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Sakura's about to uncover a horrifying family secret...
A fatal skin disease forces a beautiful actress to retire from the screen. She puts a sinister plan into motion to transplant her brain into her own daughter Sakura. She hears her mother's unbelievable confession of her past, tries to escape in vain. After the horrible operation, she starts a new life as a normal little girl. And she seduces the piano teacher, tries to inherit her mother's properties.... Then a police detective who is suspicious of her mother's sudden disappearance starts sniffing around her...
A dark and gory film about starlets, vanity and mother-daughter relationships. It's tonally bizarre but still a fun time. The brain transplant sequence will be staying with me for a long time.
The highlight of Baptism of Blood is the brain extracting/transplanting machine duo that looks like something straight out of a H.R. Giger art exhibit mixed with Tsukamoto stylings, with its protruding blades and claw-like hands that cut and peel away skin (like an orange), carefully sawing away skull cap, and extruding and replacing brains in a finely honed succession. The scenes with the machine are so graphic, long, and intricate that it seems like the design for the brain transplant machine must have been in existence before the main plot-line was created. I mean, I began to imagine the blueprints for the brain machine as I watched.
The rest of the film is a story of a woman who has…
This uneven Kazuo Umezu adaptation starts out pretty cool with stylish depictions of seductive Japanese movie queen glamour degenerating into vanity-mad sociopathy and bloodlust, but as it goes on, the promise of the interesting themes & their presentation completely dissipates. Everyone mentions the brain transplant scene because it really is the high point. I did love seeing that squishy brain plop into a stringy net of guts and be continually lowered and raised out of a bubbling pool of magenta blood. I did not love seeing the main character, an underage schoolgirl, devolve into a caricature of a lolita seducing her married music teacher.
The teacher is at first played like a handsome young man (in his late 20s, and Sakura…
Horror manga legend Kazuo Umezu's work, with it's precarious combination of folklore, elegant plotting and moments of genuine shock, presents filmmakers with a unique challenge. This is why most Umezu adaptations disregard the essential qualities of Umezu's cartooning in favor of more conventional horror tropes (or in the case of Nobuhiko Obayashi's film-version of The Drifting Classroom, absurdity and humor). Kenichi Yoshihara, in adapting Umezu's Senrei, chooses to simultaneously amp up the gore and mitigate the truly horrific elements of Umezu's original story.
Umezu's protagonists are usually powerless children, often at the mercy of exploiters and predators--the corruption of innocence by a cruel, amoral adult world. In Senrei, pubescent Sakura (here played by Rie Imamura) is besieged by her vain,…
Actually based on the manga "Senrei" from the 70s by Kazuo Umezo, who was the better Junji Ito before Junji Ito, this bizarre piece of a B-movie goes damn hard for absolutely no reason how it only can come from Japan. More than the overall quality, it's the absurdity I like in this one: The pacing is all over the place, a (very) erotic plot balancing between trash and high concept and the practical effects are actually more remarkable for their time than they were ever allowed to be.
The story revolves around a woman, suffering a skin disease, coming to the only and logical conclusion to transplant her brain in her daughter whose beauty she is admiring…
esa es una forma de trasplantar un cerebro, lástima que necesiten una explicación súper rebuscada para hacerte entender la decepción en la que se convierte después.
Emerson, Lake, And Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery album cover: The Movie!
There's some decent ideas on display, but some poor execution, with characters making weird, nonsensical decisions.
It's not completely awful, saved by the truly bizarre and gory 'brain switching' scene and a twist-within-a-twist ending that I totally didn't see coming. Mostly because of terrible writing and absolutely zero foreshadowing, but the point is that it was unexpected...
That brain transplant scene deserves a better movie. Cause everything outside that is making me uncomfortable in a leering way. The school girl banging her piano teacher (we are conspicuously not shown her age on her student ID) and the ham handed drug psa at the end reveal an ugly patronizing core. Also the twist at the end is just laughable. If you find yourself getting bored halfway through, feel free to turn it off.
