Northwest Film Forum

NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: 1960s NIKKATSU ACTION CINEMA

THE WARPED ONES (aka SEASON OF HEAT and THE WEIRD LOVEMAKERS) is visually raw and stunning. Released not long after Godard’s BREATHLESS, THE WARPED ONES has similarly amoral characters, frenetic pace and dynamic hand-held cinematography. But Kurahara’s vision is more extreme, to the point of existing in a world of its own. The protagonist transcends the usual social and moral categories, like an animal in human form. (Kurahara reportedly told the actor Kawachi to think of his character as a "hungry lion roaring at the sun.") A fascinating experiment in style (not to mention the limits of human behavior), Kawachi's famously uninhibited performance catapults the film into the highest ranks of "bad youth" cinema, and perfectly captures the essence of Beat. A stylistic and amoral high point of early 60s cinema, THE WARPED ONES was actually released in dubbed form in the US by Radley Metzger's Audubon Films as THE WEIRD LOVEMAKERS.