Flesh Target: Rape

Directed by Yukihiro Sawada, Flesh Target: Rape is an audacious slice of reverse-engineered sexual manipulation that leaves me alienated on how to actually approach the lingering sense of immorality left by the film's final moments. No stranger to pink film or the topic of molestation in cinema, Flesh Target: Rape managed to challenge a great helping of what I knew of the subject. While most of the similarly categorized films of the Nikkatsu lexicon handle and transfer the same sexually appeasing and socially vile topic of a split-consensual rape session, Sawada's target on rape is displayed with a juvenile grin and light-hearted approach to pinku eiga with the respects of women in his rear-view window and a supple-breasted woman tied up in his trunk. With nary a sense of plot, Rape follows a script-sculpted alcoholic salaryman who, in a sexually frustrated rage, hits the chairman of his firm in the face after an impromptu intervention in a bathroom during a corporate meeting of importance. Nezu, beaten but not broken, is demoted to a dead spot in the company, promised a continuing career with no possible way of advancement. In what I can only relate to as foreshadowed comeuppance after the opening, Nezu begins a wave of stress management via raping his co-workers and those female figures who sneer and snicker in his general position of company misery. Flesh Target: Rape is a prime cut of rape cinema, as to say, Flesh Target: Rape is rape singularly. The film only supports a stream of violation without a real sense of story, emotion, or consequence. Especially consequence. In fact, the ending of Flesh Target: Rape is so deliriously upbeat that I found the tempo to match a high spirited closure with a Hallmark twist/lust, but, you know, with serial rape. 

 As most films of a similar degree, Flesh Target: Rape has the one distinction that can be argued between parties for an eternity - displaying women in trouble as cloyingly accepting of their molestation - dirty damsels digging nails into their opponent. From victim number one and on, Flesh Target: Rape takes no time turning the tables on these hapless female's sexual drives. Screams of distress melt into vibrating coos in a blink of an eye. Some of these dames have it harder than others, such as the lesbian couple who are numbered and buggered as the opposing lover stares into the eyes of their partner as their sexual orientated individualism is stripped from them in a flash of stiff yellow. This and other moments of brilliance are what really make Flesh Target: Rape stand out from the crowd of post-coitus guilt-ridden and driven women left in the massacre of a company called Nikkatsu. For an example of brief originality with a punchline, but with hilarity sewn further into the scenario, Nezu decides he must lust on a pretty ring-waiting company woman that ends with him invading her apartment and throwing and trapping her head through a wall. During the process of penetration, Nezu forces the hole deeper and wider with each thrust, climaxing with both of them collapsing through the wall, leaving splintered wood and damp flesh clinging to each other - a nice cohesive bond considering how underpaid the decorator must have been. Cinema can be such a sweet treat at times, especially with the morals left intact from viewing Flesh Target: Rape, the only film that creates a corporate ladder climbing solution that begins and ends with "rape co-workers" - an adverse cry of victory from the little man. With this mindset, Flesh Target: Rape offers the mental musings of a general "does what he has to do to succeed" idea with a dosage of competent filmmaking and gender caricatures that perform honest justice on a taboo topic to anyone with something to lose. Ah, those undesired desirables; I know too well of the topic.

Apart from sections dissecting sodomy, digital and penile penetration, and degradation without implication, Flesh Target : Rape is also gifted with an animated score of fleeting jazz building an aura of cool around our anti-hero of the cock - Jap meets Gould - A silent The Long Goodbye-dick with a cigarette at all times and a calm demeanor even while being tricked into a fellatio scenario. A classic shell-of-a-man whose arrogance and nicotine habits form thanks to cinematic evolution from an aggressor caresser to a pompous, free-wheeled go-getter who force-fucks the entirety of his female staff without alerting the attention of the authorities or the men romantically assigned to these ladies. Nezu is a joy to behold, whether he's making house calls to past victims who have accepted the idea of a free orgasm with guilt at no extra cost or flustering an employee hitchhiker before a big date. Flesh Target: Rape is a delight in the sense that it is so decidedly existent within its own set of anti-morals that it wouldn't be a surprise that any self-respecting woman should take heed from what would surely be labeled as "misogynistic trash" while dawdling at work dreaming of a divine rape fantasy made all the more acute by an absent boyfriend. For a rollicking good time and a literal use of the term "rape wrecking ball", Flesh Target: Rape is not to be missed by anyone familiar or adoring of this major, and forever prominent, staple in Japanese eroticism. Nezu has it all: one word damnations, rape requests, and hot flesh quivering on a platter. The only thing left wanted is a sequel to show just how far fictional rape can take a man and how cool one can be, with women relinquishing to a man whatever he might need.

-mAQ