Secret Hot Spring Resort: Starfish at Night

This humorous film provides fascinating insight into Japan’s bygone pornographic underworld, following a band of itinerant smut-peddlers, consisting of Hisao, his wife and main model Saku, and their partner in crime Tori, as they arrive penniless at a hot spring resort town and attempt to make their money selling nude photos, staging live sex shows and screening home-made blue movies. Scripted pseudonymously by Atsushi Yamatoya, a moonlighting Nikkatsu scriptwriter who contributed to Seijun Suzuki’s classic pop-art gangster movie Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin, 1967) and collaborated with Kôji Wakamatsu during the mid-1960s, the film plays like a hybrid between Yasujirô Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959) and Shôhei Imamura’s The Pornographers (Erogotoshi-tachi yori: Jinruigaku nyûmon, 1966), with affectionate film-buff homage to Japan’s silent era, notably the early samurai films of Daisuke Itô.