Deep contact

Happy New Year!
Woman in the rings

In my unending pursuit of cinematic mad science I recently unearthed a little flick with the provocative English-language title of Deep Contact (1998).  It turns out to be a late pink eiga, that is to say, Japanese softcore/sexplotiation movie.  (It’s distributed by a company imaginatively named Pink Eiga.)

The premise is this.  A cynical, burned-out loser named Wataru is abducted and finds himself in a very strange sort of hospital.  (Wataru is on the far left of the screenshot below.)

The head of the hospital, a Dr. Ohora (yes, they do make the obvious pun at some point) explains that Wataru is desparately needed for an experiment.  The earth is being threatened with destruction by a comet, and only the force of psychokinesis can divert the comet sufficiently to save the world.

Fortunately they actually have a means of generating the necessary psycokinetic energy — they have a group of psychics whose power is released by…well, no points for guessing on this blog.  And the most powerful of them is one Ikuko, a hot lady sexual scientist.  Ohora arranges a masturbation-driven demonstration of her prowess for Wataru.

Ikuko, whose abilities began to manifest at menarche, has been abstaining from intercourse all her life for fear of the destruction she might wreck if she had “real” sex.  But it has been determined (somehow) that Wataru is the man for her, who can release her energies so as to divert the comet and save the world. “She is fantasizing about you,” Ohora tells Wataru as they watch her work her way toward climax.  (A sex partner who comes pre-seduced!  It would do for sex what the TV dinner does for cuisine!)  It sort of leads me to wonder whether the strategic deployment of a Hitachi Magic Wand might not be a cheaper and more hygienic means of saving humanity, but obviously no one consulted me on the script.

I guess considered strictly as erotic mad science Deep Contact is rather disappointing.  There isn’t really that much in the way of lab settings.  The sex is merely competent softcore.  Ohora isn’t really a mad scientist; he’s just an ordinary scientist working from a bizarre premise for the banal goal of saving the world from destruction.  (A really mad scientist would, by way of contrast, be trying to destroy the world, perhaps with an eye to repopulating it with a race of atomic supermen, or something.)  But for all that I can’t say the movie lacks entertainment value, but it features all sorts of utterly lunatic dialog, and I write as an expert lunatic.  Now to be sure I don’t speak Japanese and am compelled to rely on the subtitles, and perhaps the movie as lost (or gained?) something in translation.  But really.  The subtitles in the screencaps above certainly hint at the spirit of the proceedings.  And you do get lines like “Nurses in this hospital are not allowed to wear panties” and “Now we fuck to save the world!” which you wouldn’t normally expect to hear from the likes of say, Judi Dench or Anthony Hopkins.  (Not that it wouldn’t be entertaining if we did.)

And then there’s things like this:

Yep.  It’s not enough that smokin’ hot lady scientist is being offered to you on a plate.  We have to bring the authority of the United Nations into the game.  Sweet Zombie Jesus!  Was there a Security Council resolution?

The shape of the building in the background of this shot seems not to have been an accident, also.

I think I need to go lie down now…