Extacy Revenge: Kaori (Japan 2018)

Rating: *
Review Date: 6/2/20
Cast: Iori Kogawa

Kaori (Iori Kogawa) and her boyfriend Koji are taking a romantic walk in the park when Koji is gunned down and stabbed to death by a masked killer. Without the benefit of subtitles, the motive isn't clear. The next thing you know, an old man is having sex with a young man, and he ends up choking him to death on camera. Somehow, some dorky dude sees the live feed and downloads it onto his phone, which makes him a target for the Yakuza. Conveniently, the dorky dude visits Kaori's next door neighbor Misaki and has sex with her before the bad guys track him down and kill him. Misaki manages to escape to Kaori's apartment and they engage a detective to help them figure out what's going on. Things go from bad to worse as more bodies pile up. For some reason, Kaori has access to a revolver and decides to take the fight back to the bad guys in order to avenge her dead friends, and seems intent on not surviving the encounter.

It's a pointless revenge tale that pretty much fails on every level. Iori Kogawa is pretty and wears a tragically pained expression throughout the movie. She can also get pretty intense and even tortures a bad guy at one point. Unfortunately, the action is sparse and exceedingly weak, and when Kaori finally pulls the trigger the results are limp and unsatisfying. She puts five rounds into her lover's killer while three other Yakuza thugs drop her. Probably not the best strategy. Typical of Japanese cinema, the gunplay is unconvincing and the firearms have no kick whatsoever. The movie tries to sell itself as an erotic thriller, and contains three pointless and uninteresting sex scenes and a couple of gratuitous shower scenes. For a low budget movie, the production values are mediocre, but the overall results are disappointing.