The Marquis de Sade was a Frenchman, but his erotic, boundary-pushing written works have traveled far and wide, as this 1988 Japanese film from director Akio Jissoji amply demonstrates.

The play-within-a-play structure of Prosperities of Vice — more a thematic exploration than a straight-arrow narrative — is reminiscent of Peter Brooks’ production of Marat Sade, where the Marquis de Sade, imprisoned in an asylum, directs inmates in a performance of his play based on the life, and gruesome death, of the French revolutionary of the title. The plot, as it were, centers around a decadent count in 1920s Japan who becomes obsessed with the life and works of the Marquis de Sade, and creates a theater to showcase plays adapted from the notorious writer’s novels. Recruiting a variety of thieves, prostitutes and low-lifes to act out his increasingly outlandish fantasies on stage for the delectation of his rich and jaded friends, the nobleman (Koji Shimizu) trips a wire when he forces one of the actors (Renji Ishibashi), under threat of death, to make love to his wife (Seiran Li) while he watches. Naturally, this collision of fantasy and real life has dire, outwardly expanding consequences.

It’s somewhat striking to see Eastern actresses in this sort of material, no matter the recent influx of nervy erotic fantasies like Man, Woman and the Wall or the wild, raunchy, slapstick comedy of South Korean import Sex is Zero. That mild shock factor, though, rates second to the movie’s rich visual style as the reason for whatever hold it achieves. While eschewing true explicitness, director Jissoji, who just passed away a few years ago, at 69 years old, works in an aggressive and confrontational manner, pushing in on his actors to underscore emotion and intensity, and shooting from unusual, sometimes highly canted angles throughout. He layers and overlaps “reality” and performed stand-alone scenes with little regard for narrative congruity, instead opting to let the viewer sort out the fractured meaning of his narrative. All the while, he trades in a weird mixture of Eisensteinian and even occasionally Dadaist imagery, contrasted with spare, flower petal-laden sets to represent the Eastern restagings of the Marquis de Sade’s works. This isn’t familiar exploitation camerawork by any stretch of the imagination, no matter the cultural differences.

Housed in a bright red plastic Amaray case, Prosperities of Vice comes to DVD on a region-free disc, presented with a Japanese language Dolby digital stereo soundtrack. The brand new anamorphic transfer itself is certainly quite adequate, and nicely free of grain, but the colors themselves are a bit washed out in some sequences, and overall low on contrast. As long as we’re quibbling, and for what it’s worth, the English subtitle translations are also at times a bit dubious. Along with the film’s theatrical trailer and seven minutes worth of previews for other Mondo Macabro DVD releases, supplemental features consist of a pair of textual histories of both director Akio Jissoji and Nikkatsu Studios, and a solid, seven-minute introduction to the movie by film critic Jasper Sharp.

Most involving, though, is a 24-minute documentary on the Japanese sub-genre of so-called “roman-porno” (shorthand for romantic pornography), a category into which Prosperities of Vice decidedly falls. Featuring interview material with Sharp, filmmaker Romain Slocombe and actress Kazuko Shirakawa, among others, this engaging, briskly paced featurette gives a great overview of Nikkatsu’s erotic “Ropponica” line, various directors working in the field, and how such movies fill a socio-cultural vacuum. Footage from a 2001 roman-porno convention in Tokyo is also included, and the female fans there speak convincingly to the sub-genre’s surprising emotional connection. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. For more information on the film, and other Mondo Macabro titles, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

The post-Oscar career trajectory of Cuba Gooding, Jr. has been a subject of some fascination/discussion here, as have many of his straight-to-video projects (some of which have actually been pretty good, some not so much). Those threads get picked back up with the release of The Devil’s Tomb, Gooding’s latest film, in which he stars as the leader of an elite military squad that encounters an ancient evil lurking beneath the desert sands. Questionable special effects ensue.

The Devil’s Tomb is cast with recognizable names all around — Taryn Manning, Ron Perlman, Ray Winstone, Valeria Cruz, Jason London and even Henry Rollins — but it’s Gooding who stars as Mack, the point man on an Army rescue team that wages into the fringes of Palm Springs a nameless Middle Eastern desert on a mission to extract the scientist father (Perlman) of one of their tag-along crew, a man who was leading the research at a top secret archeological site before all communications with him were cut off. Almost immediately upon their arrival, the crew finds Alfeo Jacoby (Weston Blakesley), a Vatican priest stricken mute with mysterious boils.

Lots of bickering follows, but it’s not long before Mack is told that the research being conducted centers around nephilim — fallen angel-type figures who may be either good or bad, depending on your belief set. In fact, there’s at least one on site, suspended in some sort of ether. A Bible-quoting undead professor (Bill Moseley), other zombie-type figures and all sorts of apparitions who seem to know an awful lot of specifics about Mack’s crew also pop up, and the body count beings to mount, predictably.

The Devil’s Tomb is directed by Jason Connery (above right), son of bearded screen legend and inside-out sock wearer Sean, who does not cameo, alas. Screenwriter Keith Kjornes (Broken) sets things up decently and, early on, pulls all the levers of snippy back-biting one has come to expect from gung-ho military ensembles of this sort. The obvious (and cited) antecedents here are The Thing and Alien, the latter more for its isolation than any skulking alien presence. But there’s a pinch, too, of the woozy free-form menace of something like Silent Hill, which was itself part Alice in Wonderland and part Dante’s Inferno. A shame, then, that the potential for tangential unease is never realized. One problem is that scope and space are hopelessly cramped. There are ways to get around this — or even embrace it, with claustrophobia as an extra character — but Connery opts to try to basically make an underground, Doom-type thriller, which just underscores the movie’s cheapness at almost every turn.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Devil’s Tomb comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and French language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and optional subtitles in each language as well. The film’s special features are anchored by a feature-length audio commentary track with Gooding and director Connery, in which the pair discuss the many challenges of the film’s 23-day shoot, from the asbestos in the downtown Los Angeles location of Linda Vista to the various cheat methodologies used to change up spaces or trick the human eye, from having an actor bend at the knees to convey a lowering elevator to using mocked-up plywood to narrow walls into corridors.

Other special features include a 17-minute making-of featurette with intercut cast and crew interviews, in which Gooding talks about his character’s authority being an attractive element and Rollins describes the process of acting in the movie as being “really serious about something that’s incomprehensibly impossible.” There are also a half dozen alternate scenes running eight-and-a-half minutes, 90 seconds of outtakes (flubbed lines and missed cues, plus Perlman painfully smacking his head on a beam) and a collection of preview trailers for Against the Dark and a dozen other Sony home video releases. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) B- (Disc)