6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book for bedtime reading, August 18, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood and Madness in Japanese Cinema (Creation Cinema Collection) (Paperback)
This excellent book offers an in-depth account of porn films in Japan, with an emphasis on films that feature both sex and violence/gore. The photos included are fantastic, although some of them are difficult to make out the details. The text is easy to read, although I wish the publisher had used a better font.
A good companion book to "Babylon Blue".
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This ain't your run-o-the-mill coffee table book, February 25, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood and Madness in Japanese Cinema (Creation Cinema Collection) (Paperback)
Attention to anyone who wants the most in depth insight into japanese shock cinema that money can buy. This is a neat book with everything you wanted to know about japanese films featuring bizarre sex and violence in a world where there is no deliniation between the two. Good info and terrific pictures, this one is sure to be the hit of the tea party.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Left me hungry for more substantial food..., February 6, 2003
This review is from: Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood and Madness in Japanese Cinema (Creation Cinema Collection) (Paperback)
This is a highly distressing book. For as much information as the reader discovers, the sense of lacking mounts, creating more questions than this book has means, or intent, to answer. It is best to think of Eros in Hell as a primer for the reader interested in getting a taste of extremism in Japanese cinema. The high points of the book include the chapter on Koji Wakamatsu and the "underground" films of Shinya Tsukamoto, Shojin Fukui, et. al. Meanwhile, the rest of the book founders under the weight of excessive footnotes¹, goofy interviews of Japanese filmmakers by Parisian photographer Romain Slocombe² and a pedantic chapter covering the minutia of Nagisa Oshima's AI NO CORRIDA (IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES).
For readers with more than a passing interest in the Japanese New Wave Cinema, I recommend picking up David Desser's Eros plus Massacre (named after Yoshishige Yoshida's film). Hampered by its aggressively wide scope and passive acceptance of misogyny, Eros in Hell does a terrific job of stressing the need for a comprehensive look at the radical reaches of Japanese Cinema. (ISBN: 1871592933)
¹ All of the footnotes in Eros in Hell would work much better if integrated into the text.
² Slocombe is best known for his photographs of Asian girls in bandages and, apparently, he feels a need to bring up his fetish with everyone to whom he speaks.
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