R100 (2013) – Review

No culture is without sexual acts and fetishes that some others would consider strange if not completely bizarre or perverse but for me, the most fascinating country in this area is Japan because of the dichotomy between their strict censorship laws and some of the bat shit crazy stuff they do. From their anime hentai porn to “used” panty vending machines Japan has been at the forefront of crazy sex stuff for years, yet the Criminal Code of Japan requires most pornography in Japan to be at least partially censored. Apparently pixelating part of the image with a digital mosaic somehow makes things like tentacle rape passable. This is why director Hitoshi Matsumoto’s film R100 is so great because he aims both barrels of satire at his fellow countrymen and their sexual peccadillos.

Department store salesman Takafumi Katayama (Nao Ōmori) has a wife who has been in a coma for three years and not looking to recover any time soon if at all, he also has a young son Arashi whom he gets help taking care of from the boy’s grandfather, but Takafumi requires more than just help around the home, he has other more pressing needs. These needs lead him to a club called “Bondage” where he is offered a special year-long contract that will have beautiful dominatrices randomly showing up in his life to deliver pain and humiliation.

A bevy of dangerous beauties.

At first, things are great, if a tad weird, Takafumi joins a beautiful trench-coated woman for dinner and then all of sudden she gives him a Bruce Lee-style kick to the head. Outside the coat comes off revealing a stunning dominatrix outfit. She proceeds to kick him down the stairs. Later he is accosted in the street by a dominatrix who kicks the living shit out of him. All this leaves him in a state of blissful ecstasy.

Curb stomping has never been sexier.

Unfortunately, one major stipulation in the contract is that it cannot be cancelled for any reason, this creates tensions when these attacks start to intrude on his work and home life. His attempts to cancel are ignored and when he goes to the police he is informed that there is nothing they can do as all involved are consenting adults. That is until he comes home to find his son gagged and hanging from the ceiling.

The levels of fucked up have just been blown off the charts.

This movie is certainly not for everyone but what I loved about it is the way it slowly built from what at first appeared to be a serious drama about a man working through some serious issues that then takes a left turn into action comedy mode. Takafumi must deal with a variety of strange dominatrices; the Whip Queen (Shinobu Terajima) whose specialty is obvious, the Queen of Voice (Mao Daichi) who can impersonate anyone including his comatose wife, the Queen of Saliva (Naomi Watanabe) who douses one with a variety of horrible phlegm assaults, but it’s when a horrible accident results in the Queen of Saliva lying dead on his floor and causes Takafumi’s life to get even crazier as the S&M organization then vows revenge.

If you think any of that sounds a bit nuts wait until he must deal with the Queen of Gobble.

This surreal world makes a little more sense when you take into consideration that you are watching a movie within a movie, occasionally the story stops and jumps to a group from the censorship committee who have been screening this movie, but none of them can make heads or tails out what they are seeing, even the young assistant to the ancient director has a hard time explaining things to them, saying that the director believes it can only be understood by people over the age of a hundred, thus this film’s rating and its title.

If latex-clad dominatrices, riding crop-wielding ninjas, and a giant Aryan CEO (Lindsay Kay Hayward) of an S&M club are not your thing then you may want to give this movie a pass, but if you love wacky crazy and at times erotic moments then this film may entertain you as much as it did me.

I’d be more forgiving of corrupt CEOs if they looked like this.