From Japan’s venerated Daiei studio, Yasuzô Masumura’s Irezumi wastes no time in setup, as young lovers Shinsuke and Otsuya run away from their village to elope against parental wishes. Shinsuke (Akio Hasegawa, Navy Yokosuka Prison) is a lowly apprentice to a pawnbroker; Otsuya (Ayako Wakao, Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo ) is that pawnbroker’s daughter, arranged to marry another man. To hide for the night, they stay at an inn run by Shinsuke’s friend Gonji (Fujio Suga, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons).

Happily ever after? Hardly. Gonji hires an assassin to kill Shinsuke and sells Otsuya to the wonderful world of prostitution. Her pimp (Asao Uchida, Samurai Reincarnation) orders a tattooist (Gaku Yamamoto, Zatoichi and the Chess Expert) to chloroform Otsuya and ink her back. He does just that, pouring his literal soul into an elaborate, shoulder-to-shoulder tat of an orb-weaving spider bearing a woman’s fanged head — the Peeing Calvin of the samurai era, I’m sure. When she awakes, he tells her the spider will gorge on the corpses of her lusty clients.

Boy, won’t the memoirs of this geisha be something else!

Although definitely categorizable as a “weird tale,” Irezumi never becomes what you expect it be, so don’t come looking for horror. Even with the obvious influence of Edgar Allan Poe — and, in turn, Edogawa Rampo, whose Blind Beast Masumura would adapt within three years — the stab-happy film stops shy of entering Kwaidan territory, instead taking the guise of melodrama and dipping itself into a vat of the perverse. Fantastical elements are lined up, but never called onto the field; the spider supposedly moves and grows with each kill, but Masumura ladles not even half a teaspoon of the supernatural. At least Hikaru Hayashi’s eerie musical score finally finds a visual match in the chilling penultimate shot.

Regardless of expectations, the vibrantly colored Irezumi is well worth the watch, as picturesque as Wakao is luminous. Her progressive performance provides the magic at which the script continually winks. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

If you ever needed proof that watching teenagers engaging in unmarried intercourse is actually quite boring, here’s The Blue Lagoon for you and your pervert eyes.

Because I vaguely remember watching it as a small child with my parents in the early ’80s, I have occasionally flashed back to various scenes throughout my life, most notably the ingestion of deadly berries on a boat. (I don’t know why Mom and Dad were watching it so often. I hope because it was there on HBO and they were too lazy to change the channel. I hope.)

Sometime in the 1800s, on a boat bound for America, a fire breaks out. Two kids and a salty-dog seaman escape, only to land on a barren paradise filled with plenty of coconuts and bananas, with only the ominous drumming from a nearby tribe to keep them company when the old man dies of bloated drunkenness.

Thankfully, he taught the young boy — who grows up to be Christopher Atkins — how to make shelter and fish while the young girl — who grows up to be a still very young Brooke Shields — learns how to pout when things don’t go her way. Of course, as they get older, sex is discovered — taking up just as much of the film as the waterlogged swimming scenes — and a child is had, leading to most hilarious scenes of terrible parenting.

Directed by Grease’s Randal Kleiser, The Blue Lagoon was the start of what I’m terming his filmography’s “sandy vagina” trilogy, which included the worse Summer Lovers and North Shore. He eventually executive-produced the 1991 sequel, Return to the Blue Lagoon, a movie starring Milla Jovovich that I’m sure is far worse unless, of course, some zombies show up. I seriously doubt it. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.