| Love Hotel | |
| Director: | Shin'ya Yamamoto |
| Studio: | Tōkyō Kōei |
| Distributor: | Shintōhō Eiga |
| Runtime: | 71 minutes |
| Country: | Japan |
| Language: | Japanese |
aka and A Rendezvous Hotel[1] is a 1968 Japanese pink film directed by Shin'ya Yamamoto.
When a prostitute at a love hotel passes out drunk, the voluptuous madam who owns the establishment must serve in her place.[2]
Director Shin'ya Yamamoto is known as one of the "Founding Fathers" of the pink film.[4] In his Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, Jasper Sharp credits Yamamoto with almost single-handedly injecting the element of light-hearted fun into pink cinema.[5] His earliest films were in the serious and often misogynistic tone of many pink films of the era. Critics judged such early Yamamoto films as Degenerate (1967), Torture by a Woman (1967), and The Rapist (1968) to be technically superior to much of the pink product of the time, but not distinguished from them in terms of theme or style.[6]
Yamamoto filmed Love Hotel for Tōkyō Kōei and it was released theatrically in Japan by Shintōhō Eiga in September 1968.[7] With this film, Yamamoto found the style which would make him one of the most popular pink film directors for the next decade.[6] His films of this period, such as the 15-film Widow's Boarding House series and his "Women's Onsen" films, are known for an interest in people living in group settings, and for a light, comical touch which was in direct contrast to most contemporary pink cinema, which tended to be darker in subject-matter.[8] [9] Even more so than the Widow's Boarding House scenario, which has been taken up by other directors, Yamamoto's Molester's Train series, which he started in 1975, has proven a prolific series of pink comedies. Academy Award-winning director Yōjirō Takita made the series his own in the 1980s, and Molester's Train films were still being made in the new millennium.[9]