At first, it seems obvious that "The Warped Ones" of the title are the three thrill-seeking delinquents (two thieves and a hooker) at the center of the story, but as the film goes along, it's the middle-class victims of this trio, beholden to the tenets of standard Japanese morality, who really seem the sickest. The setting is 1960s Japan, where a man is beaten and his bride-to-be is violently raped by Akira, the alpha male of the gang of three. The couple can't face the shame of what happened to them, so they don't go to the cops. The man, instead, pretends it didn't happen. The woman, however, is so traumatized by the rape and her fiancee's denial that she seeks out her attacker. She asks him, in effect, to rape her husband, so that the two of them will both be at the same level of disgrace, and then can start all over again. The film is very much a Japanese cousin to Godard's "Breathless," which was released the same year. Tamio Kawachi's grimacing, mugging jazz-mad Akira (part Jerry Lewis, part Jimmy Cagney) is quite as feral a beast as Jean-Paul Belmondo's Michel. Kurahara pits animalistic and destructive youth against castrated, soulless society, and doesn't seem particularly hopeful about the outcome, whichever way it goes.

you can tell a top-rate reviewer when his stock in trade is leaving no ethnic slur unturned. i guess the movie didn't lack anything that adding a few more white people could not have resolved.

So these two macho jap teens and their bimbo side-chick are out for a joy ride in a boosted car, like, real gone man! A healthy dose of b-grade amateur jazz licks flow freely out of the radio daddy-o, real gone like, you know. Okay, so there's bad acting and then there's this, dig? Makes me want to watch 5 the Hard Way. This movie wants to be American so bad, you can taste it, unfortunately, it's Japanese. The Japanese have a special way with bad acting, not that they have the market cornered or anything, but this is a fine example of their particular spin on it. The continued facial expressions of Akira are increasingly cringe worthy, but also good for a chuckle or two. It's, at times, almost like the director smeared peanut butter on Akira's teeth, kind of like they did with Mr. Ed so he would look like he was talking. Even with Akira's Mr. Ed impersonations and jazzgasm faces, the worst actor honors go to the black guy from the jazz club. No real story or plot is present, but a plot would have only served to get in the way of these cats behaving badly. Though anything by Roger Corman would be better, it's still fairly entertaining and the shy 75 min. running time makes it substantially easier to sit through.