Ever get sexually aroused when having your teeth drilled? No? Us either. But Nikkatsu Studios’ infamous roman porno films leave no fetish unexplored, so in the opening sequence of Hirusagari no onna: chohatsu! aka Woman of the Afternoon: Incite!, Yûko Asada gets turned on when a dentist drills her teeth. Weird, right? But we aren’t disparaging the dental masochists among us. If inner ear vibrational resonance floats your boat, we say just do it.
Later Natusko Yashiro gets plain drilled in a dentist’s chair. This dentist is her husband, and she doesn’t want to bear children because it will ruin her body. After being pressured on this issue she flees in her car, and thus begins an odyssey of Grecian proportions. During her travels she has several bizarre mishaps and stumbles upon assorted weirdos who, for reasons ranging from persistent neurosis to sheer psychopathy, all bring her to harm. The harm escalates to degradation, most of which takes place at a rural restaurant several bad men take over and turn into a carnival of violence and rape.
You’d suspect the point of all this is something about social decay, but we’re not qualified to venture a guess. We just know that by the end credits, which arrive a mere sixty-seven minutes after Nikkatsu’s opening logo but feel fifty reels too late, we thought we’d had our teeth drilled—with zero sexual arousal involved. Roman porno films may be softcore, but they sure can be hard on the psyche. Hirusagari no onna: chohatsu! premiered in Japan today in 1979.
