Eat the Schoolgirl: Osaka Telephone Club (1997)

Such a frustrating disappointment

I'll tell you why so serious

Crappy film

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

If you've seen director Naoyuki Tomomatsu's zombie film Stacy and thought that was a bizarre little flick, wait until you get a load of Eat the Schoolgirl. Full of sex, revolting gore, rape, and general weirdness, this sleazy 60 minute exercise in extreme cinema doesn't make a lot of sense, but is short enough to ensure that it never gets boring (that's the understatement of the decade!).The film OPENS with a hot Japanese chick performing phone sex whilst her client has a five-knuckle shuffle, and gets worse (or better, depending on your point-of-view) from that point on: we get to see a psycho killer who likes to dress as a schoolgirl and mutilate his female victims before jerking off over their wounds (in one case, after completely disembowelling them!); a sexy angel (minus her wings) who isn't quite as angelic as she looks; and some Yakuza gangsters who abduct a woman, rape her, and then administer an enema—whilst filming the whole thing!At times, with its incomprehensible narrative and 'creative' cinematography, Eat the Schoolgirl resembles an art-house film; for most of its running time, however, it's simply a classic example of extreme Eastern excess, and one you won't forget in a hurry.

British cinema-goers of a certain age will doubtless remember with fond affection the now extinct phenomena of the second feature; a shorter, often low budget 'mini film' that preceded the main event (which in my day usually had Doug McClure fighting some men in rubber suits) and were usually funded by the Children's Film Foundation. One thing that the Japanese film industry seems to have excelled at over the past fifty years or so is the production of such sub feature length, low budget 'fillers', but rather than tales involving a pre-pubescent Keith Chegwin foiling kidnappers, these Japanese shorts have been exercises in enveloping stretching when it comes to the abuse of young Asian females.The pedigree can be traced back to Koji Wakamatsu's art house shockers 'Violated Angels' (1967) and 'Go Go Second Time Virgin' (1969) through to the infamous 'Angel Guts' and 'Guinea Pig' series of films, to recent efforts like 'Seketsu No Kizuna' and 'Mu Zan E'. Besides scenes of horrendous and graphic violence inflicted upon women, what these films also have in common is a pretension toward intellectualism, probably in an attempt to legitimise the proceedings in a "Hey, but it's art so it's OK" kind of way. And this mentality leads as nicely to 'Eat The Schoolgirl', because pretension is something that this film has, and has in spades.Directed by Naoyuki Tomomatsu, 'Eat The Schoolgirl' concerns two young adults who eke out a living doing dirty work for a yakuza gang whose main line of work seems to be making genuine rape/snuff films. Both of them share an obsession with sex; one is addicted to telephone sex whilst the other can only get his rocks off over the sight of eviscerated female corpses. Throughout the film, he is visited by a naked female angel (sometimes with wings, sometimes with scars where the wings used to be) who tells him to go out and kill. This he does in graphic style with the added kink of being dressed as a schoolgirl while he does so.In terms of plot, that's virtually your lot. At least, that's what the whole film boils down to in the final analysis, despite what the filmmakers would have you believe. At barely an hour long, Tomomatsu simply does not allow enough time for any of the 'mysteries' of the plot to unravel. There are hints and flashbacks that suggest our cross dressing killer witnessed something bloody and traumatic as a child (a plot device that's strongly reminiscent of similar in Scavolini's 'Nightmares In A Damaged Brain'), but it's never developed enough to provide any kind of satisfactorily explanation as to what's going on or to give any depth to the film as a whole.And that's the main problem with 'Eat The Schoolgirl'. Rather than develop the identity and motives of the 'angel' and the killer, or to give the two antiheroes any kind of contextualising backgrounds, he prefers instead to focus on lengthy and extremely unpleasant scenes of women being abused, raped, or given forced enemas by cackling males who delight in filming the attacks on video and clearly regard the women as nothing more than objects.Although Tomomatsu is best known for 'Stacy' (though 'Eat The Schoolgirl' pre-dates it by around four years), anyone expecting more good natured blood and gore in the humorous and slapstick style of this later film should be on their guard; 'Eat The Schoolgirl' plays straight as a die and is completely devoid of humour or any moments of light relief. The violence is frequent and bloody and the special effects, though nothing particularly 'special', are graphic and gritty and leave nothing to the imagination. The sex/rape scenes, although never hardcore, are as brutal and harrowing as anything in better known shockers like 'I Spit On Your Grave' and are not at all easy to sit through.But sit through them I did, largely out of interest as to where Tomomatsu was going with the characters and situations, and it so was with some disappointment to find, when the credits rolled, that he wasn't going anywhere with them. Instead, 'Eat The Schoolgirl' plays in style like a jumble of cut up images and ideas that recall a 90's MTV video, a clear example of style over substance with the underlying idea seemingly being that the introduction of some ambiguity and mystery will excuse the images of a naked woman being disembowelled in a shower and her killer masturbating over her writhing body as she tries to hold her intestines in. Subtle? Certainly not, but the feeble attempt to pass off such tacky, exploitative fayre as 'art' leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

