Before discovering Koji Wakamatsu's "Sex Crime: Phantom Killer," I considered Norifumi Suzuki's "Star of David" to be the roughest and most disturbing of the "pink" genre, with it's crazed anti-hero masturbating to concentration camp photos while forcing the girls that he had imprisoned in his dungeon to urinate on themselves or engage in sex acts with dogs, before carelessly impaling them with a knife or using them as target practice..But this ultra-rare print of an early Koji Wakamatsu film has surfaced...and this one may have that movie beat. "Phantom Killer" is supposedly an early template for Wakamatsu's later film "Serial Rapist." That movie, one of the ugliest pink films of all time, is almost impossible to sit through, but "Phantom Killer" is definitely a masterpiece of nihilistic art. The teen boy riding around on his bike, observing the opposite sex through his thick glasses, studying them as if they were creatures from another world; he doesn't know how to connect with them socially; he only knows one thing; that he wants to rape them. It starts rather typically, with him as voyeur, watching from a distance, other men raping women. And this film would have us believe that men in Japan do nothing but rape women all day, because it seems to be happening everywhere. Watching others live out his fantasies is not enough for the boy, and it is not long before he is acting out his own depraved fantasies. "Phantom Killer" very quickly veers off the familiar path of the pink genre, when our anti-hero starts stabbing people to death. The tone shifts into this darker territory and the film becomes uncomfortable to watch. The violence here is graphic, and committed so casually that it feels even more twisted. Movies like "Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer" come to mind, and this one reminded me of the film clips Alex was forced to watch in "A Clockwork Orange," with it's relentless "sex-rape-stabbing, sex-rape-stabbing" visuals playing out on the screen in quite relentless fashion. But make no mistake; this is an extremely powerful and well-made film and I think it's one of Wakamatsu's strongest efforts, even without the larger budgets that his later films had. Filmed in bleak black & white, but with sudden bursts of color during certain intense scenes, and the sudden shock of seeing bright red blood spurting forth from a black & white film, only adds to the uneasy mindset it creates. Complete with a climax that is completely unforgettable and shocking, this is definitely worth tracking down for fans of the genre. It's one of the strongest pink films of all time, especially considering that it was filmed in 1969..
