Film Review: Captured for Sex 2 (1986) – CAT III

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SYNOPSIS:

In Captured for Sex 2, a young man, Shingo, and his girlfriend, Miki, are driving in the countryside when their car breaks down. When they go and seek help from a nearby house, they are captured and kept as sex slaves by an unnamed man. Gradually Shingo becomes enraptured by the acts of forced S/M on both himself and Miki and offers to be the man’s apprentice, helping him abduct and torture two other women. And soon, the apprentice wishes to become the master.

REVIEW:

Captured for Sex 2, is the second in a trilogy of films produced under the banner of Nikkatsu’s roman P*rno films and directed by Genji Nakamura, Ryuichi Hiroki and Hitoshi Ishikawa under the pseudonym of Gô Ijuuin. Unlike the ‘softer’ more mainstream S/M themed roman p*rno films produced by Nikkatsu in the 1980s, Captured for Sex 2 details unflinchingly the mechanics of S/M culture and practice, covering just about every conceivable fetish in the process and offering a detail description of bondage and sex toys in the process.

It is a relief therefore that still constrained by censorship, the genital areas of the women are pixilated out as the graphic nature of what is shown is extreme enough as it is. On the positive side, Captured for Sex 2 is constructed in an interesting manner, with the voice-over of Shingo detailing his conversion to the ‘pleasures’ of S/M and has an interesting conclusion or perhaps climax is more appropriate in which the three women (who have been captured as sex slaves) are suspended from a complex construction of rape and knots as the man and Shingo torture and abuse the women with flames and whips.

The mise-en-scene is interesting and effective, rather than the action itself, as is the use of a blue filter which externalises Shingo’s extreme rapture when he expresses in voice-over in religious terms.

While I have a great deal of time for Japanese independent pink cinema with its political critique of Japanese society and the less explicit mainstream P*rno films of the 1980s made by the main Japanese studios, I am less enamoured by films such as Captured by Sex 2 which focus purely on male desire and fantasies and construct women as ‘willing’ victims of such fantasies. Such films were made specifically for a male audience, and therefore did not need to entertain issues surrounding female viewers or indeed offer any positive representation of femininity.

Given this however, any film which has a woman forced to submit to sex and then shown as enjoying being the object of abuse is problematic from any perspective, especially within a film that has artistic pretensions above its P*rnographic status. In addition, scenes in which the captured women are forced to have sex with each other and of course, enjoy it immensely, directly interpellate the male spectator with this foundational male fantasy of lesbian sex. It may well be, as Ryuichi Hiroki has argued, that the whole point of the Captured for Sex films was to offer an honest and realistic representation of S/M practices (see Jasper Sharp, Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complex History of Japanese Sex Cinema, 2008, p. 243), but the relationships depicted in these films are non-consensual and therefore highly problematic as I have already said. In addition, there are much better and more nuanced explorations of gender relations utilising S/M as a theme through which to articulate desire and abandonment to the flesh including Tetsuji Takechi’s Daydream (Hakujitsumu, 1964) and Blind Beast (Môjû, Yasuzô Masumura: 1969).

If the women in Captured for Sex 2 had managed to escape or overcome their captors – preferably after torturing them, then I could have perhaps offered a more positive review, but there are few redeeming qualities about it aesthetically or narratively. If you want a film that explores S/M culture in explicit detail then perhaps this is for you, the only thing I can say is that it certainly wasn’t for me.

Captured for Sex 2 (1986) – CAT III