I honestly can't tell you what Naoyuki Tomomatsu's (of STACY "fame"...) EAT THE SCHOOLGIRL (aka EATING SCHOOLGIRLS: OSAKA TELEPHONE CLUB) is about. It seems to be a strange amalgamation of surreal "art-house" film and all-out Japanese filth. There is some sort of storyline that ties it together, but it is hard to follow and threadbare. A lot of it seems as if it's supposed to be dream-sequences, but these are hard to tell apart from the true action of the film...One thing I DO know - it's pretty nasty stuff...Two guys who are sexually obsessed work for some Yakuza thugs who make hard-rape films. One of 'em dresses like a schoolgirl and goes around slicing people up, raping them, and jizzing in their open wounds. The other guy disembowels some chick. There's some sort of angel with her wings cut off that has something to do with all of it. The Yakuza guys kidnap this one girl, beat the hell out of her, rape her, then give her an enema in a pretty nasty forced-enema-doody-expulsion scene. Yup...that's about it.EAT THE SCHOOLGIRL is pretty primo sleaze for those into the newer wave of Japanese perversity films. It ranks up there in the filth department with some of the other more notable works of Japanese sickos like Daisuke Yamanouchi and Tamakichi Anaru. SCHOOLGIRL lacks any of the goofy elements that makes STACY a "fun" watch - this one is pretty much all-out depravity. The rape and sex scenes are very long and protracted, to the point of almost becoming dull (except for the car-rape-chest-stab-wound-jizz scene...that one is pretty strong...). I actually think the film would have been a little stronger had they shortened a few of the sex scenes and thrown in some more gore - but that's just me. Definitely recommended for the filth-fans out there, but clocking in at right around an hour - it felt like it was missing something. Oh yeah...and there is no schoolgirl-eating - unless by "eating" they meant clam-diving - in that case, there's plenty of that. I pray for the day that the Japanese are allowed to show full-frontal and actual penetration in these hybrid gore/sleaze films - I think they would be untouchable in the repulsive department. Worth a look to "extreme" J-gore/sleaze fans - 7/10

From the director of, 'Stacy' and pre-dating that film by about 4 years, this is more bloody, less coherent and a bit shorter. It is also extremely weird, hard to follow and packed with sex and bloody death. All known bodily fluids are on show here and all exhibited within a sexually explicit context. So, a naked girl is sick down her front before her assailant cums in the stab wound he has inflicted between the merry moments of their sex and her death. I don't think I need to go into all the gory details but rest assured that all fluids do indeed make an appearance, for good or bad! The opening sequence of phone sex seems a bit strong but it is probably the easiest sequence to take (and it's erotic). From there on as we struggle to make sense of everything, really nasty things happen, like the slit open nude girl, struggling to maintain her balance in the bath as she also struggles to stuff her intestines back inside her. There is so much more and yet the film barely runs an hour. Oh yes, there is an angel too, naked all through the film - I'm not sure if she was a schoolgirl but she didn't get eaten. Actually nobody got eaten, unless we count the numerous scenes of oral sex. Enough!