Juvenile Crime (1997) – Gunji Kawasaki.

An almost numbingly graphic, wholly sleazy teensploitation shocker based upon the true crime history of the shocking Junko Furuta case. I don't imagine that this is an altogether authentic depiction of the kidnapping, but director Kawasaki certainly doesn't deny viewers a mucky, unfiltered display of utter depravity. The three teenaged delinquents are clearly avid students of the 'last House n The Left school of extreme misogynistic psychopathy. While I'm fully aware of the inanity of stating that these abject youths are mindless skells, and as mindless skells go, these are on the evolutionary level of grossly neglected toilet bowl crusts. Aesthetically, Kawasaki's film is workmanlike, rather than articulate, and yet, there's a grimy intensity to this murky video edition which heightens the impact of the profoundly sordid content, providing a verisimilitude that, perhaps, the film makers don't deserve. I dug the more basic electronic elements of the score, strangely hypnotic, a welcome distraction from the hugely irksome pixelization process, suggesting extreme torture violence is all strawberry sundaes, but we must save the fragile gentlefolk from the real world horrors of exposed male & female pudenda. I'm wholly jaded/indifferent to screen violence/depravity, others may well find Juvenile Crime case an undistinguished, base, porn-y, and ultimately distasteful work. My main takeaway from the sleazier type of Cat III shenanigans is that when the poor, beleaguered female victim says 'No!', the director says 'Yes!', and we all blithely continue watching like desensitized oafs.