SIX HOURS OF PSYCHO TV FROM JAPAN!

JAPANARAMA! VOLUME 1
No wonder the Japanese are such a stressed-out society: They enjoy mutilating and torturing each other just for the hell of it…not to mention for the benefits of the television cameras, and JAPANARAMA! VOLUME 1 captures two hours of only the very twisted of psycho TV from Japan.

Much of this party tape utilizes footage from bizarre and cruel game shows, including:
• SUPER JOCKEY, in which contestants immerse their bodies in scalding hot water in exchange for commercial time to plug their various wares. As an added twist, they also have to change into a swimsuit beforehand within an allotted amount of time or the modesty-protecting curtain drops on them.
• A quiz show in which if you answer a question wrong, you are catapulted via bungie off a cliffside. Many of the contestants do not leave the ramp with their clothes intact.
• A beachside wrestling match pitting hulking pros against 90-lb. weaklings. Said weaklings are always tossed out of the ring, either onto an electrically charged platform or a giant glue trap.
• A one-on-one fight with buckets of hot wax. The players repeatedly squared off until one of them is a human candle.
• Break, which allows four bikini babes to compete in a race to see who can knock a bar down by jumping up and hitting it with their head. The purpose? To see their breasts jiggle in slow motion during the instant replays. If you doubt this, round two has them doing push-ups, much to the delight of the cameras mounted in the floor.
• One in which animals from rabbits and porcupines to snakes and scorpians are placed on the heads of unsuspecting players.
• A tug-of-war, where players are competing not with rope, but string tied to clothes-pins attached to their bare nipples.

Someone please send a copy of this tape to FOX so we can get programming like this here.

Rounding out the tape are some great cheesey commercials, mostly for foods that look grossly unappetizing (i.e. Funky Egg), and some with sell out American celebrities like Brad Pitt, Mel Gibson, Christian Slater, Ray Charles, Michael J. Fox, Juliette Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Madonna, Naomi Campbell, and Quentin Tarantino. (Even the Three Tenors shill for yen.) There are a couple of musical numbers, most notably by a pompadoured pop outfit called Piss Kids. Several scenes from CANDID CAMERA-type shows are included, such as footage of transvestites trying to affix lipstick while riding a roller coaster, or the clip in which a man gets a firecracker lit between the cheeks of his butt. COMEDY!

A few (precious at that) scenes are shown from various weird Far East movies, including one where a robotic superhero battles a spiked beetle monster, and another that has two female gymnasts infiltrating the lair of a crime boss.

From beginning to end, I didnt understand a word, but I laughed my ass off. Its fascinating to see how obsessed the Japanese are with American culture, and then just how far theyll be able to go in their prime-time line-ups. Considering there is evidently a surplus of this crazy shit emitting from Japanese cathodes, wed better damn see JAPANARAMA! VOLUME 2 before I commit hari-kari.
A total professional job, JAPANARAMA! VOLUME 1 is well worth owning.

JAPANARAMA! VOLUME 2
Ask and ye shall receive. Last issue, we raved about the wild Japanese TV compilation JAPANARAMA!, and now we’re prepared to do the same with the quick follow-up JAPANARAMA! VOLUME 2. Even after multiple viewings of the first tape, it is still mind-boggling to see what the Japanese can get away with on the tube. Luckily, Too Far East has captured it all for proof.

As with the first, we still get lots of crazy commercials, such as ones for an all-Japanese production of the musical Annie and for toilet deodorizer (I get sick just thinking about all the seafood stench), with many of the spots featuring American sell-outs celebs. Among them: Dennis Rodman, Madonna, Quentin Tarantino, Liv Tyler, Beavis and Butt-head, Jodie Foster, Antonio Banderas, Brad Pitt, Mel Gibson, Demi Moore, Ringo Starr and Bruce Willis, who simply sits on a ladder, watches feathers fall around him and exclaims with a smile, “It’s dream time!” Boy, is it ever. Also as with the first, we still get clips from strange films and bizarre musical numbers.

The real reason, however, to watch JAPANARAMA! VOLUME 2 is for the sampling of shows programmed by our far-out Far East friends. The game shows in particular seem designed solely to hurt and humiliate its participants. For example:
• On ULTRA QUIZ (misnamed since there are no questions asked), contestants spar with masked pro wrestlers on a floating ring in the ocean. Each round ends when the pro tosses the hapless player into the water, where chum is then thrown to attract the nearby shark. Because watching a guy get his leg swallowed is funny!
• Six guys hit the streets to see who can get their underwear the dirtiest. Hence, scenes of grown men rubbing their bottoms in trashcans and on tailpipes.
• Two men play tug-off-war using only clothespins attached to their tongues.
• Various items are rolled down a tube that empties into a player’s mouth. This would be no big deal, except that said objects include a scorpion and a flaming hot coal.
• A couple of apparently thick-skulled men bounce a bowling ball up a ramp with their heads.
• A variety of hot and sour things is poured into men’s mouths to see who can stand it the longest. The contest almost ends when lemon juice is poured into one contestant’s eyes.
• A man with a chunk of meat strapped to his forehead sticks his head into a corridor, whereupon a hungry komodo dragon is unleashed toward him.
• Two guys in jockstraps pull appliances around the room using only a cord attached to the material covering their butt cracks.
• Stripped of his clothes, a man is smothered in butter from head to toe and placed in a cage with a half dozen dogs.
• Two men play chicken with a firecracker, each waiting for the other to let it go before it explodes in their fingers.

