In the final film in the Nikkatsu Angel Guts series (there was a sixth movie produced after the studio closed) the central character Nami is now a nurse. Nami is having a very bad day; her patients attempt to rape her, she finds her photographer boyfriend in bed with a glamour model and then she is hit by a car, the driver of which instead of taking her to hospital decides help would be best administered through a quick attempted raping (This is Angel Guts remember).

In this film the central character Nami is both naïve and yet streetwise at the same time. Her main naive is that caused by love, she comments on how much the model in the photo seems to trust her boyfriend and he tells her it's just part of his work. However, she is very trusting (naïve) as his studio doubles as the bedroom in the flat they share.
This film opens in classic Angel Guts style with a rape scene; some patients in the hospital ring the bell and when Nami goes to attend to them, they pounce on her in an attempt to rape her. However, their unhealthy state means they fail to totally subdue the feisty Nami and the main perpetrator becomes too excited and prematurely ejaculates before managing to penetrate her. After this harrowing event Nami flees the hospital and heads her to get some much needed comfort from her boyfriend. Unfortunately for Nami when she gets back so early from her shift she catches her man inflagranto with the model from the photo. Nami flees the house and runs blindly into the road were she is struck by the car of Muraki, a stock trader who has blown his clients money and whose life has gone into freefall. Murika believes he has killed Nami and instead of checking to make sure he drives around with her in the car finally stopping in a remote area and attempting to have sex with the unconscious passenger, Nami then wakes again and avoids being raped but for the second time that day is the victim of an attempted sexual assault. The now conscious Nami flees into an abandoned warehouse, pursued by Murika who again attempts to assault her, this time Nami is overpowered and it looks like she now has no way of escaping a full rape however, Murika can’t get it up and for the third time Nami escapes being raped. At this point Murika tells Nami he just wanted to have sex because he felt that would bring him luck, which seems to be TAKASHI ISHII's (finally directing one of his own Angel Guts stories) attempt at showing the audience that rape is more than about sex, it is Murika's attempt at regaining his masculinity by exercising power over another human being through sexual dominance. However, after this somewhat worthy look at rape Ishii's film takes what is maybe the dodgiest turn of all the Angel Guts films. Nami forms an emotional and sexual relationship with her would-be assailant Murika and quickly appears to fall in love with the failed stock broker. Murika is reinvirgured and can now “get hard” and Nami is happy to drift with him as they spend the remaining money on his credit card and drive aimlessly around towards the films tragic finale.

The Nikkatsu studio which was in financial freefall itself at this time appears to have let Ishii make this movie as a favor/thank you. Knowing he had always dreamed of directing they seem to have let him take what limited finances there were to realise his dream of getting behind the camera. Its low budget shows even compared with the limited budgets of the other movies in the series. For me this is the least interesting movie in the series. It does have some great ideas about the roles of masculinity and femininity within sex and sexual assault, but for the most part it drags a little too much and lacks the stylistic flair of some of the earlier movies. Towards the end of the movie there are some stand out moments both stylistically and plot related, but I can help but feel these are too little too late. The twisted relationship of the main characters is an difficult thing to stomach, not because of any visual extremes like the earlier movies, but just the message it conveys of the rapist being an “all right guy really”, it's not the most healthy. That’s not to say two people in the mind state of these beleaguered characters could not form a relationship, just that it’s certainly a questionable thing to present on screen, but then part of the strength of this series is that it makes you think about issues beyond that of normal exploitation movies.

To sum up this is certainly a movie that's worth seeing and its finale is a worthy goodbye to the Nikkatsu series, however it can’t match the power of its predecessors.

Buy it from amazon.com or buy 'The Angel Guts Box Set' from amazon.com