We open with a medical examiner named Murase (Teruo Yoshida) performing a gruesome autopsy on who we find out is his wife. He discovers another man’s semen present and sets out on a quest to attempt to understand what drove his wife to infidelity, in the process researching four major true crime cases in Japanese history. The first story concerns a woman played by Rika Fujie who is driven by ambition and desperation to take over an inn in 1957, in the process murdering three people with the help of her lover (Takashi Fujiki). The infamous “Hotel Nihonkaku Murders” resulted in Rika’s character becoming the first woman to be sentenced to death in Japan since World War II. The second story features the notorious Sada Abe incident (probably most well-known for being dramatized in the film In the Realm of the Senses), along with a couple of extra very short (no pun intended…) penis chopping segments, and even features a real interview with Sada Abe herself. The third story tells of notorious rapist and serial killer Yoshio Kodaira (Asao Koike) who killed seven women in the mid 1940s as well as his father-in-law and who later admitted to multiple war crimes in the 1920s. The final story concerns Oden Takahashi, the famous murderess who became the last woman to be put to death by beheading in Japan in 1879.

Teruo Ishii, at the time of Love & Crime‘s release, had already established himself as a go-to provocateur who could deliver violent, idiosyncratic films that could perform well at the box office, having already directed a couple of entries in his Joy of Torture series as well as the highly successful Abashiri Prison series. So it comes as no surprise that his blending of crime elements with gruesome violence works so well. In fact, I might go so far as to say that Love & Crime might be the quintessential Teruo Ishii film, delivering a relatively grounded narrative lacking the more disturbing torture elements of some of his more extreme films while still serving up many of the more stylized gore tropes for which he is known. Having said that, I do think Horror of Malformed Men and Blind Woman’s Curse that followed this are better films, but they may prove to be a bit too out there to act as an introduction to Ishii’s work. Love & Crime, being an anthology format, is able to show all the facets of what makes Ishii such a fascinating director. The first segment is perhaps the most conventionally filmed, giving us a doorway into Ishii’s world, but it also features the most character development and narrative cohesion, making it one of the best segments. The second segment with Sada Abe then starts to shake things up, mixing documentary footage with dramatization and quick cutting short films. It’s an interesting experiment but does feel a bit disjointed compared with the previous story. The third segment on Yoshio Kodaira is easily the most experimental, switching to black and white and using a very avant garde point-of-view style that makes for a very unsettling and visceral impact. Nathan Stuart, the essay included with this release, draws a parallel with the transgressive films of Koji Wakamatsu that were being released around the same time, and it’s easy to see the comparison. The final segment then illustrates Ishii’s preoccupation with the grotesque (which he would explore much more thoroughly in Horrors of Malformed Men) in the depiction of Oden Takahashi’s leprosy-afflicted husband before ending on a strikingly beautiful, almost elegiac scene of the beheading in the snow. Honestly the weakest link here is Teruo Yoshida’s wraparound story which feels superfluous. Yoshida is fine but the framing device just isn’t necessary. Overall though this film is the complete package.

88 Films has delivered a very nice transfer. The blood is a nice, bright red and the grain levels never get too heavy. The color saturation in general feels very balanced which can get difficult when you have a film that’s a mix of color, black & white and even documentary footage. That final segment in the snow looks simply stunning. The LPM 2.0 Japanese mono track sounded very clear and free of distortion with a solid, even mastering that represents the original audio well. We have some nice extras as well. First we’ve got a very good commentary from Asian film expert Jasper Sharp and Fangoria staff writer Amber T. They have both a lot of good information on the film and play off one another well. We also get a new introduction to the film from Mark Schilling as well as a stills gallery and a trailer. Finally the disc includes a physical booklet with the aforementioned very good essay by Nathan Stuart.

If you are looking for a great introduction into the weird, grotesque world of influential exploitation pioneer Teruo Ishii, Love & Crime fits the bill to a ‘T’, and 88 Films has delivered this singular and fascinating film in a great package. Highly recommended!