Blind Beast isn't cheap to watch. The DVD is. It's pretty durned Good,and it's…important and impressive. Lighter than Irreversible. Very enjoyable at times. Interesting throughout. It made me more comfortable with material I'm not comfortable about being more comfortable with. (Not entirely comfortable watching it, really.) THAT's an ending, certainly. There's THAT. So there. –{don't watch it right before sleeping, is a fair point. XXXy dreams from it, in flavors more poisonous than oft preferred.} But you'll like it. Really. Come on. Watch it. It's Good. Double Dog…don't be a girly. But if you do…glasses, please.

Yasuzo Masumura's story of obsession and pride is definitely one worth watching.Just three characters, with Eiji Funakoshi as the blind man, but there is enough to keep your interest. Michio (Funakoshi) relies on touch as his primary means of pleasure. He is a sculptor that has created a warehouse of body parts that will blow you away, But, he wants the perfect form to sculpt and he sets his sights on the model Aki, whom he only knows by touching a sculpture of her.Aki is Mako Midori, an exotic beauty, who is best known to Japanese art-house fans in this country. She is kidnapped by Michio and enters into a bizarre S&M trip to his warehouse. Her attempts to flee result in the eventual death of Michio's mother - the third character in this film. Finally, we see love blossom into a bizarre ending that is both gory and surreal.

My response to this movie is a little different than others I've read. Many point to themes like sadomasochism, the cruelty of art, and addiction. However, no one seems to have noted the rather obvious moral. In fact, the movie constantly tells viewers how to interpret its symbolism. Far from subtle, it bludgeons us with the desired interpretation with the same force Michio uses to drive his sculptor's knife through his model's limbs. It is a cautionary coming-of-age tale that enacts a distinctly Japanese version of the Oedipal myth in which the son must overcome his mother rather than his father (there are no fathers here).The blind Michio is incomplete. As the model Aki tells him, he is not a real man but a momma's boy, a child who still sleeps with his mother (which he does). His mother has done everything in her power to preserve Michio's infantile dependence. She helped him build the cavernous warehouse and fill it with the grotesquely bizarre sculptures of female body parts. The model Aki quickly realizes these are just more symbols of Michio's infantilism. Michio reacts with stunned recognition when Aki points out to him that he has made the figures so large because they represent his childish perspective. To a certain extent, Aki lessens Michio's blindness by repeatedly opening his eyes to the reality of his situation.Aki's mother, on the other hand, will go to any lengths to preserve Michio's blind reliance on her. She is more than willing to participate in kidnapping and perhaps worse to provide him a new plaything. Indeed, without this accomplice, Michio could never have captured or held Aki. After Michio has chloroformed Aki, his mother leads the way back to the den and guards the door to prevent Aki's escape. However, when Aki starts to become more than a toy to Michio by awakening his romantic and sexual desires, she threatens the mother's dominance.Again, Aki offers the interpretation of what must follow. She promises to have sex with Michio, even marry him, but only if he will break totally with his mother. In effect, she tells him that to become a man he must reject his mother and assert his mature sexuality with her. She adds that any good (Japanese?) mother would welcome such a change in her son. This sets up a literal tug of war between Aki and the mother for Michio's affection. The seductive Aki stands on one side of Michio exhorting him to choose her in return for her sexual favors, and the mother pulls at him from the other side, warning Michio that Aki is a lying slut who will betray him. The symbolic psychological triangle was so explicitly rendered that I couldn't help but laugh out loud as Michio repeatedly knocks his mother to the floor during this struggle. Then the mother pulls out the big guns, reminding Michio of all her sacrifices in bearing, birthing, and raising him. But Michio fires back with the ultimate guilt trip, accusing his mother of being the cause of his blindness. With one final shove, Michio ends his psychological struggle by knocking his mother against a pillar, after which she dies from the blow to her head.Michio has literally and figuratively broken the triangle and started on the path to manhood by choosing Aki and an adult sexual relationship. But he doesn't stop there. With the mother no longer blocking the door, Aki believes she can now escape her blind captor. She bolts, but Michio intercepts her. No longer needing his mother to control Aki's feminine assertiveness, Michio drags Aki back into the sculpture gallery and rapes her on top of the gigantic nude sculpture. Earlier, Michio had asked Aki why she agreed to pose nude for a photographer but refused to allow him to feel her body so he could sculpt it. She replied that the photographer was a famous and respected artist who presented her in a way she wanted to be viewed, as the image of the "new woman." In fact, the photographs depicted her in various states of naked bondage. Michio now explicitly forces Aki to accept the traditional role of women in Japanese culture that the photographer only symbolically portrayed -- as an utterly submissive sex object.Interestingly, it is only when Michio begins to physically abuse Aki that the director Masumura allows the viewer to enjoy Aki's full sexuality, exposing her breasts for the first time in live action (they were also visible at the beginning of the movie in the portraits exhibited by the photographer, another "real" man). Once violently subjugated, the formerly willful Aki not only accepts the submissive role but embraces it to such an extreme that she adopts Michio's disability, becoming blind herself and symbolically accepting his view of the world. She encourages him to beat and mutilate her, and she ultimately allows him to objectify her totally by dismembering her. She becomes like the sculpted body parts that adorn Michio's world, another product of his artistic vision.With Aki dead, Michio also commits suicide and validates his mother's warning. The mother had cautioned that Michio did not know the real world. Once Michio leaves the safety of her symbolic womb for the path to manhood, his end is inevitable. Maturity ultimately means death. So we're left with a very transparent rendering of a basic maturation myth with some peculiarly Japanese elements. To become a man, a boy must reject his umbilical dependence on women and take on the dominant role. Independent women, on the other hand, are seductive charlatans (except for you, Mom). To be proper members of society, they must submit totally to the desires of men. And of course, sex, as always, equals death for both, but neither has any choice but to accept it as an inevitable consequence of growing up. Obviously, Blind Beast is a feminist's allegorical nightmare. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating rendering of an archetypal story.