Other programs deal not in games, but remain just as cruel nonetheless. For example:
• A young man chows down on beans, eggs and milk in order to work up some noxious fumes, and then farts in the faces of unsuspecting sleepers.
• For more violent wake-up calls, men with machine guns surround someone in a peaceful slumber and open fire.
• A wrestling match between a guy and some sap in a bear costume ends when a solid punch results in a jetstream of blood spurting from the bear’s eyes.
• A workplace sitcom finds laughs in the plight of a bucktoothed businessman who literally is caught with his pants down, depositing diarrhea in the women’s bathroom.
• In a CANDID CAMERA-type segment, we watch a loving couple strolling down the street suddenly stumble among a giant glue trap.

Most notable is Japan’s continued efforts to demean women. It’s all in plentiful supply in vivid color here, including:
• In-awe Japanese men touching, groping and weighing the bare, silicon-enhanced breasts of skanky American strippers.
• A bikini tricycle race! Watch out for those bumps, ladies! The cameraman sure is!
• A quiz show is set in a hot tub. The buzzer, however, is at such a distance from the tub that, in order to answer, the naked women have to emerge from the water to hit it.
• For weather reports, a woman in a metallic bunny outfit goes out in some public place and pops pieces of her costume off before spouting the skinny on precipitation.

Like the first volume of JAPANARAMA!, you won’t understand a word, nor do you need to. Comedy this low and shameless requires no translation. I laughed my ass off, and you will, too, provided you shed any veneer of political correctness beforehand. It is hysterical, surreal and infinitely entertaining. If our many blooper shows included material of this type, I’d watch them week after week. C’mon, Rupert Murdoch, bring this stuff stateside! Until then, however, we’ll just have to pin our hopes on a VOLUME 3.

JAPANARAMA! VOLUME 3
Reality TV is all the rage in America right now, and none stand taller than CBS’ almighty SURVIVOR. But the country of Japan likes its reality TV a little – okay, a shitload – weirder, and I guarantee that if any enterprising network would import some of their bizarre and demented programming, the ratings would scream louder than the tribe has spoken.

Like the two previous outstanding volumes, the long-in-the-making and highly welcome JJAPANARAMA! VOLUME 3 is nothing but two solid hours of “Psycho TV from Japan!” It gets kicking immediately, beginning with a brief, strobe-lit bit of guys handling women’s bare breasts from behind, for no other reason than it’s fun.

The women-as-sex-objects comprises damn near 90 percent of everything that hits Japan’s airwaves, it seems. For instance, there’s a game show where teams of short-skirted girls race to shimmy up a large, bendable pole to capture the flag up top. It’s less a competition and more an excuse to televise panty shots. The phallic imagery all, er, comes to a, um, head when the flag is removed and the pole spurts smoke out its end!

SUPER JOCKET – featured extensively on previous JAPANARAMA! tapes – features the never-gets-old bit of having bikinied babes sit in tanks of scalding-hot water in exchange for commercial time. Another obstacle-course-type show requires gals to eat a Popsicle blowjob-style before moving on to the next task. And another merely puts them in tiny swimsuits and asks them to jump and run in place real fast. Much giggling ensues.

But it’s not just the ladies who act like total fools. The men are given ample opportunity, too. Some are dressed up like possums – complete with plastic genitals – and made to “play possum” while their laughing friends drop basketballs on their stomachs, dump a live frog in their suit, submit them to electric shocks or stick them on nausea-inducing carnival rides. Less harmful but more gut-busting – literally – has guys eating sushi laced with hot mustard and drinking a glass of Tabasco sauce. Others merely try to pull the underwear off of each other first, in a memory I’m still trying to shake.

In POKERFACE, contestants have to guess which one of five men – whose bodies are hidden behind a curtain – is not relaxed. It’s quite easy to tell, because one guy is having his bare bottom whipped by an S&M expert before being violated with an anal vibrator. It is the most humiliating thing I’ve ever seen, and yet a stroke of sheer programming genius!

Almost as outlandish is a program in which one man’s butt is robotically thrusted onto and rubbed vigorously against another man’s face after too many wrong answers are given. “Your ass looks moist,” the host remarks at the start of one round, much to the receiver’s dismay.

One highlight of the JAPANARAMA! trilogy has always been to see which Hollywood stars will shed their pretensions against spokesperson advertising for some serious yen. This time, Jodie Foster sells makeup, while you’ll also see Steven Seagal, Charlie Sheen, Winona Ryder, Bruce Willis, Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Brad Pitt, Meg Ryan (in a wedding dress!), Kevin Costner, an oblivious Bruce Lee, Britney Spears, KISS and The Addams Family.

Celebrity-less, but no less notable, are spots for Haagen-Dazs green tea ice cream, an all-Japanese production of Evita, and adult diapers. Others sell panties, prunes and a litany of products I couldn’t identify.

If all that wasn’t enough, you’ll also receive a dramatic farting contest between two youths, hidden videos of people walking onto glue traps and human bowling. There is no valid reason why this shouldn’t be sitting on your shelf, so get your virtual ass over to their website today.

For more information and to order, visit the official Japanarama! website!