Zoom In: Rape Apartments

Zoom In: Rape Apartments is a 1980 violent pink film in Nikkatsu's Roman Porno series. It was director Naosuke Kurosawa's debut work.

Plot summary

A woman living in an expensive Tokyo apartment suspects that the piano tuner living on the same floor is the man who raped her years before. When she witnesses the man raping another woman, she becomes convinced of his identity, but is unwilling to report him to the police because of a mysterious attraction she has towards him.

Cast

Erina Miyai as Saeko
Yōko Azusa as Sachi
Yūko Ōsaki as Mayuko
Miki Yamaji as High school girl
Beniko Iida as Young housewife
Keijirō Shiga as Takaya Nakabayashi
Toshikatsu Matsukaze as Kōichi
Ren Seidō as Keigo
Rei Takagi as Glamorous woman
Yūko Araragi as Woman in the gym
Yūko Katagiri as Opera singer
Hidetoshi Kageyama
Setsu Midorikawa
Yōko Ōyagi
Midori Mori

Background

Zoom In: Rape Apartments was an unofficial sequel to director Kōyū Ohara's Zoom Up: Rape Site, inspired by the success of that film and written by that film's screenwriter Chiho Katsurako. For Zoom In: Rape Apartments, Nikkatsu intentionally cut back on the extreme violence displayed in Ohara's earlier film. The surrealistic elements of the film, such as a scene in which liquid dripping from a woman's vagina bursts into flame upon hitting the ground, has led some to compare Kurosawa's style to that of Seijun Suzuki.
The film inspired a series of films using the Zoom In/Zoom Up title, including Zoom Up: Woman From The Dirty Magazine, Zoom Up: Sexual Crime Report, Zoom Up: Genuine Look At A Stripper, Zoom Up: Graduation Photos, and Zoom Up: Special Masturbation.

Critical appraisal

Japanese critics praised director Naosuke Kurosawa's use of imagery in Zoom In: Rape Apartments and the film's cinematography. They were not as impressed with the script, however, complaining that it was weak. In their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films, Thomas and Yuko Mihara Weisser give the film a rating of two-and-a-half out of four stars. They judge that the film's strong visual sense compensates for the writing, noting that pink film scripts are not generally the best. They write, "Kurosawa's 'color-and-shadow' work is akin to that of an erotic Seijun Suzuki." Allmovie warns that the film's subject matter is not for all audiences, but judges it to be "one of the Nikkatsu studio's most unusual pinku eiga films."

Availability

Zoom In: Rape Apartments was released theatrically in Japan on March 15, 1980. It was released on DVD in Japan on March 24, 2006 as part of Geneon's third wave of Nikkatsu Roman porno series.