A man watches a film reel documenting an attack on his own lover, then pays a professional killer to settle the matter. The killer accepts the job and walks straight into his own unfinished business.

INFLATABLE SEX DOLL OF THE WASTELANDS (1967) follows Sho, a hitman hired by a wealthy real estate agent named Naka to track down a kidnapped woman named Sae. He discovers the gang holding her is led by Ko, a man tied to Sho's past who once murdered a woman Sho loved. Revenge-for-hire becomes a reckoning between two men who already know each other's worst acts.

Atsushi Yamatoya wrote and directed the film as his solo debut. He had just co-written Branded to Kill for Seijun Suzuki, released the same year. The family resemblance is obvious: the same disregard for linear storytelling, the same fixation on hitmen drifting through their own wreckage. What Suzuki did inside the studio system at Nikkatsu, Yamatoya did on a pink-film budget through his own Yamatoya Productions, distributed by Kokuei and produced by Keiko Sato, one of the few women producing in Japanese pink cinema at the time.

Hajime Kai shot it in stark black and white, and Yosuke Yamashita's jazz score lends the violence an improvisational, jagged pulse. The film stands as a rough, little-seen artifact of Japan's underground crime cinema.