Kangofu nikki: kemonojimita gogo (1982)

March 22, 2017 | By Mark R. Hasan

Film: Good

Transfer: Very Good

Extras: Standard

Label: Impulse Pictures / Synapse Films

Region: 1 (NTSC)

Released: November 8, 2016

Genre: Japanese Pink / Roman Porno / Adult

Synopsis: The vengeful widow of a sex scientist who hung himself seeks to undermine the success of his magic gizmo which enables scientists to see, record, and experience the erotic dreams of patients.

Special Features: 4-page colour booklet with liner notes by Japser Sharp / Theatrical Trailer.

Review:

Although director Naosuke Kurosawa made his directorial debut with the stylish and repugnant giallo / Roman porno Zoom In: Sex Apartments (1980), Nurse Diary: Beast Afternoon seems to show an effort by studio Nikkatsu to not only tone done the nastiness of their adult line, but reign in directors who sought to make more narrative works. There is a story within Beast, but the final product is a rather incoherent 62 min. film where shots and scenes where forcibly whittled down to their bare essentials.

The script by Yuki Miyata (TV’s The Detective Story) starts off grim with a sex scientist and his assistant being murdered after discovering a means to extract erotic dreams using a special ‘dream ring’ but the drama veers into clumsy comedy, most of which is wrought from a pair of teens whisked to emergency when the pair become ‘stuck’ while copulating by a cross-adorned tombstone.

Girl Reiko (Jun Miho) is admitted to a special wing where she’s deemed an ideal patient for the dream ring, and what follows is a series of lengthy montages in which she’s repeatedly outfitted with said ring, and a bell that once adorned the necklace around the dead sex assistant. Kurosawa’s fascination with womb penetration continues in Beast, with a prop womb enabling macro shots of the dream implants addition and removal. When the ring is removed, Reiko’s dreams are displayed on a screen and recorded to tape for analysis by lead scientist Ayako (Maiko Kazama), who notes her patient’s vivid copulation fantasies not with her idiot boyfriend but the clinic’s lead director.

Woven into this already ridiculous plot is the ghost of the sex assistant who happened to be the lover of Reiko’s doctor, the doctor’s revenge scheme to ‘programme’ her patient to kill the director and the supposedly dead sex scientist’s wife for killing her lover, and the lover ghost (!) who seems to be orchestrating all the nonsense in Miyata’s screenplay.

With such a complex plot, it’s no wonder the sex scenes are brief and largely non-controversial, and most seem to be hastily filmed softcore emulations rather than the harder, fogged out versions which dominated earlier Roman porno entries. This is clearly a last gasp production as Nikkatsu moved towards even cheaper films, ultimately switching to video, and according to historian Jasper Sharp, shutting down their focus on porn by 1992.

Although nicely shot with vivid colours and soft-focus cinematography, the editing is rash, Hachiro Kai’s synth music is stylistically spastic (if not stock music), and Miyata’s dialogue is neither witty nor shocking. Kurosawa tries to juggle too many elements and fails to deliver on any front, making Beast a significant disappointment in the Roman porno line.

Impulse Picture’s transfer is fine, and the included trailer typically perfunctory teaser, and the booklet notes by Sharp contextualizes Beast as work where even the aspect ratio was knocked down to a slightly pillor-boxed 1.85:1, making it easier to port over to the lucrative home video market. Sharp is much kinder to Beast, calling it both bizarre and innovative – one can give kudos to the lighting design, use of derelict locales, and surreal dream sequences – but he also acknowledges broad humour was worming its way into the genre, which in Beast arguably robbed Kurosawa of the freedom to go truly weird and nasty.

Impulse also released several nurse-centric entries that have their own levels of ridiculousness, and include Nurse Diary: Wicked Finger (1980), Story of White Coat: Indecent Acts (1984), and Nurse Diary: Sticky Fingers (1985).

External References:
Editor’s Blog — IMDB

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