Lost Paradise: Riding Habit Harakiri
Lost Paradise: Riding Habit Harakiri
| 01 January 1990 (USA)
Lost Paradise: Riding Habit Harakiri Trailers

Directed by Masami Akita,who is also one of Japan's leading noise musicians under the name Merzbow. With a soundtrack by the director himself, this intense and ultra-gory seppuku film shows a young woman taking her own life by an act of ritual harakiri.

Reviews
Interesteg

What makes it different from others?

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GazerRise

Fantastic!

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Kodie Bird

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

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Jenni Devyn

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

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pellenase

This is NOT a horror-film, Nothing to be afraid of here, keep moving, go on. Nothing to see here.Horrible? Oh yes. Gory? Check. A big V on that. But most of all, its terrible. I have seen the inside of a belly, its not a pretty sight, not ugly either, it depends on why you can see it (I prefer the doctors cut, I think, but then again, I have never seen the ax-slayers cut in real life. I could be wrong). Anyhow, those guts was not human, and that is a good thing. They wasn't even close, and that is a bad thing. You can SEE that they have been packed, compressed (At the butcher shop: Yes, I take some from that cow over there, and that goat liver looks cool, and throw in some fish guts while you're at it. Can you wrap them up in plastic for me, hate the smell. Do you have any blood? some red blood?), awful. If you need human guts, go for a pig. You can fool your local police with that one. Stay away from personal road kills like snakes, cats and ducks.And then the knife work. I have seen it worse, in Satánico pandemonium. Why not try to make it look real? Just a little bit? a tiny little... try?Works best in fast forward, even the soundtrack sounds better in double speed. Maybe we need a Charlie Parker for the white-noise electronica genre? You know, double-tempo and all that jazz?

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Argwaan

Always looking for movies that can still shock me like Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood or August Underground: Mordum did, I stumbled upon this short movie of a woman performing ritual suicide.Yes, that's the "story", a woman performing ritual suicide. With a setup like that you can assume the director wanted to at least shock his audience, but he fails miserably because of the bad special effects (we never see a wound, just lots of fake blood and what is probably animal intestines).Well, maybe he wanted to make a fake snuff movie, like the movies mentioned earlier? This doesn't work either because of the many camera angles and the artsy beginning and ending of the movie.Having said this, it's still at the very least an interesting movie, worth hunting down if you like rare and weird stuff, and it has some nice atmospheric noise music, but it's definitely not for everyone.Rating: 3/10

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HumanoidOfFlesh

"Lost Paradise" is directed by Masami Akita,who is also one of Japan's leading noise musicians under the name Merzbow.With a soundtrack by the director himself,this intense and ultra-gory seppuku film shows a young woman taking her own life by an act of ritual harakiri.Dressed in militaristic attire,the girl(Asako Mochuzuki)kneels,removes her jacket and opens her shirt to the waist,exposing her naked breasts and stomach.Lowering the waistband of her white panties,she caresses her belly before taking up a sacrificial knife,whose blade she wraps in a white bandage.Pressing the point into her left side she punctures the flesh,then slowly and deliberately pulls the knife across to the right.First blood leaks out,then as the gash widens her entrails start to ooze onto the floor.She continues to cut,her moans strongly reminiscent of those made by the actresses in porno films.Finally she collapses,still groaning,in a lake of blood and coiling viscera.Her death throes are extremely protracted."Lost Paradise" is an extremely gory Japanese shocker which looks as real as possible.I was really shocked whilst watching it and that's a compliment.The suicide scene is extremely long and painful to watch,because it lasts 18 minutes.The soundtrack by Merzbow is truly disturbing and hard to forget.This film is not entertaining,so fans of mindless teen horror should not bother.Check it out,but good luck finding a copy.

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erebus3001

OK, so I'm a fan of that racket-making kind of industrial ruckus that is referred to as noise and I've been a fan on Masami Akita's noise work under his Merzbow moniker for quite some time (even though his material of late has been somewhat unchallenging and tame) and I've always been interested in (but perhaps not a fan per se) of arty film and experimental movies and cinema in general. So I was of course excited when I found out that Masami-san had actually made his own movie. I was equally excited to actually stumble upon it on one of the lesser-known p2p networks lately (in divx format) and so I promptly downloaded it.I had no idea what the film was about, not an inkling as to what to expect, though I think I expected it to be at least loud. But it wasn't. It's quite subdued actually. And, to be blunt, quite boring as well. It's about a Japanese girl, dressed as a schoolgirl who flips through some photographs and after a while starts to fondle herself. After a couple of minutes she pulls out a knife and starts fondling that for a while. Then she promptly starts to commit seppuku (or is it harakiri? I never get that right for some reason). After she has sliced her abdomen up she pulls out a piece of intestine and wiggles it about for a bit before she collapses and dies, apparently from blood-loss (all the while with a vaguely pleased look as if this somehow sexually arouses her).That's it. The special fx are good but not spectacular. The point of this piece eludes me. I admit I'm no art critic nor am I crazy about gore for gore's sake, but to me this film is pretty much useless. The camera work is decent, the editing OK and so on, but really: what is the point? I'm bewildered and confused and also a bit disappointed. I guess I had expected more somehow. I'm just not sure what.

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