Ecstasy of the Angels (1972)
Director: Koji Wakamatsu
Genre: Avant-garde / Experimental, Psychological Drama
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Subs: English hardsubbed
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069358/
Maverick auteur Koji Wakamatsu once again marries softcore porn with radical politics with this trippy tale about a member of a militant group coming apart at the seams as it plans its latest strike against society. The members of the group, who all go by code names based on the days of the week, labor under the "Autumn" branch of the organization. Following a late-night weapons raid on a U.S. Army base that turns bloody, members of the "Spring" branch attack, torture, and rape Saturday (Rie Yokoyama) and Friday, demanding the weapons cache. This betrayal echoes throughout the group, turning friend against friend, as one and all descend into paranoia and sexual decadence. Some go crazy, as others grow ever more revolutionary. Evidentially, a splinter group unleashes a wave of bomb attacks upon the unsuspecting bourgeois of Tokyo. — Jonathan Crow
Having made such comparatively linear works as Go, Go Second Time Virgin and Violated Women in White, Koji Wakamatsu pushes the limits of narrative and experimental filmmaking with this exploitation freak out. This go around, Wakamatsu evokes the cloistered life and dry-mouthed paranoia of radical terrorists on the lam while fusing it with a dizzying assault of violent sex and nudity. In one scene, a longhaired thug plunges a pencil into the thigh of the female lead. The image is as grizzly as it is surreal in its sexual imagery. Wakamatsu makes deft use of sudden shifts in time, film stock (black-and-white to color), sound effects, and music to heighten the film's lyrical, nightmarish quality. A free jazz riff on radical politics and kinky sex, the plot as such may perpetually skirt incoherence but since Wakamatsu is such a gifted image-maker, the film never fails to shock, titillate, and transfix. — Jonathan Crow
(DivX.JAP.sub.ENG).Ecstasy.of.the.Angels.(by.Koji.Wakamatsu,.1972).avi 
