NO END INCITE

Like Einstein said, if you want to understand relativity, watch a bad roman porno film and time will slow to a crawl.

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.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the panting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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