Ecstasy of the Angels

A Film by Koji Wakamatsu

A group of militant extremists whom we know only by their code names -- the days of the week -- realize that they've been betrayed by their own organization when a nocturnal weapons raid on a U.S. Army base goes awry.The delicate internal balance of trust and friendship splinters apart.Their already fragile, idealistic young psyches quickly disintegrate into a morass of sexual paranoia, violent recrimination and sadistic torture that completely destroys their ability to function as an organization.Ecstasy Of The Angels is a bitterly humorous, disturbing and deeply personal dissection of how ruling powers exploit human weaknesses in order to factionalize, then neutralize fringe elements that could possibly destabilize society.

No matter how horrifying the subject matter, no matter how unflinching the camera eye that refuses to look away, Japanese director Koji Wakamatsu wields an uncanny power to mesmerize the viewer.He has the ability to depict disturbed mental states with a gritty visual eloquence, supplying an unobtrusive psychological subtext that coaxes a mysterious compassion for even the most unsympathetic monsters.Wakamatsu's poetic irony of juxtaposition combined with a surface detachment creates an atmosphere of clinical study gone gonzo, beyond all limits, establishing links with nether regions and tapping directly into the sexual libido and the subconscious -- unconscious states of being beyond morality shaped in the womb, then molded by our families (or lack thereof) and, by extrapolation, society at large.From early films like The Embryo Hunts In Secret (1966), Violated Angels (1967), and Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969) through such later pictures as Pool Without Water (1982), one can find correlations in the dream logic of David Lynch, the visceral impact of Sam Fuller, the radical politics of Jean-Luc Godard and the uninhibited sexual frankness of Russ Meyer.