The Stroller in the Attic

Exceptionally pervy sexploitation movie from the first flowering of the Nikkatsu company's 'roman-porno' (romantic-pornographic) genre. A merely decadent exposition (landlord spies on bizarre erotic activities of his tenants in 1920s Tokyo) leads into a seriously pathological drama (landlord and aristo tenant team up for a series of thrill kills), climaxing with a vision of the 1923 Kanto earthquake (which wiped out the city) as the ultimate fusion of Eros and Thanatos. The perversity derives in part from the source story by Edogawa Ranpo (the Japanese 'Edgar Allan Poe'), but Tanaka was the right director for the job: less a skin merchant than a connoisseur of the extremist frisson.