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.