By Tristan Bishop
Due to Asami August here at Brutal As Hell I’ve had a good excuse to revisit some of my favourite Asami performances, as well as discover some new ones (the insane charms of Sukeban Boy are now counted amongst my favourites) and make mental notes of a few more must-sees thanks to the sterling reportage of my fellow BAH writers. One of my original ideas for a piece this month was covering one of her AV features (that’s a porn film, for those of you not familiar with the lingo) – an idea which, although appealing at the time (in the sense of bringing a new perspective to things, of course) soon turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. How, for instance, does one review pornography in an interesting manner, beyond appraising the physical attributes and noise-making skills of the players involved? (and, frankly, I would find it a little embarrassing to write). Added to that, it turned out to be damn near impossible to actually track any down – The AV films haven’t been released in the West, I can’t Google in Japanese, and, it turns out, using ‘Asami’ as a search term when poking around in the less salubrious areas of the internet doesn’t help much, as there appear to be a large number of Asian porn stars with that name. That was a frustrating evening’s research, I can assure you. Instead it was suggested that I take a look at one of her ‘pink’ (softcore) films, and so I browsed her filmography marking titles like ‘Prison Girls’ for possible investigation. In the end I decided on Erotibot – after all, who can resist a title like that?
Erotibot is the story of Tamayo, who is the daughter of a rich inventor and a servant girl – and apparently heir to a massive fortune when her father passes away. Tamayo has been raised in a mansion by two robots – a suave butler droid named Number One and a hulking metal beast called Number Two. On her 18th birthday she receives another robot which she names Sukekiyo. Sukekiyo is not as advanced a model as number one, with his big silver head and frequent malfunctions, but he is by far the most human, and it doesn’t take long for Tamayo and Sukekiyo to fall in love with each other. However the path of girl & robot love never runs smooth, and it transpires that Number One has been programmed to attend to Tamayo’s ‘adult education’, causing Sukekiyo not a little heartbreak. On top of this the inventor’s legitimate daughter Tsukiyo (played by another very popular AV star, Maria Ozawa) and her female ninja sidekick Azami (who else but Asami) have heard that Tamayo is in line for the inheritance and are out for blood.
This review can stand as a lesson in doing your research however – firstly Asami is hardly in the film, and given very little to do next to the other two actresses (although, as always, she looks great). Secondly, well, the film somehow manages to be incredibly boring, even at 72 minutes (Apparently there is a version out there somewhere which runs an additional 15 minutes, but in this instance I’m glad I didn’t put myself through any extra suffering). A few Philip K Dick references at the start of the film got me thinking that maybe this would be an interesting take on what it means to be human, but it isn’t – it’s mostly a slushy romantic comedy with a few sex scenes, and a bit of gore in the final ten minutes. Added to this is the fact that the film is obviously ~extremely~ cheap. Now we’re used to our Japanese exploitation being on the budget side – that’s all part of the charm – but when you have silver-painted wellingtons standing in for robot feet and a number of shots where you realise the rooms have no roof, the lack of action (and under-use of Asami) gets even less excusable. As for laughs, well, there are none. Director Naoyuki Tomomatsu wrote and co-directed (along with Yoshihiro Nishimura) the brilliant Dracula Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl, and the drop in quality here is actually astounding – he is also the man behind Lust of the Dead (as covered in Asami August by Ben) which, although I’ve not yet seen it, sounds at least a more interesting proposition than what is on offer here. Was it a complete waste of time? Well, the cast are uniformly attractive, but anyone looking for pure titillation will get more bang for their buck elsewhere.