CULTJAPAN!

Teruo Ishii (1924–2005) was a Japanese film director best known in the West for his early films in the Super Giant series, and for his films in the Ero guro (“erotic-grotesque”) subgenre of pinku eiga (soft porn movies) such as Shogun’s Joys of Torture (1968). He also directed the 1965 film, Abashiri Prison.

Born in Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood in 1924, Ishii developed an early love of cinema. He joined Toho Studios as an assistant director in 1942 but his artistic career was interrupted when he was assigned to take aerial photographs in WWII.

Ishii’s directorial debut was in 1957 with the boxing film, King of the Ring: The World of Glory (Ring no Oja: Eiko no Sekai). He was next assigned to direct six installments in the children’s science-fiction series, Super Giant. From 1958 to 1961 Ishii directed four films in the film-noir Line (Chitai) series. For the last of these films, Sexy Line (Sexy Chitai) (1961), Ishii took his cameras to the streets of Asakusa and Ginza, in order to film real life on location.

In 1961 Ishii moved to Toei Company where he directed Flower and Storm and Gang (Hana to Arashi to Gang) (1961), starring Ken Takakura. His 1965 Abashiri Bangaichi with Takakura would solidify that actor’s stardom and give Ishii his biggest success of the 1960s. In 1968, Ishii initiated two popular, long-running series for Toei, Hot Springs Geisha  (1968–1972) and The Joys of Torture (1968–1973). Beginning with Shogun’s Joys of Torture (1968), Ishii directed all eight entries in the series, which examined the history of torture in Japan. A fan of the work of horror and suspense author Edogawa Rampo since childhood, Ishii adapted many of his horror stories into his films of this period, including Horrors of Malformed Men. The term ero-guro (“erotic-grotesque”), used to describe Rampo’s writings, was also applied to Ishii’s style in these films, and the term is still used to describe the most extreme of the S&M films in Japan.

Ishii worked in several of Toei’s popular genres during the 1970s, including a pinky violent film with Reiko Ike, Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition and Torture (1973), and one of Sonny Chiba’s Street Fighter films in the mid-1970s, The Street Fighter’s Last Revenge (Gyakushu! Satsujin Ken). Ishii made two contributions to the biker genre with Detonation! Violent Riders (1975) and Detonation! Violent Games (1976). After 1979 Ishii stopped making theatrical films and worked mainly for television during the 1980s.

Ishii returned to Toei in 1991 with the V-cinema film The Hit Man: Blood Smells Like Roses. In 1993 he made a film of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s manga, Master of the Gensenkan Inn (Gensenkan Shujin), and in 1998 he filmed Tsuge’s avant-garde manga, Wind-Up Type (Nejishiki). In 1999 he remade director Nobuo Nakagawa’s famous film Hell (Jigoku; 1960). Ishii’s last film, The Blind Beast Vs The Dwarf (2001) was another based on the work of Edogawa Rampo.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Teruo Ishii“.