Red Angel - a "must see" classic

[Szlia]

Most of the times the back of DVD boxes is just a chain of superlatives to encourage you to buy the thing, but sometimes there is a nugget of truth to be found. There is such nugget on the box of Akai Tenshi aka Red Angel: "a criminally unbeknown masterpiece". After watching it, one can only agree.

The reason it found its way into my friend's DVD player the other night is because the movie is directed by Yasuzo Masumura. A pretty obscure name in occident even for most movie lovers but little by little we start to discover his huge filmography spanning from the late 50s to the early 80s. We allready saw Blind Beast, that fully deserves its cult status for its nihilistic love story and its psychedelic sets, and also the haunting and breathtaking Manji (I made a post on this very board about it at the time...). Yet we were not prepared for the shock that Red Angel was.

How to summerize it without giving too much away? Let's say it follows the dark path of a japanese nurse on the sino-japanese battlefront, where bodies and humanity is shredded. How to survive? How to remain sane? How to remain human? How to help others? That's the questions Nurse Nishi tries to answer while caught in a maelstrom of death and blood.

A superb black and white photography, great performances and a score that delivers one of the best main theme I ever heard, all that for a 95 minutes dive in apnea into the bleakest darkness, haunted by the poisonous ghosts of fetishism (don't worry it will make sense when watching the movie).

A timeless masterpiece (available in a DVD store near you!).

[Ham n Cheese]

Dang, it's hard to believe the film will live up to your post