REVIEW: Whore Angels

ピンサロ病院３　ノーパン診察室 (Pin-saro byôin 3: Nô-pan shinsatsushitsu)

Released: 2000

Director:
Mototsugu Watanabe

Starring:
Shiori Kuroda
Nao Saito
Shuetsu Tokaichi
Rira Mizuno
Jimmy Tsuchida

Running time: 63 min.

Reviewed by Chris MaGee

Blown into Tokyo by the dry winds of Mt. Akita comes orphaned beauty Komasa. Decked out like a cowgirl Komasa follows a series of help wanted posters to the Hot Lips Club, half cabaret/ half brothel in which she hopes she can ply her superb handjob skills. After providing a demonstration for the manager Komasa gets the job, but that doesn't settle life for her. Worn out from her first day of work Komasa heads out only to encounter one of the strangest scenes she's ever laid eyes on -- a young woman in a pink wig and a diaphanous fairy princess dress being man-handled by a man in a viking helmet and white cake make-up. No, it's not Halloween. Komasa has in fact stumbled into the middle of a cosmic battle between good and evil. The fellow with the horns is the demon Rock & Roll and his plan is to defile the pink-haired Monroe in order to propel the world into a millennium of evil. Frightening plan, but he should have picked a better place to do it than the parking lot of a rub n' tug because not only does Komasa save Monroe, but after having her ass kicked by Rock & Roll the mysterious Monroe demonstrates her own special erotic powers. It turns out that Monroe's kisses (and it also turns out, her blowjobs) have miraculous healing powers. Before you know it the two women are splitting their wages and have men lining up around the block to get into Hot Lips... but the battle for the soul of the Earth has still not been completed.

Are you confused? Yeah, so was I. At about the halfway point into Mototsugu Watanabe's 2000 pink comedy "Whore Angels" (a.k.a. "Pink Salon Hospital 3: No-Panties Clinic") I felt myself experiencing more than a little narrative dizziness, but it was a giddy, hilarious kind of dizziness, so I just rolled with the ensuing plot twists involving ghosts of dead siblings, blonde mariachi saints and secret Vatican operatives. I could almost have seen the antics (and of course frequent nude bump and grind sessions) as some massive lampoon of "The DaVinci Code" author Dan Brown's series of pseudo-religious thrillers. To call "Whore Angels" a massive anything would be a misnomer though. While most pink films are produced on a razor thin budget "Whore Angels" looked like it was produced with whatever props the cast and crew could scrounge out of the storage unit of their apartment buildings -- multi-coloured wigs, an old cowboy hat, a giant novelty styrofoam hand, a bunch of rolls of tin foil, oh, and a whole crate of nurses uniforms. When Rock & Roll captures Komasa's nemesis at Hot Lips and takes her to his lair he waves his cape across an array of candles and a stuffed toy white tiger and intones "...here before the gods of the old world!" you wonder if you're watching the worst film ever or the best film ever.

Okay, "Whore Angels" is far from being the best film ever. It's wildly creative film-making given its zero budget (a shot of Komasa making love under a set of Christmas lights with the undercover Joe Armani is just plain gorgeous), and as an erotic film it delivers on the sex scenes, but it's hard to call this great, or even good, film-making. Then again, you have to take a good hard look at a directors intentions when you come across something like "Whore Angels". Was Mototsugu Watanabe aiming at surpassing Kurosawa for his technical brilliance? Oshima for his transgressions? Mel Brooks for his tasteless comic brilliance? Probably not. It is easy to see, like in Watanabe's "Sexy Battles Girls", that this is a film-maker who wants his viewers to have fun -- fun in watching a movie as well as to have a bit of fun with the loaded subject of sexuality. Judged on this criteria "Whore Angels" is a resounding success; but even with its nods to millennial tension (the film was shot in 2000) a thorough examination of the film will see it fall apart.

If you're looking for high brow from your movie-going experience then you won't want to bother with "Whore Angels", but if you and your special someone want to settle in for a night of well-intentioned, horny laughs the you couldn't rent a better film.