Zoom In: Rape Apartments

**Zoom In: Rape Apartments** (ズームイン 暴行団地) is a 1980 violent pink film from Nikkatsu's Roman Porno series and marks the directorial debut of Naosuke Kurosawa. It was conceived as an unofficial follow-up to Kōyū Ohara's *Zoom Up: Rape Site* (1979), riding on that film's success and penned by the same screenwriter, Chiho Katsurako.

The story follows a woman living in a high-end Tokyo apartment who begins to suspect that her neighbor—a piano tuner—is the man who raped her years earlier. After she sees him assault another woman, she becomes certain of his identity, yet she hesitates to report him to the police due to a strange, compelling attraction she feels toward him.

Nikkatsu deliberately toned down the extreme violence that characterized Ohara's earlier film. The movie includes surreal touches, such as a scene where liquid dripping from a woman's vagina ignites upon hitting the ground, prompting comparisons between Kurosawa's style and that of Seijun Suzuki.

The film launched a series of titles using the "Zoom In" or "Zoom Up" branding, including *Zoom Up: Woman From The Dirty Magazine* (1980), *Zoom Up: Sexual Crime Report* (1981), *Zoom Up: Genuine Look At A Stripper* (1982), *Zoom Up: Graduation Photos* (1984), and *Zoom Up: Special Masturbation* (1986).

Japanese critics praised Kurosawa's imagery and cinematography but found the script weak. In *Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films*, Thomas and Yuko Mihara Weisser gave the film two and a half out of four stars, noting that its strong visual sense compensates for the writing—which, they add, is typical for pink films—and describing Kurosawa's "color-and-shadow" work as akin to that of an erotic Seijun Suzuki. Allmovie warns that the subject matter is not for everyone but calls it "one of the Nikkatsu studio's most unusual pinku eiga films."

The film was released theatrically in Japan on March 15, 1980, and on DVD in Japan on March 24, 2006, as part of Geneon's third wave of Nikkatsu Roman porno releases.