These are not nice people.
The Warped Ones (狂熱の季節, Kyōnetsu no kisetsu) is a 1960 film from Japan, directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara.
Akira and Yuki are a petty criminal and his prostitute partner in Tokyo. One day a reporter named Kashiwagi spots Akira lifting wallets in a jazz club that caters to Westerners. Akira is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he befriends another young hoodlum, Masaru. Akira and Masaru are released at the same time, whereupon they join up as partners in crime. They steal a car to take a trip to the beach, and as they're arriving they spot Kashiwagi and his girlfriend Fumiko. They assault Kashiwagi by striking him with the car door as they zoom past, then kidnap Fumiko. Akira rapes Fumiko while Yuki and Masaru have sex. They promptly forget about the incident and continue their life of crime untl Fumiko tracks Akira down and makes a strange request.
This film, with its mix of sex and violence and crime, was quite unusual for Japanese cinema in 1960.
Tropes:
- All Men Are Perverts: Invoked by Yuki to Fumiko after she has sex with Fumiko's boyfriend Kashiwagi. Fumiko wants to make Kashiwagi as impure as herself after the rape so she arranges this meeting with the hooker. Yuki however says in the aftermath that Kashiwagi acts as an animal during the intercourse and there is in fact nothing pure in him.
- Brick Joke: First Akira casually asks a woman from his neighborhood he meets whether she wants to have sex with him, she just jokingly pushes him away in response. Some time later that same woman in her turn at the chance meeting asks Akira whether he now wants to have sex. This time Akira is not interested.
- Car Fu: Akira hits Kashiwagi with the door of his car as it rides past him.
- Child by Rape: Fumiko winds up pregnant.
- Cool Car: The one stolen by Akira after he quits prison in the beginning.
- Defiled Forever: Fumiko describes herself as "stained, defiled, good for nothing". She asks for Akira and Yuki to defile Kashiwagi as well, so they will be equal again. Amazingly this works, as the distance between Kashiwagi and Fumiko disappears after Kashiwagi has sex with Yuki on Fumiko's dime—but that doesn't really help them in the end.
- The Dying Walk: For Masaru in the end.
- Evil Laugh: The horrifying cackling that ends the film, from Akira and Yuki after they meet Kashiwagi and Fumiko in the hospital.
- Fanservice: Both Yuki and Akira provide the viewer with it.
- Five-Finger Discount: That's how Akira acquires a knife in a shop while Masaru distracts the shop assistant.
- Foreign Culture Fetish: Akira is very keen on jazz. He likes only "real jazz", not the brand of jazz which he finds false.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: First played straight, then averted. Yuki says that Kashiwagi knocked her up and that she needs an abortion. Masaru tells her to keep it, and that he'll support her. She cries with relief and says she wanted to keep it. Then after Masaru is killed in a gang fight, Yuki goes and gets her abortion. Crosses into
Squick territory when a client sees her and she says she has to hurry up and get the abortion so she can service him. - Hassle-Free Hotwire: It takes about ten seconds to hotwire a car in order to drive to the beach.
- Hitler Cam: The camera is pointing almost straight up for a shot of Akira as he's dragged from the jazz club in handcuffs.
- Japanese Delinquents: Yup.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Yuki who regrets that she is not a man so that she could participate in a rape.
- Law of Inverse Fertility: Both Yuki and Fumiko get pregnant after a sole meeting with a certain character of this movie.
- Fumiko might have sex very rarely as she confesses that it actually happened only once with Fushinagi. Then in the act of rape she is impregnated.
- Even better, Yuki has to have sex with various clients as well as with Masaru. However if one has to believe her she was impregnated by Kashiwagi during the one time they had sex.
- Meta Guy: One of the guests at the party where Akira breaks. He lampshades the typical features of an angry young man present in him (eyes showing ennui, lips revealing disdain, rebellious spirit), who is disaffected but attractive (and thus interesting to the intellectuals as an object of research or a stock character to be presented in the works of art). It appears that the attitude of this intellectual to Akira carries a weighty element of Ho Yay too.
- Mood Whiplash: The film is an emotional rollercoaster however the beach scene where Akira celebrates life with a black bar patron takes the cake.
- No Ending: Akira takes Yuki to the hospital. There they meet Kashiwagi and Fumiko. Akira pushes Yuki at Kashiwagi, grabs Fumiko, and says they should switch girls, since Fumiko's carrying his baby while Yuki is carrying Kashiwagi's. Akira and Yuki mock Kashiwagi, laughing maniacally. Then the movie ends.
- No-Tell Motel: Where Yuki takes her clients—she takes a white man to one for a thirty-minute stay, and later takes Kashiwagi to another.
- Parental Abandonment: Yuki says that she started to prostitute herself only because her father was sentenced to a term in jail and thus could not take care of her.
- Police Are Useless: Except for the prologue where they are very efficient, arresting Akira and Yuki in flagranti. Later it is always this trope.
- Race Fetish: For Akira who admires blacks. He thinks that they invented jazz which the whites then stole from them. Now that Japanese consume this jazz being next in this chain even after the whites they might be the worst as per Akira.
- Once it leads to a Ho Yay moment when Akira leaves the bar with a black man rejected by Yuki unwilling to serve him. The black comforts his as Akira is in disarray and later they swim together.
- Yuki does not want black clients.
- Once it leads to a
- Rape as Drama: Akira assaulting Fumiko on the beach.
- Rule of Cool: For cars and music.
- Self-Deprecation: Akira thinks that Japanese are the worst as they took jazz from them whites who previously stole it from blacks.
- Sex for Services: Fumiko says "you can have my body for payment" when asking Akira and Yuki to "defile" Kashiwagi. It turns out to not be necessary, as Yuki takes cash to seduce Kashiwagi.
- Shirtless Scene: Akira has several of them, he also drives the stolen car shirtless.
- The Sociopath: All three of our leads. Fumiko delivers a rage-filled speech to Akira only to discover he isn't paying attention, lost in his jazz music. After Masaru's death, Yuki says "I cried for three days" in a tone that sounds like she is talking about shopping for groceries.
- Streetwalker: Yuki appears to find customers in bars, but Akira picks up a street whore in one scene, and gives her Fumiko's purse.
- Teens Are Monsters: At least they're apparently supposed to be teens, given that Akira and Masaru are released from a juvenile detention center. In true
Dawson Casting tradition, all the actors were in their early twenties. - Took a Level in Badass: Played with for Masaru: On one hand he joins the gang and makes himself a leader killing the leader of an opposite gang. On the other hand that leader kills him too as it becomes clear soon after he arrives at the house where the delinquuuent trio lives.
- Visible Boom Mic: In one scene the viewer can see the reflection of the crew in the car window when the car takes off.
- Wicked Cultured: Zigzagged with Akira. He does not understand classical music and mocks abstract paintings but he has a very good taste in jazz.
- Villain Protagonist: Three awful, awful young people.
