They just don’t make pornography like they used to. As television feasted on the corpse of Japanese cinema in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the five major movie studios suddenly found themselves willing to do anything to hold on to the few remaining moviegoers. So they turned to sex and violence, which grew increasingly lurid and over-the-top as the studios vied for a shrinking pool of eyeballs.

As it turned out, the man of the hour was director Teruo Ishii, whose love of “ero-guro,” or the “erotic and grotesque” aesthetic (which exploded in Japan in 1936 when Sada Abe became a national figure after strangling and castrating her lover), allowed him to pack maximum kinkiness into minimal screen space.

After launching “ero-guro” cinema with 1969’s jaw-dropping “Horrors of Malformed Men,” Ishii was tapped to direct “Bohachi Bushido: Code of the Forgotten Eight,” or, as it’s directly translated, “Porno Period Film: Way of the Outlaw Samurai.” This 1973 film is being released on a beautiful new special-edition DVD from Discotek Media, and while the passage of time hasn’t made it respectable, it has turned it into a remarkable cultural artifact full of eye-popping sex, sin, and swordplay.

Tetsuro Tanba had co-starred with Sean Connery in “You Only Live Twice” and, like Mr. Connery, he wasn’t so much an actor as a fertility god. He owned the rights to a little-known manga cartoon by the legendary artist Kazuo Koike, who had created the landmark series “Lone Wolf and Cub,” as well as “Razor Hanzo” and “Lady Snowblood.” Ishii, a friend of Tanba’s, agreed to direct the project, but it was immediately apparent that “Bohachi Bushido” was no “Lone Wolf and Cub.” So instead of treating it seriously, Ishii turned it into a tongue-in-cheek carnival of “ero-guro.”

Tanba plays an unstoppable killing machine recruited by a clan of sadistic pimps known as the Bohachi. They’ve rejected their humanity to run a human slavery ring that lets them fuel the Edo pleasure quarters with the broken women they call “beautiful dolls.” They ask Tanba’s character to help them keep their hold on the prostitution trade by decapitating anyone who gets in their way. “Roaches are more pleasant company than you,” Tanba snarls. But what the hey? He wasn’t doing anything that afternoon, anyway.

Shot entirely in the studio, “Bohachi Bushido” is a gorgeously stylized catalog of color-coded fields, streets, and marshes, with Tanba striding through lurid, Technicolor tatami mat rooms, a gaggle of naked women clinging to his thighs like barnacles. Initial scenes of extreme sexual sadism will repel many viewers, but stick around a little longer and it becomes clear that the film is a put-on that exists solely to deliver wild visuals, like a gang of naked female warriors fighting a ninja pimp and a final, opium-fueled one-against-100 battle that’s lit and choreographed like a Pina Bausch dance piece.

“Bohachi Bushido” is just one of thousands of films made by ambitious, stylish directors that are stuffed with clunky exploitation elements in order to secure financing. The reissue of 1987’s “Anguish” delivers another case in point. Directed by the avant-garde Catalan director Bigas Luna (who would win art-house fame in 1992 with “Jamón, Jamón,” introducing the world to Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz), “Anguish” is a stylish experiment dressed up in horror-movie clothes.

Michael Lerner, whose face is familiar from hundreds of television appearances, plays Michael, a hospital orderly whose mother, played by Zelda Rubinstein (the diminutive psychic from “Poltergeist”), uses hypnosis to control his life. Enraged by the way he’s treated at work, she sends him out to slice out the eyes of everyone he sees. It’s typical slasher fare until the 30-minute mark, when the camera pulls back to reveal that the whole thing is actually a movie called “The Mommy” being watched by an audience in a theater.

The theatergoers and the on-screen action begin to mirror and comment on each other, and by the time a murderer begins ripping his way through a theater audience in “The Mommy,” it may not be wildly entertaining, but it is enormously fascinating. Making clever use of the surround-sound system, and featuring some of the most complex editing you’ll ever see in a film whose poster shows a scalpel plunging into a human eye, “Anguish” is an overachieving horror movie that is obviously a labor of love.