[MUBI] "Inflatable sex dolls of the Wasteland" (Atsushi Yamatoya, 1967) is a film noir that marked the directorial debut of Atsushi Yamatoya, the same year he had participated in the script of "Branded to Kill" (Seijun Suzuki, 1967 ), considered one of the best yakuza movies ever. The story begins with a businessman commissioning a hit man to kill those responsible for the rape and murder of his lover, who have also recorded in his presence.

The film unfolds towards almost hallucinatory terrain, in a way of telling the story that dives into the protagonist's past and that proposes a plot that bends in on itself. It could be defined as a kind of psychological "film noir", in which the director rehearses with experimental shots, underlined by an excellent free jazz soundtrack by the pianist Yôsuke Yamashita. But the story and the lines are quite disastrous and the lack of budget causes ridiculous moments. The woman is represented as a nympho and as an inanimate object (literally), but the film does not contain too many erotic scenes. It is also an example of the production way of "pink films", since at the same time that they participated in these film, the actors Noriko Tatsumi and Yūichi Minato starred in "Love's milky drops" (Ario Takeda, 1967), which it was shot on the same sets.

That was presented as an erotic polar/noir. Well first, it's really japanese to consider this erotic. There very single "erotic" scene (translate "where you can see a nipple") is of women being raped, gang raped, beaten and/or killed, fondled while unconscious (or dead, it's unclear), including by her father. In what seems like the potentially most consensual act, the guy still has a gun to her head.

Polar part is ok. A killer, Sho, is hired to get back his client's girlfriend and kill the ones responsible for her kidnapping. Turns out the main responsible, Ko is the one that killed the killer's own girlfriend a while ago.

It then gets pretty weird. Not as much as Branded to kill that apparently the director co wrote, but there are similarities. We see that Ko used to be Sho's close friend and he's been tracking him and fantasizing about killing him for years. They meet in a bar and have pretty gentlemanly conversation about killing each other.
A mysterious girl, that turns out to be Ko's girlfriend, ends up in Sho's hotel room. Conversations start getting weird and repetitive.

Twist: [spoiler]after killing everybody and getting the girl back, she won't wake up. While trying to wake her up, we realize that none of that happened, and all the recurring conversation bits were real words spoken in the hotel room where Sho was actually killed.[/spoiler]

The twist is nice, and not out of nowhere, the moment when things goes weird the first time is pretty noticeable, it just look like an old movie glitch so you don't pay too much attention to, it, that's all.

The action scene are a bit ridiculous (specially the very VERY exaggerated way people die).

The sex dolls in the title may relate to an ending scene where we see an hotel where what is presented as sex dolls in the room might actually be unconscious (or dead ?) girls. It's not quite sure how that relates to the rest of the story though.

In the end that's a nice polar with a weird structure and twist that could be used in modern movies, but not weird enough that it would be absurd. Not sure I got everything though, as the theatre had technical issues and we lost sound several times during the movie.