Starting in the 1970s, Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest movie studio, launched a series of erotic sexploitation flicks, most of which are inspired by and loosely comparable to Italian giallo exercises. Zoom In: Sex Apartments, a grisly, 1980 offering from director Naosuke Kurosawa, is one such effort, a jumbled oddity of psychosexual kink.

After Saeko (Erina Miyai) is raped by a mysterious stranger wearing a dark mask and gloves, several residents of the nearby Kibougahara housing complex are beaten, killed and have their genitals set on fire. Powered by arousal as much as dread, Saeko has suspicions about the pyromaniac’s identity, but a thick haze of craziness seems to hang in the air.

Kurosawa, working with cinematographer Masaru Mori, crafts the movie as an obvious valentine to Dario Argento, but it’s awfully thin in plot and sensible motivation, even by giallo standards. One supposes there’s a certain genre cultural cache here, but Zoom In: Sex Apartments, though redolent with sadomasochistic air-quote artfulness, mostly just seems an elaborately orchestrated and unrepentantly nasty excuse for fetishized violence and degradation.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Impulse Pictures’ North American release of Zoom In: Sex Apartments comes to DVD alongside companion offering True Story of a Woman in Jail: Continues (yes, complete with its hilarious colon), in a solid, grain-free 2.35:1 widescreen transfer, with a Japanese 2.0 mono audio track that features newly translated, removable English subtitles. A minute-long, forced-start-up Nikkatsu introduction gives way to a static main menu screen, and a dozen chapter stops. Apart from the movie’s 80-second trailer, there are no supplemental featurettes, though film historian Jasper Sharp’s liner notes — as part of a little insert booklet featuring the movie’s Japanese language poster on its cover — are sharp and insightful, if a bit dismissive of what he terms the movie’s “misogynistic verve.” To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; if Half is your thing, meanwhile, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)