THINK PINK, Round II: Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973)

Snow falls like a funeral

For the dead morning

Stray dogs howl in the distance as she walks

The sound of her ‘geta’

Piercing the air

She walks on, weighed down by karma

Justice and mercy

Tears and dreams

Yesterday and tomorrow

Words that have no hold on her now

The woman who has immersed herself in the river of vengeance

Gave herself up long ago

As mentioned in my introduction to the first Think Pink reviews round-up, I always intended to use the heading to take in a number of films that don’t fit at all comfortably under the ‘Pinky Violence’ banner but nonetheless find themselves associated with it in the West – a notion that’s particularly worth bearing in mind in this case, as I’m sure that star Meiko Kaji, director Toshiya Fujita and Toho studios would all spit blood at the thought of their film being described as PV.

Though she is often thought of as the definitive Pinky Violence star thanks to her pioneering work in the ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ and ‘Stray Cat Rock’ franchises, it seems that Kaji – by all accounts a lady just as determined and formidable as one of her characters – did everything she could to distance herself from the kind of exploitation typified by the ‘pinky violence’ tag, and the films she made outside of the two aforementioned series during the early ‘70s are all essentially attempts to take a more serious, ‘respectable’ approach to female-led action/revenge movies, largely free from the nudity and cheap sexploitation elements that were becoming increasingly prevalent in Toei and Nikkatsu’s output.

Produced for a subsidiary of the more venerable and up-market Toho studios, ‘Lady Snowblood’ – based on the manga by ‘Lone Wolf & Cub’ authors Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura – perfectly typifies this trend in Kaji’s films. Although many of the elements here – the simplistic revenge plotline, ridiculously exaggerated comic book bloodshed and frequent use of the zoom lens as a visual exclamation point – are still pure ‘70s exploitation, ‘Lady Snowblood’ nonetheless adopts a heavier, more self-consciously artistic tone than most of its competitors, fleshing out its central character’s traumatic background in lengthy, harrowing detail, accompanied by much pontificating on the whims of fate and the nature of revenge and so on, set against the muted tones and beautified landscapes of a grand historical drama.

Some may see all this as adding a compelling, atmospheric grandeur to proceedings, helping to elevate the film to a level rarely seen in quick turnover b-movie fare. Others though will no doubt find it as overblown and self-important - an empty attempt to raise the stock of what’s essentially just baseline pulp fiction. Myself, I’m kinda on the fence.

In the film’s favour is the fact that it’s extremely well made, with Fujita clearly making optimum use of the resources at his disposal, revelling in some of the most elaborate production design ever seen in a female action/revenge film. Sets, shooting locations and costumes are all exquisite, with the entire movie giving the impression of being art-designed and colour co-ordinated to the n-th degree, lending its images an ‘iconic’ resonance – a certain, ineffable sense of elegant ‘coolness’ – that would certainly be prove difficult to replicate on a tighter budget & schedule. (In particular, you wonder where Kaji’s character gets her supply of stunningly beautiful outfits, roaming the land with no means of financial support, not to mention the cleaning costs necessitated by all that blood flying everywhere, but… oh yeah, stylised comic book adaptation – we’re not supposed to think about that stuff too deeply.)

The achievements of the art department are also matched by the effort that’s been put into the film’s fight sequences, which again goes way beyond the level normally seen in Japanese exploitation, aspiring more to the high velocity swashbuckling of a prime Hong Kong wuxia flick, with the addition of majestic arcs of gore spurting hither and yon, the effects team seemingly rigging up each victim with a series of hosepipes to aid the beyond parodic celebration of arterial spray.

So, yeah - basically, if you’ve got a thing for absurd fountains of blood soiling pristine white kimonos, this is the movie for you. No opportunity is missed to fill the screen with bright whites and reds, whether represented through actual blood and snow, or costumes, flowers, décor and set dressing, the two colours blaze supernaturally against a stormy, autumnal background - a less than subtle reflection of the imagery of the film’s title of course, but also one that takes on added resonance in view of the story’s rather nebulous political sentiments.

And indeed, much of the time this stuff works brilliantly, delivering precisely the kind of hyper-real bloodshed us post-Argento, post-Tarantino ‘cult film’ fans are supposed to eat for breakfast, whilst also drawing us into the movie with a genuine emotional clout, filling our heads with bold, blazing images that live long in the memory.