"Blind Beast" "Moju" (1969): Eiji Funakoshi, Mako Midori, Noriko Sengoku...Director Yasuzo Masumura, Screenplay/Story ...Rampo Edogawa, Yoshio Shirasaka.The films of 1969 were in many ways a revolution, a bold step forward into the future of cinema. Like the decade of the 60's, liberal attitudes were embraced, as was rebelliousness against convention and shock appeal was big. Graphic adult content, that is to say R rated and X rated material by today's standards, was bombarding the big screen and a new wave of cinema hit America never before seen even by adult audiences in the 40's and 50's whose films were always under the eye of the censors and were at most only mildly shocking or violent. Foreign films paved the way for this new type of shocking film, and other films from this time - coming from South America, Mexico, Europe and Asia, were bold in their excessive shock appeal. "Blind Beast", released in 1969 by Japanese Director Yasuzo Masumura is possibly the most graphic, the most sadistic, twisted, horrifying piece of veiled romantic art-house material. The art-house signature is all over it. Its lead character is a blind sculptor who is sexually frustrated and in pursuit of a life-long, impossible romance, there are many fine moments of cinematography that makes use of interesting camera angles, artsy in themselves, actual sculptures and mood lighting, primarily light colors and clarity at the start of the film and total darkness by the end of it.Though not everyone would call this a romance, the blind hero Michio (Funakoshi) is a blind man who has never known any real love from a woman and who is ostracized and isolated, living a lot like the Phantom of the Opera. Only his mother (Sengoku) cares for him. They quickly determine that he needs a woman, a bride and they kidnap a beautiful artist's model (Midori). At first, she is disgusted and horrified by her situation. Alone in a sunken warehouse, Michio repeatedly rapes her and they are both deprived of real food, clothes and contact with the outside world. This can easily be traced to similar stories like "Beauty and the Beast" and the fore-mentioned "Phantom". Michio quickly trains his kidnapped bride to respond to touch and to rely on her senses. She quickly becomes insane and goes blind. They are both now in a bizarre, sadomasochistic, symbiotic relationship in which he provides her with rough physical dominance which she craves. He tortures her, beats her, whips her, bites her, drinks her blood and eats some of her flesh. Before long, she equates physical pain with love. Surprisingly, Michio can still make sculptures. Before long, we realize that reality has set in. They are both insane and dying of lack of food, social contact and a real life. They descend into degradation and self-destruction. She demands that he chop off her limbs before she dies. This truly horrible story is good only because it is so out-of-this-world for 1969 and so bold and daring in its subject matter. Keep in mind that this is not for younger audiences. The scenes are graphic and intense. A film that is little-known, little appreciated and yet a sort of whispered-about cult classic, a story that may arouse some and disgust others. Nevertheless, being a Japanese foreign film, with much philosophical and Buddhist-like ruminations by the girl's voice-over, it is an art-house film nonetheless. The cinematography as mentioned is really interesting and as much a part of the story as the characters and their evil passion. Notice how seriously it takes itself for a film that could be reduced to mere pornography or "snuff" film. There is a strange sadness to this film, a tragic quality to it that makes it somehow more than just about the shock appeal. The shock element is still there and it's strong but it's a film with a powerful impact nonetheless. It's art-house. Just not to everyone's tastes.