Pretty Body: Frankenstein's Love (1988)

directed by Takafumi Nagamine

Japan

54 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

I only watched this because the thing I meant to watch fell through. I'd been aware of it for a while; it got subtitled relatively recently and looked like the kind of thing I'd be interested in, but until I thought to myself "who the hell is responsible for this" midway through the film, I had no idea it was directed by the same guy who made Diva in the Netherworld, a favorite of mine that is still in need of subtitles.

Pretty Body is a film that, on the surface, is not very complicated: it's a story about a girl named Izumi who moves into an apartment above an otolaryngologist's office while, unbeknownst to her, the doctor and his assistant have been murdering (and continue to murder) apartment residents and other random folks to harvest their body parts for a Frankenstein's Monster they're making. Somewhere along the way, the girl catches sight of the monster and falls immediately and intensely in love with him.

It would be a lot easier to explain the way it feels to watch this movie to someone who has already seen Diva in the Netherworld, because it's almost exactly like that. Diva in the Netherworld itself would be easier to explain to someone who's seen House, so to oversimplify things (perhaps to an unfair degree), I guess we could say that Pretty Body feels like a mixture of House and maybe one of the Guinea Pig movies if it was directed by somebody whose only previous work had been idol videos.

Despite its simple plot, and despite the bizarre, dreamlike execution of that plot, I do think there's some sense being made here, somewhere. The more I thought about it, the more this started feeling like a classic "coming of age" story (I do not tend to be a fan of these, but sometimes they are at least interesting). A girl who's young enough that she probably hasn't been living on her own for long moves into a strange new place and, still innocent enough to find love and magic wherever she goes, meets another innocent like her, while all around them the world is full of random murders and sex & violence. At the end of the film, Izumi is forced to grow up when everything goes wrong and she's separated from the monster she loves, but her attitude shows that despite her loss, she seems like she's going to do fine in the larger world. There's also some upsetting implications, given the fact that we see very graphically where the body parts that made up the monster came from. This creature Izumi falls in love with is very much his own person with agency and autonomy, but he is made of pieces from people who had been Izumi's own neighbors until relatively recently.

I want to come back to that word "dreamlike" just now, because there's no better way to describe this movie. It really does feel like a lot of the imagery is taken directly from things that you would see in a weird anxiety dream. There's a scene where the doctor's assistant comes in the room and tries to talk to him while he's on the toilet and she doesn't acknowledge that this is unusual in any way even though it clearly makes the doctor uncomfortable. Then there's the viewing window to the chamber where the doctor keeps the monster, which is opened by way of giving a wet willie to a sculpture of a giant ear on the wall next to it. The practical effects are dialed down here more than they were in Diva in the Netherworld, and the aesthetic is much more beachy and modern, but the environment still gives off a similar feeling of unreality.

I don't really know how to end this review, so I guess I'll just mention for tokusatsu fans that Noboru Mitani and Tomorowo Taguchi are in this (Taguchi in only a small role, Mitani as the doctor), so if you're some kind of completionist, you are now compelled to watch whatever this is.