Violated Angels

The year after Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses in a Chicago dormitory, Koji Wakamatsu restaged it as a Japanese pink film and turned the tabloid horror into something closer to an art-house provocation. A soft-faced young man talks his way into a nurses' hostel and kills the women through the night, and Wakamatsu shoots almost all of it in cold black and white and cuts to colour only when there is blood. It runs under an hour, moves like a stage play, and treats the killer as a broken, impotent product of post-war Japan rather than a monster to be solved. This is the political, avant-garde wing of the pinku industry, the stuff Wakamatsu made between reels of programme smut. Austere, ugly and deliberately hard to sit through.