Set in the fictional mountain town of Matsugane, the film opens with what appears to be the dead body of a woman lying on an icy, snow-covered road. The only passerby is a young pre-teen who, rather than calling for help, stops to feel her breasts and undergarments. Some may find that funny, some not. When Miyuki, the female victim, turns out to be alive while being examined in the morgue, we discover that she was the victim of a hit and run accident and that the driver, Hikari, was the simple-minded twin brother of Kotaro Suzuki, one of the town's two police officers. Uncooperative with the police, Miyuki cannot explain the presence of an ice pick wound in her hand but the police are unable to charge her with any wrongdoing. When she is released, she returns to the company of her gangster boyfriend Nishioka, and they proceed to make life miserable for Hikari, beating him and blackmailing him with nude photos so that he will not tell the police of their criminal activity which involves a stash of stolen gold buried under the ice. Based on a novel by one of Japan's greatest writers, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Nobuhiro Yamashita's The Matsugane Potshot Affair is definitely of the black variety and contains a decapitated head, kinky sex between unequal partners, family members shouting at one another, blackmail, rat poison, and other oddities that may make you simply shrug and say, “alrighty thenâ€. Unlike the novel which merely indicted the ineptitude of twin brothers, “Matsugane Potshot†convicts an entire town of gross stupidity.
