Hisayasu Sato

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Hisayasu Sato
Born	15 August 1959 Shizuoka City, Japan
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Years active	1985 – present

Hisayasu Sato aka Toshiyasu Sato (佐藤寿保, Sato Hisayasu^?, born on 15 August 1959 in Shizuoka City, Japan) is a Japanese exploitation film director. He has worked prolifically in the pinku eiga genre. His best known works are the pink film The Bedroom (1992), and the V-Cinema splatter film Splatter: Naked Blood (1996). He is known for his "sledgehammer" filmmaking style, and using his exploitation career to tackle serious subjects like obsession, alienation, perversion and voyeurism.^[1] He is often likened to being a Japanese David Cronenberg due to his unflinching eye for Body Horror. Along with fellow directors, Kazuhiro Sano, Toshiki Sato and Takahisa Zeze, he is known as one of the "Four Heavenly Kings of Pink" (ピンク四天王, pinku shitenno^?).^[2]

[edit] Life and career

Sato is a very prolific director, having directed about two dozen films in 1998 and 1999.^[4] To date, he has directed more than fifty films dealing with eroticism, sadism and horror among the lower classes of Japan.^[5] He is famous for his "guerilla shooting technique" in which his actors appear on location in public and incorporate unknowing bystanders into the film.^[1] One notorious example of this technique can be seen in Widow's Perverted Hell (1991) in which the lead actress, nude and bound in S&M gear, appears in a busy downtown location and begs confused passers-by to help her masturbate.^[6] All Movie Guide comments, "Like Divine's memorable strut through the streets of Baltimore in Pink Flamingos, this scene was shot guerrilla-style, with no advance planning, and some of the reactions from unsuspecting pedestrians are absolutely priceless. Intended as a dark meditation on the unhinging effects of grief, the mondo aspects of its climactic scene makes the rather lackluster Mibojin Hentai Jigoku worth seeing."^[7]

Sato's 1987 Temptation of the Mask was important for several reasons. One of the first gay films produced by a major pink film director, the film also brought together three members of the shitenno for the first time. Takahisa Zeze worked as Sato's assistant director for the film, and through him began hiring future-director Kazuhiro Sano as an actor in his films. Zeze later recalled, "I remember once there was a gay pink film, and Sato wanted to use Sano, so I was the go-between and negotiated with him to appear in it. That's how we all started working together."^[8]

Sato's second gay-themed film was the Muscle aka Mad Ballroom Gala (1988) was a tribute to director Pier Paolo Pasolini.^[9] For this film, Sato was awarded the grand prize at the Berlin Gay and Lesbian Festival in 1993.^[10] From this and later films like Hunters' Sense of Touch (1995), Sato has gained a reputation as one of the few directors who can competently alternate between gay and heterosexual-themed pink films.^[11]

Sato's 1990 film, Horse*Woman*Dog, another film featuring Kazuhiro Sano, became a success due to its scandalous scenes involving bestiality between the three characters in the film's title.^[12] Another controversial, but highly-regarded film from Sato is Promiscuous Wife: Disgraceful Torture (1992), for which the director hired the Paris cannibal, Issei Sagawa (aka Kazumasa Sagawa) to appear in a cameo role.^[13][14]

Famed for the offensiveness of his films, Lolita: Vibrator Torture (1987), dealing with a homeless man who rapes and murders women, is often singled out as Sato's most repulsive film.^[15][16] In his later works, Sato has collaborated with the female pink film writer, Kyoko Godai. While the violence in his films has sometimes become less extreme since this collaboration,^[1] Godai and Sato's work on Uniform Punishment: Square Peg in Round Hole! (1991) has been called "Perhaps the most mean-spirited satire on film.".^[17] The film deals with a religious cult who worships a maniacal young woman who spends her nights hunting the city for people to rape and kill with the help of a male slave. All Movie Guide judges the film a "perversely entertaining jet-black satire" and a "dark but highly watchable softcore effort."^[18]

The respected writer Yoshiyuki Hayashida became a fan of Sato's work and wrote a script using mand of Sato's major themes. Sato filmed the script as Uniform Masturbation: Virgin's Underpanties (1992).^[19] Though Sato's style seems to have softened somewhat as the 1990s progressed, he was still capabable of producing such works as Splatter: Naked Blood (1996), which, All Movie Guide warns, "contains one of the most appalling scenes in Japanese horror, with a young woman mutilating and eating her own body."^[20]

[edit] Partial filmography

[edit] Notes

[edit] Sources

• Hisayasu Sato at the Internet Movie Database
• 佐藤寿保 (Sato Hisayasu) (Japanese). Japanese Movie Database. Retrieved on 2007-10-06.
• Weisser, Thomas; Yuko Mihara Weisser (1998). "Spotlight: Four Kings of Pink (Hisayasu Sato)", Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films. Miami: Vital Books : Asian Cult Cinema Publications, p.463-479. ISBN 1-889288-52-7.