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Review

Consider yourself cautioned: Freeze Me is an intensely disturbing and uncompromisingly brutal thriller, which explores sexual violence and bloody vengeance in a style that is both graphic and unflinching in its cruelty, and beautiful and haunting in its aesthetic mastery. In other words, it's a classic Japanese exploitation film. Indeed, Freeze Me seems like a homage to the "pinku eiga" (sexploitation) films that thrived in Japan throughout the '60s and '70s: shocking but visually ravishing pictures that investigated the darkest areas of human sexuality and violence. Chihiro (Harumi Inoue) has moved to Tokyo after suffering through a sexual assault in her hometown. Years later, she encounters one of her attackers, and he forces his way into her life, blackmailing her with the video that the rapists shot of her torment. The shocked Chihiro initially complies, but then decides to strike back. Before long, one of the other attackers turns up – and soon Chihiro has to buy several more large freezers. Director Takashi Ishii pulls no punches in his approach to the "rape-revenge" subgenre, maximizing every grisly moment for its cathartic impact. Ishii is one of Japan's most fascinating genre filmmakers, though in the United States he is best known for his Takeshi Kitano crime drama Gonin.

 -- Travis Crawford