Teruo Ishii revels in the perversion of the Edo period once more in SHOGUN'S JOYS OF TORTURE, on Blu-ray from Arrow Video USA.

Young court judge Yoshioka (Teruo Yoshida, GOKE: BODYSNATCHER FROM HELL) reflects on how capital punishment of his own time often served not the cause of justice but the cruel impulses of those in power with a trio of historical cases. In the first, woodcutter Shinzo (also Yoshida) is injured in a work accident and the cost of his treatment is high. His sister Mitsu (Masumi Tachibana, TOKYO BAD GIRLS) has misgivings about her brother's boss Minosuke (Kichijirô Ueda, THRONE OF BLOOD) paying the doctor's bills; but neighbor Genzo believes that she should be grateful for the help even if she must become Mino's mistress. Mitsu hopes to conceal this arrangement from her brother, but his jealousy upon discovery turns out to be because of his shameful attraction to his sister. She succumbs to his desires initially to keep him calm, but this taboo relationship seems more "natural" compared to her exploitation by Mino. When Mino discovers their secret and attempts to use it to his advantage, tragedy ensues and Mitsu must choose between a living hell or execution by the state.

The second story depicts the arrival of middle-aged Reiho (future Toei cartoon voice artist Yukie Kagawa, GAMERA VS GYAOS) as the new abbess of the Juko Temple which shares a border with a monastery but the sisters are allowed no fraternization with the monks. Although Reiho expresses disapproval at the very sight of handsome monk Shunkai (Shin'ichirô Hayashi, SEX & FURY) taking a shortcut through the temple gardens, her jealous lesbian companion Rintoku (Naomi Shiraishi) realizes that the older woman has fallen in lust with the younger man. When Reiho spies Shunkai with one of the nuns Myôshin (Miki Obana, HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN), she orders him to purify himself under by praying under the waterfall and then offers her body to test him with temptation to which he succumbs. Upon learnin that Shunkai only slept with her to protect Myôshin, however, she punishes the young nun with torture and tries to force Shunkai to give Myôshin up or have her womanhood destroyed by a hot poker.

In the final story, tattoo artist Horicho (Asao Koike, BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY) believes that he has just inked his masterpiece on geisha girl Kimicho (Tamaki Sawa, MASSACRE GUN) only to be publically ridiculed by Lord Nanbarra (Fumio Watanabe, THE STREET FIGHTER) for its lack of realism in depicting the tortures of hell. Humiliated, Horicho searches for the ideal skin for his new canvas, abducting virginal young Hana (Reiko Mikasa) and then begging Nanbarra to show him the real expressions of the tortured; whereupon Horicho gets to witness Nanbarra's brutal torture of a shipwrecked boat of white female missionaries for the crime to spreading Christianity to Japan. Unable to return home after Horicho has tattooed her genitals – marking her as a geisha – Hana becomes compliant and devoted, enduring the pain of Horicho's needles. Before he can complete his masterpiece, however, Horicho makes a final request to Nanbarra: to allow him to capture the expression of the torturer on his flesh canvas.

The first film in Teruo Ishii's "joys of torture" cycle, SHOGUN'S JOYS OF TORTURE – long only known to English-speaking readers through an entry in Phil Hardy's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HORROR MOVIES (later THE AURUM FILM ENCYCLOPEDIA: HORROR) reference book – is surprisingly the most brutal of Ishii's four "joys of torture" anthology films (the other three being ORGIES OF EDO, INFERNO OF TORTURE, and YAKUZA LAW). It is also the most Sadeian with such conceits as molested innocent Mitsu seeing in the resemblance between her brother Shinzo and judge Yoshioka an angel of deliverance and choosing the truth and execution over a lie and a continued living hell, what Yoshioka seemingly describes inaccurately as the "beheading of the abbess," and the final sting in the tail of the tattoo episode (a story that would be rehashed and reworked to different effect in INFERNO OF TORTURE, also with Koike). Apart from the similar title sequences which depict brutal executions inflicted on extras, the sequels were somewhat tamer by comparison in the onscreen explicitness of the stories suggesting that those entries may have been both compromised for the tastes of the mainstream audience as much as Ishii's perhaps waning interest in the formula.

Apparently intended to be released in 2019, as the film was mentioned in the extras of the subsequent entries as already being available from Arrow, SHOGUN'S JOY OF TORTURE comes to Blu-ray from an HD master provided by Toei with additional grading by Arrow. This may have been the master struck by Toei for their barebones Japanese DVD, but the 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen presentation look vibrant and generally sharp when Ishii and his cinematographer Motoya Washio (SWORD OF DESTINY) are not zooming around in Jess Franco fashion during the frenzied torture sequences – in general looking on par with the other Arrow releases of Toei titles. The LPCM 1.0 Japanese track is free of any distracting damage or defects so viewers might want to turn down the volume during the scenes of rape and torture if they have neighbors, and the English subtitle track is without any noticeable errors.

The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by Japanese cinema expert Tom Mes recorded back in 2019 in which he discusses the film in the social context of 1968 – including unrest about the post-WWII "economic miracle" in Japan by way of the country acting as a base for American intervention in other Asian territories including Vietnam – as well as drawing parallels between Ishii's avant-garde sensibilities and those of the earlier Taisho era (1912-1926) and its literary and artist genre of Ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) including the works of pulp author Edogawa Rampo, some of which inspired or were adapted by Ishii like HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN (other Japanese filmmakers of the seventies also mined Rampo's works for films like THE BLIND BEAST and THE WATCHER IN THE ATTIC).