Tampon Tango

Title: Tampon Tango
Rating: 1.5/5
Genre: Experimental... Documentary perhaps? Comedy? Exploitation?
Starring: Nobody of note.
Director: Unknown
Language: Japanese

With a name as absurd as this – apparently the result of an inane desire to forcefully insert tampons into women for some reason – coupled with the fact that this mid-70s flick must have resurfaced for some reason, I knew it had to be something to be seen. I'm a sucker for all this experimental stuff and the opening scene of the director screaming “down with America, Down with Herpes” certainly showed promise. The experiment being conducted here: the quest to prove Japan's video making abilities and create a porno that would make it past the American film boards and be considered a legitimate film for cinematic viewing. A perhaps somewhat interesting idea on the surface; how to create scenes of graphic nudity without constituting something pornographic, including just enough of a plot to be able to call it a legitimate film, and it really only had one stumbling block.

It doesn't work. It never had even the slightest pretence of working at all. There is no way anyone with a rational mind could think that a film about people making a porno, fucking some retard going “I'll try my hardest” over and over; firecrackers placed inside women – and they certainly didn't have the budget to fake this – as well as the required tampons; backflipping off clothes and men playing guitar and lifting weights with their penis, could ever make it as a legitimate film. And these are the scenes that are actually interesting. The vast majority of the time it's just a standard porno, except it feels like a failed porno; I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the director realised this when editing together yet another 5 second clip of woman screaming on loop for a couple of minutes that actually, there's no way this is arousing in the slightest, so instead decided to re-cut it and call it an “experiment” to try and save face. Perhaps the incorrect date shown in the opening credits (1984) was his best guess at when this film might actually be allowed to be released. Who knows?

There's almost a Lynch-like feel to many of the scenes; the complete absence of plot not making things any easier and the incessant refusal to explain the most basic of concepts or characters. There are some genuine moments of brilliance, and particularly the last couple of minutes of everyone wandering in claiming to “also be the husband” and joining in the orgy which began as a man dancing on a wooden table. By the time the third husband backflips and his clothes magically disappear, the confetti falling in the wake of a meteorite (read: duvet), guitar smashing and men in white skirts wielding batons signal the end of the film, you realise you have no idea what just happened. The problem is that for all the scenes of cult-like absurdity there's at least 90% of the film which is just plain awful, boring, monotonous and sleep-inducing and all the cock guitar playing in the world couldn't save it.