Other times though, it doesn’t quite cut it. The film’s ponderous narration swiftly becomes comically tedious (can you remind us that this woman is “a child of the netherworld, living only for vengeance” again, mr. narrator? You haven’t mentioned it for a few minutes, and I’m worried I might forget..), whilst the sporadic attempts to invoke an ‘arthouse’ aesthetic are questionable at best. A good examples is the sequence in which the daughter of one of Kaji’s victims throws her collection of hand-wrought wicker dolls into the ocean as ‘poignant’ music swells on the soundtrack, bringing back unhappy memories of the unbearably pretentious Chinese ‘New Wave’ films I had to watch as part of a college course a few years back. (Honest to god, I mean, I love experiencing cinema from all countries and genres, don’t get me wrong, but sitting through some of those made me wish I’d taken Chemistry instead.)

During moments like these, I couldn’t help but think of the very different films Norifumi Suzuki was making over at Toei at around the same time, and in particular the incredible Sex & Fury. Although it’s difficult to confidently ascertain which came first given that both films share a 1973 copyright, Suzuki’s epic certainly plays very much like a cheeky sexploitation response to Fujita’s film, verging into the realm of an outright rip-off at its near-identical conclusion. Garish, prurient and opportunistic, a film like that would no doubt have been looked down upon by everyone who worked on this one, but taken out of context 'Sex & Fury' is arguably the more impressive of the two works, weaving together a tapestry that is just as lavish and visually imaginative as ‘Lady Snowblood’, building an altogether more complex and uncertain portrait of Taishō-era corruption and injustice, and doing so in a manner that is often a hell of a lot more entertaining than the dour, formal approach taken by Fujita and his collaborators.

Not that ‘Lady Snowblood’ is exactly lacking in political clout – in fact it’s just as suffused with it as with gore. Despite their slightly abstract period settings, Koike and Kamimura’s manga maintained a strong connection with contemporary left wing issues, and whilst Lady Snowblood’s calling as an all-purpose righter of class-based wrongs is explored in more depth in the film’s sequel, this initial instalment still never misses a chance to characterise her antagonists as representatives of various aspects of the wave of capitalist greed and state-sponsored criminality that was seen to be sweeping Japan in the period in which the story is set.

Straight out of the opening credits, scene-setting historical narration immediately begins criticising the Meiji-era government for their use of a military draft and misguided pursuit of imperialism, zeroing in on the assorted evils wrought by “mercenary businessmen, plutocrats and corrupt officials” – a class which in fiction set in the Meiji and Taishō eras often seems synonymous with those trying to import ‘decadent’ Western values (and, by extension, the subsequent excesses of European-style military imperialism) into Japanese society.

Even if this notion is never broken down in great detail in the film’s script, the subtext becomes hard to miss during the film’s conclusion, in which the Final Villain (who is now an arms dealer, gleefully helping prepare Japan for the ensuing global conflict) explains through a rather clunking chunk of exposition that he runs his operation out of a newly constructed, Western style building ostensibly opened by the government to receive guests from foreign powers, but in reality housing nightly orgies of “self gratification and shameless hedonism” for the country’s corrupt elite.

When Yuki subsequently attends one of these gatherings in the course of instigating a showdown with the rascal in question, her traditional dress sticks out like a sore thumb amid the multi-lingual, Western-garbed chattering classes, and when the bad guy finally gets what’s coming to him, he does so clutching the Japanese flag, as the literal and symbolic applications of the film’s colour scheme combine in one of those tormented moments of fractured national identity that Japanese b-movies can often embody so powerfully – nationalism and socialism, pacifism and bloody murder, all mixed up in a cathartic howl of cinematic confusion.

Despite all this though, the film is first and foremost a personal vengeance narrative, and beyond of any of the other notes filling up our ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ columns, it’s worth noting that Meiko Kaji herself is absolutely superb, delivering probably an even more extreme, single-minded performance than in the Scorpion films, and certainly a more nuanced one. Drawn and ashen- faced, she perfectly embodies the kind of unstoppable, quasi-supernatural force that the role demands, but at the same time manages to bring out a fragility in the character that helps transform her into a genuinely great heroine. However much she may aspire toward becoming a robotic, inhuman avenger, there is something behind her eyes that suggests that any minute now, her mask will crack, her training will fail, and the abused, orphaned child within will be revealed.

Allowing the sometimes melodramatic nature of the story’s presentation to bounce off her as painlessly as the blows of the assorted goons she ploughs through en route to her real targets, she keeps the human calm at the centre of the metaphorical storm solid and touchable at all times. A subtle touch, too fleeting to really explain properly, it is this certain something in Kaji’s performance that really makes the character, and, by extension, makes the film.

