This adaptation of a novel by Japanese S&M author Dan Oniroku, is like watching the porny scenes of Eyes Wide Shut taken to extremes. Shizuko (Sugimoto Aya) is a famous tango dancer and deferential wife, who is kidnapped by yakuza as payment for her businessman husband's debts. On a darkened stage, in an unknown location, she is then used and abused by a secretive, masked society as a sexual plaything.

"The Rape and Snuff Show" is what the whiney transvestite compere calls it. The victim is stripped bare, strung up with heavy rope and subjected to a series of sexual humiliations aimed at breaking her spirit. Meanwhile, a blotchy, 95-year-old yakuza boss (Ishibashi Renji), lords over the proceedings via cc television. In a voice that resembles a death gurgle, he orders the perversity to be taken to greater and greater extremes so that he can see Shizuko's "true nature".

The film has been described as S&M, but really this would seem mostly "S" and very little "M". Masochism implies an element of consent. Here, the female protagonists - there are two more participants in the floorshow - are raped and tortured, again and again. This being a mastabatory male fantasy, the female victims, although they put up some physical resistance, respond to the sexual violence more often with sounds of ecstatic pleasure rather than anger and pain.

The version I saw at the Vancouver International Film Festival seemed to jump occasionally in the narrative, which suggested that some of the more graphic scenes had been cut. It is is still nasty enough to provoke outrage, but has an aesthetic veneer that allows it to masquerade as art. There are few genitalia shots, although the long-suffering protagonist/victim in the film spends more time with her clothes off than on. And biblical imagery - in particular, a bondage version of the crucifixion story - is thrown in for good measure.

In more ways that one, the story is a complete nonsense, which is just as you would expect from top shelf video rental.