How do you follow up a surprise hit like The Family Game? Yoshimitsu Morita smartly decided against a re-run of his brilliant, dead-pan comedy and went for something altogether stranger and more mysterious. Deaths in Tokimeki tells the disturbing, compulsive story of a hit-man waiting to carry out a job: the assassination of the leader of a religious cult, masterminded by the leader’s own deputy. But it is a story that is told in blocks, like the phrases in a child’s computer game, and what counts most is not the narrative but the spaces between the blocks-the gaps that are filled with undefined menaces. You could imagine David Bowie playing this hit-man, so it’s no surprise that Morita chose to cast Japan’s foremost androgynous pop-star Kenji Sawada (Mishima). The film makes great play with Sawada’s bizarre persona, but it’s not really a star vehicle in the usual sense. This is very much a director’s film, the product of a young talent sparking on all engines. – Tony Rayns, Edinburgh Film Festival

Deaths in Tokimeki ときめきに死す (1984) NTSC DVD5
VOB / DVD5 / Untouched
Subtitle: English

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190075/