Japanese director Yasuzo Masumura remains relatively unknown in the West, but that can't be blamed on laziness or a lack of pedigree. A veteran of Rome's most prestigious film school and a former assistant director to both Kon Ichikawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, Masumura shot a remarkable average of three films a year between 1957 and 1970, anticipating and later feeding into the New Wave movement of the '60s, both in style and spirit. Masumura moved from genre to genre as his projects required, and his films Giants & Toys and Blind Beast—the initial releases in an ongoing series of Masumura reissues—reveal a director equally comfortable with day-glo social commentary and brutal sexual allegory. Giants & Toys (1958) offers the former in a satire set within the cutthroat world of Japan's post-war economic boom. Desperate for an edge in the candy market, the executives at World Caramel struggle to find a gimmick to rival their competitors' microscope giveaways and catchy slogans (such as "Apollo Caramels: The exotic taste of the South Pacific"). When they stumble on a gauche female taxi-stand worker (Hitomi Nozoe) with a difficult-to-explain sex appeal, two World executives think they've found the perfect mascot. After putting their new find in a spacesuit, they see their sales climb, but they pay the corresponding cost as both the company and their star grow difficult to control. A satire that slowly sprouts teeth, Giants begins as a gentle send-up of business-world foibles and ends as an indictment of corporate soullessness. Sacrificing his charming It Girl on an altar of caramel boxes, Masumura uses restless camerawork and eye-catching pop artistry to capture a country where the codes of tradition have begun to give way to the rule of the bottom line. Destruction of a different sort colors Blind Beast, a bit of erotic horror adapted from a story by Edogawa Rampo, Japan's self-styled heir to Edgar Allan Poe. (Try saying Rampo's full name quickly.) A sort of S&M Woman In The Dunes, the 1969 film was marketed to Japan's then-sizable soft-porn film audience, which no doubt realized it had gotten more than it'd paid for when the film introduced a dungeon with walls covered in oversized sculptures of eyes, ears, mouths, and breasts. After a series of artful nudes becomes a small sensation, model Mako Midori receives unwanted attention from blind sculptor Eiji Funakoshi. Aided by his mother (Noriko Sengoku), Funakoshi kidnaps Midori as a model for his masterpiece, but discovers she's more capable of resistance than he anticipated. Though the heavy-handed symbolism constantly threatens to overwhelm his film, Masumura wisely keeps shifting the rules of engagement, starting with a commentary on the objectification of women, then delving deeper into the sexual hinterlands. The claustrophobia grows wearying after a while, but the film is packed with many unshakable moments. With so much Masumura to explore, more such moments are no doubt on the way.