Rampo Noir

Hisayasu Satō aka Toshiyasu Satō (佐藤 寿保 Satō Hisayasu?, born on 15 August 1959 in Shizuoka City, Japan) is a Japanese exploitation film director. He has worked prolifically in the pinku eiga genre. His best known works are the pink film The Bedroom (1992), and the V-Cinema splatter film Splatter: Naked Blood (1996). He is known for his “sledgehammer” filmmaking style, and using his exploitation career to tackle serious subjects like obsession, alienation, perversion and voyeurism. He is often likened to Canadian director David Cronenberg due to his unflinching eye for Body Horror. Along with fellow directors, Kazuhiro Sano, Toshiki Satō and Takahisa Zeze, he is known as one of the “Four Heavenly Kings of Pink” (ピンク四天王 pinku shitenno?).

Satō is a very prolific director, having directed about two dozen films in 1998 and 1999. To date, he has directed more than fifty films dealing with eroticism, sadism and horror among the lower classes of Japan. He is famous for his “guerilla shooting technique” in which his actors appear on location in public and incorporate unknowing bystanders into the film. One notorious example of this technique can be seen in Widow’s Perverted Hell (1991) in which the lead actress, nude and bound in S&M gear, appears in a busy downtown location and begs confused passers-by to help her masturbate. Allmovie comments, “Like Divine’s memorable strut through the streets of Baltimoremarker in Pink Flamingos, this scene was shot guerrilla-style, with no advance planning, and some of the reactions from unsuspecting pedestrians are absolutely priceless. Intended as a dark meditation on the unhinging effects of grief, the mondo aspects of its climactic scene makes the rather lackluster Mibojin Hentai Jigoku worth seeing.”

Satō’s 1987 Temptation of the Mask was important for several reasons. One of the first gay films produced by a major pink film director, the film also brought together three members of the shitenno for the first time. Takahisa Zeze worked as Satō’s assistant director for the film, and through him began hiring future-director Kazuhiro Sano as an actor in his films. Zeze later recalled, “I remember once there was a gay pink film, and Satō wanted to use Sano, so I was the go-between and negotiated with him to appear in it. That’s how we all started working together.”

Satō’s second gay-themed film was the Muscle aka Mad Ballroom Gala (1988) was a tribute to director Pier Paolo Pasolini. For this film, Satō was awarded the grand prize at the Berlin Gay and Lesbian Festival in 1993. From this and later films like Hunters’ Sense of Touch (1995), Satō has gained a reputation as one of the few directors who can competently alternate between gay and heterosexual-themed pink films.

Satō’s 1990 film, Horse*Woman*Dog, another film featuring Kazuhiro Sano, became a success due to its scandalous scenes involving bestiality between the three characters in the film’s title. Another controversial, but highly-regarded film from Satō is Promiscuous Wife: Disgraceful Torture (1992), for which the director hired the Paris cannibal, Issei Sagawa (aka Kazumasa Sagawa) to appear in a cameo role.

Famed for the offensiveness of his films, Lolita: Vibrator Torture (1987), dealing with a homeless man who rapes and murders women, is often singled out as Satō’s most repulsive film. In his later works, Satō has collaborated with the female pink film writer, Kyoko Godai. While the violence in his films has sometimes been less extreme since this collaboration, the Weissers, in their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films call Godai and Satō’s work on Uniform Punishment: Square Peg in Round Hole! (1991) “Perhaps the most mean-spirited satire on film.”. The film deals with a religious cult who worships a maniacal young woman who spends her nights hunting the city for people to rape and kill with the help of a male slave. Allmovie judges the film a “perversely entertaining jet-black satire” and a “dark but highly watchable softcore effort.”

The respected writer Yoshiyuki Hayashida became a fan of Satō’s work and wrote a scriptusing many of Satō’s major themes. Satō filmed the script as Uniform Masturbation: Virgin’s Underpanties (1992). Though Satō’s style seems to have softened somewhat as the 1990s progressed, he was still capabable of producing such works as Splatter: Naked Blood (1996), which, Allmovie warns, “contains one of the most appalling scenes in Japanese horror, with a young woman mutilating and eating her own body.” —Wikipedia