If you’ve read anything at all about ‘Lady Snowblood’ then you’ll no doubt be aware that it is the film that ‘inspired’ the central episodic framework (and much more besides) in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’, so I’m contractually obliged to mention that before we finish, but needless to say, it’s easy to see why the film made such an impression on him. For all its affectations and potential missteps, and for all that it might help to perpetuate just about every Japanese cinema cliché in the book, '..Snowblood' remains a landmark tour de force of stylised action film-making, and, in much the same way that Harry Kumel’s ‘Daughters of Darkness’ is often described as “the Citzen Kane of lesbian vampire movies”, I think Kaji and Fujita have a pretty good contender here for “the Citizen Kane of movies about wronged women wreaking bloody vengeance”... with all the positive and negative connotations that might imply.

(Thanks to the machinations of the big QT, ‘Lady Snowblood’s fantastic theme song is of course widely available from your mp3 provider of choice, so, rather than providing a download here, I’ll leave you to track it down via legitimate means, perhaps even helping to earn Meiko Kaji some miniscule amount of royalties in the process.)

THINK PINK, Round II: Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-attack(Norifumi Suzuki, 1971)

Putting on make up in pale neon light rouses my blood

A beautiful flower in Nerikan secretly finds her own way

Only with her beauty… Sukeban Blues

The night in Nanka is cluttered with chaotic flowers

The battle flower blossoms to fight all her foes in the world

Only with her beauty… Sukeban Blues

Between 1971 and 1974, Norifumi Suzuki directed about a dozen pinky violence-related films for Toei*, putting him very much in the driving seat of this short-lived genre, at least in terms of its sleazier and crazier ‘70s incarnation. Given the director’s seemingly all-consuming obsession with dysfunctional sexual weirdness, one could legitimately raise concerns about leaving the guy in charge of a laundry room, let alone a whole cinematic sub-genre, but, four decades down the line, we can hopefully at least enjoy the chaos that resulted.

The first of four Suzuki-directed entries in the ‘Girl Boss’ series, ‘Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack’ is actually one of his earliest shots at the genre, but, though somewhat light on the vengeance and bloodshed side of things, it still manages to deliver just about everything else you could ask of a wild & woolly pinky violence adventure, in industrial strength quantities.

In keeping with many other sukeban movies, the emphasis here is very much on celebration of the hippie/outlaw lifestyle – a kind of hyper-caffinated exploitation version of the previous generation’s ‘sun tribe’ films, but even further removed from reality. Whilst Western movies of this ilk usually purport to represent a kind of “torn from today’s headlines” realism (with an accompanying moral sting), Japanese culture was under no such illusions, with films such as this happily acknowledging that their characters are totally unreal figures living a life of promiscuous sex and comic book mayhem, presumably allowing the devious girl-gangers and long-haired, devil-may-care bikers herein to become irresistible escapist fantasy figures for male and female viewers alike.

Suzuki helpfully signals this by staging the action in a deliberately ‘flat’, cartoonish style, lining up characters on screen like bowling pins and using their exaggerated reactions to move from one set-piece to another at a frenetic pace, allowing for a constant stream of zany incident that leaves us in little doubt as to the director’s tongue-in-cheek intentions. And let’s be glad he keeps his tongue where we can see it, because, this being a Suzuki film, it’s naturally crammed with sordid antics guaranteed to alternately enrage, offend and astound any well-adjusted individuals who find themselves accidently watching ‘Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack’ of an evening.

The promise of casual sex is ever-present in these ‘Girl Boss’ flicks, with the female characters agreeing to sleep with men at the drop of a hat, offering a taste of paradise to sweating, cowardly salarymen or a good night in the sack to the slightly more appealing young bikers or yakuza… provided they can turn a profit on the exchange. In fact, the code adhered to by the film’s inexplicably named ‘Athens Gang’ strictly forbids members from “dating or being manipulated by one particular man”, and women who refuse to use their sexuality for personal gain, or else harbour dreams of a conventional, monogamous relationship, are treated as fools or neophytes throughout.

Suzuki of course can always be relied upon to go further and get crazier with this material than anyone else on the block, and the #1 jaw-dropping exploitation highlight here is undoubtedly the infamous ‘bike fuck’ sequence, wherein the film’s (male) biker gang – perhaps inspired by the cover of Flower Travellin’ Band’s debut album, perhaps not – decide to race their machines naked as the lord intended, but this time with their ladies (mostly Athens Gang members, in a curious deviation from their ‘no profit/no sex’ philosophy) strapped on beneath them. The starting line is set and the rules are simple: stop when you come, and the last one motoring is the winner! What more of a perfectly ridiculous, OTT exploitation sequence could you possibly ask for!? It’s all in good fun too (well, I thought it was pretty fun at least), but, as mentioned, there is no shortage of other material here that sets out purely to offend.

