It is truly the rare occasion that one gets to sit in a respectable movie theater and watch fully qualified pornography. But thanks to the moral decay spread by the Danger After Dark program, genre enthusiasts can now sate their love of the perverted arts without having to don their favorite trenchcoat. This year fans can feed their perversion with Flower and Snake, a thorough examination of sado-masochistic fantasies involving a woman sold into sexual slavery. It's a contemptible film, but not for the reasons you'd automatically assume.

Shizuko (Aya Sugimoto) is a world-famous tango dancer who is married to a succesful businessman (Toriyama, played by Hironobu Nomura). Tensions between them are strained, and they only get worse once Toriyama gets into hot water with the local yakuza. To save his business he sells his wife to 95-year-old mob boss Tashiro. The lifelong pervert forces Shizuko to perform in his private sex show, where she is tortured, raped and otherwise humiliated in a carnival-like atmosphere while a select clientele look on with great... uh, interest.

This threadbare plot is held together by the most tenuous sinews of coherency, and quickly becomes lost in the films' extended portrayal of Shizuko's sexual torment. Much like the splatterfest checklist in Versus, the entire second and third acts of Flower and Snake play out as a "best of" compilation of sadistic and fetishistic humiliation sequences with total disregard for plot progression and characterization. Here's an abbreviated checklist for those keeping score at home:

• Hot candle wax? Check.
• Acupuncture needles through nipples? Check.
• Water sports? Check.
• Inverted suspended flagellation? Check.
• High-powered "back massager" used on untamed velvet glory? Check.
• Guy with Tengu mask shaped like Fist of the North Star? Check.
• Guy dressed like Sailor Moon? Check.
• Fake lesbianism turned to "real" lesbianism? Check.
• Latex outfits used in above sequence? Check.
• Woman raped while dressed in geisha attire? Check.
• Naked woman paraded around on horseback? Check.
• Extended visual guide to tying a Double Sheet Bend? Check.
• Toe sucking? A little.

This cavalcade of complicated carnality carries on well past the point where it can be considered shocking until it becomes downright tedious. It's almost as if Takashi Ishii took the S&M sequence from Eyes Wide Shut — complete with hooded onlookers — and turned it into a 70 minute film-within-a-film. That might be an unfair parallel to draw considering that Flower and Snake is originally based on a novel (by Oniroku Dan) and has been filmed several times, but a 20 minute sequence of perversion is a lot more tolerable to watch when taken as part of a larger whole.

Gentlemen, start your lubing!

Handy St. Fistalot (left) and Shafty McBoneface prepare for their orifice-probing shift in the colosseum. (Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Film Society)

But it would be premature to dismiss Flower and Snake entirely, as it presents us with several important questions to consider. Is it wrong to laugh at a crippled old man as he feebly tries to hump a naked woman tied to a cross? Does the term "brazilian" exist in Japan? Has anyone else noticed that the ending is sorta the same as Super Mario Bros. 2? Who were you rooting for, the flower or the snake?

It isn't often that I discard my rigorous analytical nature in favor of juvenile jocularity, but Flower and Snake is so relentless in its desire to offend that even fans of gratuitous nudity — myself proudly included in that group — will ultimately grow tired of its repetitive spectacles. Its languid pacing certainly doesn't help, and it goes without saying that the film runs far too long, especially during its extended surrealistic "climax".

For hardened veterans of S&M fantasy films (or of any pornographic sub-culture for that matter) there will be very little here that hasn't been seen before. Without any genitalia, forced oral, penetration shots or even a single bukkake, the film manages to be perverse without being at all explicit. There's also very little "M" in Flower and Snake, so those hoping to see Shizuko enjoy these sexual shenanigans will likely walk away disappointed.

Thanks to Flower and Snake I'm now completely bored with sex. Without enough explicit material to be a proper stroke film or enough appalling sexual assault to be considered truly offensive, Flower and Snake is a confused mess of an exploitation film that falls flat on just about every front. Recommended only for genre vets who are more interested in seeing softcore S&M porno than a coherent, artistically relevant film.

Needless to say I won't be partaking of the recently-announced sequel, Flower and Snake 2: Snakes in Space.

Thumbs Down. Flower and Snake is a mind-numbingly dull exercise in sexual excess that will bore even the most stiffened of sex film connoisseurs.