Mondo Macabro: Assault! Jack the Ripper (1976) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Mondo Macabro

Japanese Nikkatsu film director Yasuharu Hasebe made his big screen debut in 1966 with the action crime thriller Black Tight Killers (around the corner from Radiance Films) before working up to such seismic Yakuza action epics as Massacre Gun and Retaliation and doing not one but three of the Stray Cat Rock movies and the critically acclaimed Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701’s Grudge Song.  Around the same time he was making a number of Yakuza films for Nikkatsu, the film studio itself was going through a number of changes in the 1960s with the emergence of the Pink film or Japanese sexploitation film full of sex and nudity. 
 
By the 1970s, the company ceased making action films entirely and devoted itself 100% to producing erotic sex movies and gave way to a most contested and illicit subgenre: the “Violent Pink” which gave way to topics such as sexual assault and/or murder, all but singlehandedly spearheaded by none other than Yasuharu Hasebe who churned out two of 1976’s most notorious Violent Pinkus with Rape! and today’s Mondo Macabro entry the ultraviolent and viciously sadistic psychosexual shock fest Assault! Jack the Ripper.  

The kind of movie that could’ve only existed within this short window before Nikkatsu pulled the curtain back on such films continuing to be made, it represents a queasy tightrope walk between progressive sex cinema with strong female characters and pure amoral sociopathy the likes of which had never been seen before in Japanese cinema and unlikely will be again in the near future.

 
A newly hired waitress named Yuri (Roman Porno regular Tamaki Katsura) who tends to mouth off to her customers and superiors meets ineffectual nebbish pastry chef Ken (Yutaka Hayashi).  Befriending the man, she convinces him to give her a ride home in the pouring rain when his car inadvertently strikes an insane self-mutilating female bystander in the road.  

After killing her, instead of going to the police the unlikely couple finds out they’re really turned on by murder and begin an all-out joint serial murder-sex spree to maintain their libidos.  Soon the two are living out a life of sex and crime with increasingly vicious attacks on woman.  However, things get complicated when the previously fearful and soft-spoken Ken’s bloodlust can’t be satiated and soon begins striking out on his own, much to the scorned angry Yuri’s wrath.

 
One of the most plainly unspeakably evil films ever made, predating the nonjudgmental amorality of John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer by several years, Assault! Jack the Ripper is the kind of ugly vile psychosexual grotesquerie that could’ve only emerged in mid-70s Japan when the filmmaking landscape was undergoing radical changes for good or for ill.  

Sexually graphic (bordering on pornography) and viciously violent with knives going into places that shouldn’t be talked about, watching this Violent Pinku is far less sexy than it sounds.  Confrontational, absurdly over the top in its transgressions and deliberately devoid of a moral center, it winds up being one of the most countercultural films made anywhere in the world and also arguably paves the way for such incendiary movements as the New French Extreme or Cine de Terror Mexicano.

 
Visually speaking, the film looks painterly and milky with rich filmic texture lensed by The Naked Seven cinematographer Masaru Mori and Hajime Kaburagi’s incongruent, tonally chipper score functions in stark contrast with the film’s grim and gruesome proceedings with a lofty female singer crooning away happily about love and carnality.  However, as things do start to ratchet up in terms of the naked slashed up bodies dropping, the score becomes more twisted and sinister and briefly accurately reflects the audience’s horror.  

Most audiences will probably remember Yutaka Hayashi from Godzilla vs. Megalon and Bullet Train but here he goes the whole distance and believably tracks the gradual evolution from dorky baker to bloodthirsty killer.  Tamaki Katsura, a regular in Hasebe’s films, spends much of the film (and her career) cavorting about naked though near the end of her run she made a memorable turn in Shôhei Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine.

 
While successful at the box office, the brisk 71 minute sex-murder monster was considered by many the pinnacle of the so-called Violent Pinku subgenre.  A film so cruelly evil and devoid of a moral compass of any kind, it engendered backlash to such a degree that soon Nikkatsu, fearing a government intervention, installed a producer on the set of his next film Rape! 13^th Hour, a film that all but effectively ended Nikkatsu’s Violent Pinku line for going too far.  

Incredibly brutal and downright mean, Assault! Jack the Ripper remains not wholly unlike Goodbye Uncle Tom in being indefensible.  However, for fans curious about one of Japan’s darkest subgenres of film that could’ve only existed in the mid-1970s, this might perhaps be the shining example of what the Violent Pinku was capable of doing to audiences.  Not for the squeamish or easily offended by any stretch of the imagination but for fans of all things Japanese cinema, this one is hard to shake.

--Andrew Kotwicki