Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands

Director: Atsushi Yamatoya

1967 / 87min / DCP

Yamatoya, co-writer of Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill, released the same year, used his occasional forays into directing softcore Pink films as theaters for formal experimentation, a propensity much in evidence in this gonzo down-and-dirty yarn about a detective who becomes infatuated with the image of the woman—the buxom Noriko Tatsumi—whose purported murderers he’s been hired to find, a film notable for its mesmerizingly hallucinatory images, its chaotic piano jazz soundtrack courtesy Yōsuke Yamashita, its hard-boiled dialogue (“I can see the color of your heart… It’s sickly green”), and its ouroboros-like end-at-the-beginning structure.

Recently rescued from the only surviving 35mm film elements by Rapid Eye Movies in Germany, and newly digitally restored by Craig Rogers for Deaf Crocodile.

Distributor: AGFA