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70s cult classic Belladonna Of Sadness includes torture, desire and a penis creature

BELLADONNA OF SADNESS (Eiichi Yamamoto). 93 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (May 20) at the Royal. See listing. ­Rating: NNN


Revered by international midnight movie enthusiasts and discussed in whispered tones by animation fans, Eiichi Yamamoto’s 1973 feature, Belladonna Of Sadness, lives again in a 4K digital restoration from American distributor Cinelicious Pics. 

This version, which restores some eight minutes of footage cut from the negative, opens for a run at the Royal this week. And it’s… well, it’s something. Four decades on, Belladonna Of Sadness now looks like the apex of the psychedelic sexploitation era: it’s an expressionist pop art freak-out. 

In medieval France, stunning young bride Jeanne (voiced by Aiko Nagayama) is thrown into a surrealistic landscape of torture and desire through the machinations of a feudal lord and a penis creature. (You know, the usual.) 

The incongruity of the setting and the spoken language is compounded even further by the score, which comes straight from Italian sleaze cinema, and the deadly seriousness with which everything is performed. 

It feels like it was burped out whole from the cinematic unconscious of the age, the animated analogue of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s lucid fever dreams El Topo and The Holy Mountain, which are similarly mesmerizing without ever being terribly entertaining. 

Whatever it is, it’s an experience unlikely ever to be replicated. And maybe that’s for the best, but at least we can finally see it on a big screen.

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