And now for a film that was made in 1983, made almost no impact in it’s native Japan, and is only now doing the round because someone was offered the 16mm print in 2022 and then Marty McFiles spent two years doing a fansub of it. It’s an hour long, it’s got some of the most hilariously realistic disappointing sex scenes in cinema, and it’s a delight of strangeness.

The film starts with Miki Takagi, in a fetching knee-length dressing gown, waking up buried in the sands of a desert. Then Misa Momose turns up in a swimsuit, wearing deely bobber’s and singing a song about being an alien floozy here to pick up men. She rescues him, he discovers he’s got some random tickets, and then he starts gobbing on about him life because the main character is a self-obsessed dickhead. Think Ataru from Lum crossed with Hugh Hefner before we all worked out how awful he was.

We start tracking through Miki’s like as a child oblivious to how useless he is, confessing his devotion to Ultraman (which is fair), and then adolescently discovering that he’s quite useless with the ladies, we start to get a feel for the desert and it’s varied masked inhabitants. They’re either fragments of his psyche, with each ticket representing a layer of his personality that he must come to terms with, or cheap zany costuming. Or, my favourite take, both!

Moving on from student life he gets a story published and decides he’s a great author, regardless of all the rejection letters he gets. He also decides he’s a great lover, and ends up squirming around for a minute and a half on a thoroughly disinterested female partner who literally just wanted to read their manga. It’s painful, and hilarious, and real. Well, other than the naughty bits being blurred out. Although they kind of add to it all.

He tries to become a salaryman for 5 minutes, becomes a pornographer, and in a total unforeseeable chain of events causes everything to go wrong when he knowingly breaks a real simple to follow law. This is interspersed with him talking to the alien that has only been on the planet for 5 minutes and knows he’s a berk and his ongoing conflict with a 6-foot-tall block of tofu that keeps on holding him back. It eventually gets a weapon and Dali alone knows what that’s all about.

Whilst this all sounds an unintelligible mess, there is a sense that writer director Santetsu Natsuki had an actual story to tell and was trying to convey something meaningful in between the daft bits. Quite what it is I’m not sure, as I’m not as elbow deep in the early 80s indie cinema and otaku culture than he appears to have been. What I know for sure is that the story gets tied up satisfactorily, it doesn’t slow down at any point, and there the conclusion is off-beat enough to work.

Clearly this is a niche film, suitably only for dedicated weebs and those who are up for a punt on world cinema that no one thought of giving any kind of release to. It’s low budget, low-fi, and grubbily low brow in places. Being an hour long also helps, as does some of the cultural and language guidance including in the subs. So it’s obviously a Treasure in these parts, as it’s got enough charm and comedy to keep you engaged if you can accept what it is.

The Raggedyman