pimp and the forensic pathologist that is enjoyable in its own right but has no GIMP value. But I wouldn't fast-forward through it because they are both hot chicks. Eventually, we get to the point where the killer captures the forensic pathologist and renders her unconscious. She awakens, still fully clothed and unbound, on a table in a room. She hears noises and when she investigates discovers the young woman pimp tied in much the same position as the girl at the start of the movie, except there is no shower and hence she is not wet. The forensic pathologist begins to unbind her when the killer walks in behind her and there is a struggle. He drags her kicking and screaming back to the table where she awoke, managing to remove her overcoat in the process. So she is wearing a white button-down blouse and a just-above-the-knee length skirt. The killer zip-ties her thumbs again and pulls her hands above her head, but he doesn't tie them there. He says something to her in Japanese and maybe he told her to keep them there or what? he'll rape her? That's pretty much a foregone conclusion. The scene loses a little of its GIMP factor for her arms not actually being bound above her head. An oversight that the killer will regret, as it turn out. Next, the killer slowly and lovingly cuts at one of the buttons on her blouse before he just violently rips it open. Then he rips off her skirt. She is wearing hose that covers her white panties. The camera draws back so we can see her laid out on the table in ruined blouse, white bra, panties and hose with the killer taking a good long look at her. She is not so much struggling as maybe whimpering, which makes her belly palpitate and her breasts heave and her entire body undulate in a not unpleasant manner. The killer cuts off her bra, slowly spreads it open and caresses her exposed breasts. Then he lifts up the top of her hose and cuts it away in several jerky motions, slowly spreads it open, takes hold of the hose and her panties, and eases all clothing down her long shapely legs. The action suddenly cuts away to the cops who have somehow found out, no doubt in Japanese, where she is being held, and they are rushing through the streets of wherever they are, siren blaring. Then we cut back. It is viewfinder mode again, that bluish tinged eye-of-the-rapist cam effect. He is running his gloved hand over her face, her neck, her lips, her arms, her nude body, pretty much every place you would if you were in his position. She is not fighting him tooth and nail. It is almost like she is turned on by the whole thing, maybe even looking forward to the rape but failing to recognize that these scenes generally end in murder. He takes his time playing with her nipples, then runs his hand down between her legs and moves around and her undulations increase and her eyes widen and you just know he's discovered she's really wet. He takes off and drops his pants and climbs up onto the table between her legs, still with the video recorder in play to capture her responses. I think I would have lost the camera by now, but this guy is dedicated to his art. He thrusts roughly into her and she rocks back and throws her head back but still seems to be liking it, pain and all. We get a long view of him on top of her, her legs spread, as he continues to rape her, bodily moving her with each thrust. Then he stops, still straddling her, to run his hand over her again. He reaches over for his chisel knife thing and continues videotaping as he runs the chisel over her chest, encircling her breast, pressing it up against her nipple like he's going to chisel it off, across her neck, against her parted lips. It is more erotic than GIMP at this point, that is until he draws back and gets ready to plunge the knife into her. She suddenly opens her eyes and he is paralyzed, for some reason, so she knocks the camera out of his hands and off to the side, where it records the scene as she raises her unbound hands (thumb zip-tied only, remember) in front of her, grabs the chisel sticking out of his arm (which I neglected to mention she had ineffectively stabbed him with in their initial struggle), and drives it into his chest, which proves to be more effective. He falls to the floor. She sits up, thumbs still zip-tied, climbs down off of the table still wonderfully naked, and in an inspired piece of scripting, uses the chisel still in his (we think) cold dead hand to cut the zip-tie. Then she kind of dresses, returns to free the pimp, and as they are walking out the killer rises again. Of course. In the ensuing struggle the pimp is thrown across the room and knocked unconscious. The forensic pathologist flees to the roof, with the killer in hot pursuit. The cops arrive in time to shoot the killer a few times and finally he is dead. So there is wire bondage, zip-tie bondage, and standard bondage, all accompanied by lots of great nudity. There is bondage rape and attempted rape, although it is brief. Mostly, though, I really enjoyed the amount of time the movie spent with the killer playing with his victim (primarily the forensic pathologist). It might have been even better if she had been completely unwilling instead of half-heartedly unwilling bordering on willing while he was actually raping her. It might have also been better if he had actually tied her arms above her head in that last scene, although that would have made her subsequent escape problematic. All in all, though, I was pretty jazzed by those scenes. The first time in her bedroom she was terrified and the GIMP-factor was through the roof. For a mainstream movie, I would give the GIMP parts an A- at least, taking off points for missed bondage opportunities and her enjoying the rape at the end. NOTE: I posted the relevant GIMP scenes to YouTied. |
