ASSAULT! JACK THE RIPPER – A dewy eyed moment today when this rolled out of my bagful of dusty memories. Maybe that’s not how I should frame a flick as unsentimental as ‘A!JTR’, which takes us into the heart of a love affair based on genital mutilation via cake knife. It’s about a moody chef and a mean waitress who fall for each other after they accidentally run over and kill an escaped mental patient; some kind of weirdly contrived vag-impalement happens when they try to drag the body away, apparently so arousing that romance is born. They develop an addiction to… rekindling the moment. A!JTR was made in seventies Japan by Nikkatsu and has all the strangeness and ickyness that one might expect from the more way-out stuff from that era. ‘Way out’ here means, not only the amped up tastelessness, but the wackiness that went into the soundtrack – breezy jazz drifts along, occasionally tilting towards a more yearnsome melancholy, as cake blades crunch and scrape. It’s basically a string of murder scenarios, but it’s neither callous nor particularly shocking. The atmosphere is one of a haunting kind of sadness, undermined by bits which seem almost knowingly absurd (the waitress’s reaction to chef going it alone with his cake knife – “but that’s like having an affair!”). Actually, rewind that last bit, A!JTR is definitely at least a little bit callous, but my, what an odd film.
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