Last Updated on September 30, 2020 by rob
Three friends, Yojio (Hiromasa Hirosue), Yukio (Go Jibiki) and Kohei (Takaki Uda) attempt an armoured truck robbery but it goes disastrously wrong after Kohei fails to show. After a stint in the slammer Yukio emerges seeking revenge. Kohei’s trail leads to a hotel by the sea surrounded by lava-topped mountains and its sole, apparently perpetual resident, a stunning, enigmatic beauty named Rika (Hitomi Katayama) whose presence is so overpowering Yukio vows to have her. But he’s not the only one under Rika’s spell.
A busty goddess with the most amazing bee stung lips comes down to Earth to expose the eternal weakness of man in this sly, black comedy from Koji Wakamatsu, a talented and amazingly prolific auteur (IMDB lists 107 movies between ’63 and 2012!) who for over five decades made politically engaged, sex and violence low budget indies. He learnt his craft well and Hotel Petrel Blue, despite its minimal budget and mildly smeary digital video look, works not just because it has the staple ingredients of gangsters, violence, a sexy naked girl and a memorable setting but because above all it engagingly illustrates an eternal truth about the male of the species. It’s fun to watch the plot’s initial revenge dynamic gradually succumb to Rika – as does everything else in the movie – once she arrives on the scene.
Frequently naked or wearing nothing more than a flimsy negligee Hitomi Katayama as Rika has the voluptuous figure to sell her character’s allure and there’s a sort of delightful insolence in the way Wakamatsu stages her encounters with the men. It works like this; the men come into the hotel talking revenge or business (there’s also a detective on Yukio’s trail), but once they spot this all but naked woman sitting at the bar in this empty, out of season hotel, smoking one cigarette after another and just staring out to sea, they’re caught like flies in a spider’s web. What follows – as the men resort to murdering each other in their desperation to have Rika – is as mordantly amusing as it is inevitable. Katayama herself has just three words of dialogue in the entire film but when they come they’re an absolute hoot.