If you get past the opening twenty minutes – during which a teenage girl is forced to break her hymen with her fingers as a gang initiation rite – you might think there’s not much more the film can throw at you, but for sheer I-can’t-fucking-believe-this nastiness, it’s hard to beat the later sub-plot in which an ‘uppity’ pop idol who ignores her former friends pays rather severely for her assumed transgressions when the gang get their yakuza allies to ambush her in a lift and brutally gang rape her. Objectionable enough in itself, this scene attains jaw-dropping heights of crassness by accompanying the action with a jaunty, swanny-whistle based party tune, and when we cut straight to a bar where the girls are celebrating the violation and subsequent ruined career of their rival, the combined effect is unbelievable – an astoundingly tasteless bit of business, even by the shaky standards of a Toei pinky violence movie.

As is usually the case in these PV flicks though, Suzuki seems determined to have his cake and eat it as regards the film’s approach to its female characters, balancing out such horribly exploitative moments with a solid, pro-female emotional core that remains weirdly convincing in spite of all the outrages that surround it. As noted, the ‘Athens Gang’ live according to a strict set of rules that not only governs their sexual behaviour, but also encourages them to avoid falling under the influence of men and to strive for “power, courage and strength” through their sisterhood (look closely and you’ll see that the gang’s cramped apartment hang-out is decorated with pictures of armed revolutionary fighters). The gang’s current boss and the instigator of their code (Reiko Ike, natch) didn’t sign off on the aforementioned rape scheme, and it is this that leads her into a conflict with returning former boss Jun (played as a total bad-ass by Teruo Ishii regular Yukie Kagawa) that dominates much of the film’s run time. Ike confesses to her second in command (Miki Sugimoto) that she was driven to reject conventional society and join a gang after being raped as a young girl, and, one by one, several of her comrades reveal similar tales of grief, allowing for some moments of genuine catharsis that are hard to write off entirely.

As you might imagine, this sort of thing makes for a movie that is wildly uneven in tone, and the waters are muddied further when things veer heavily into yakuza territory for a whole other male-dominated plotline that plays like a pastiche of one of Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Battles Without Honour & Humanity’ movies, with Hawaiian shirted thugs facing off all over the place as whisky is gulped, teeth are spat out and dearly-held principles are abandoned. (I was quite surprised to see Tôru Abe, one of Japan’s most respected actors, popping up as a yakuza boss, but actually a quick look at his CV reveals that he paid the rent with cameos in a number of sukeban and PV-related movies in the early ‘70s.) “Without money, honour and humanity can be lost in a second” one character opines over a glass of Johnny Walker, as a highly Fukasaku-esque tale of old-fashioned, principled yakuza being ploughed under by brute economics proceeds to unfold.

All of which strikes me as pretty curious to be honest, given that, although he’d made a few lesser known crime movies up to this point, Fukasaku’s game-changing ‘Battles..’ series didn’t even BEGIN until two years after this movie came out, which makes me uncertain quite what Suzuki was riffing on here, but, well… my knowledge of Japanese cinema being what it is, I’ll leave any further speculation to the better-informed amongst you. Just thought I’d throw that out there.

You won’t have much time to ponder such matters whilst ‘Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack’ is actually in progress mind you, as Suzuki somehow manages to also cram in a hefty dose of parental melodrama, enough bawdy behaviour to fuel the scripts for several ‘Porkys’ sequels, masses of gratuitous dirtbike racing footage, a musical interlude featuring what appears to be a transvestite or transsexual club singer, a devious plan involving blackmailing the head of a pharmaceutical company to provide raw materials for a hyper-addictive new street drug, and, well… you get the idea. Frankly how he manages to crow-bar so much STUFF into an 80 minute run-time is one of cinema’s great mysteries - it’s like that clowns-emerging-from-the-car trick, only infinitely more entertaining.

I guess the final, plot-heavy quarter of an hour drags slightly, and the dirt road shoot-out conclusion is rather po-faced and ineffective, but after a film that’s given us this much joyous mayhem & taboo-smashing craziness, such failings are hard to criticise too much. Provided as you can put your ‘morally upstanding member of the human race’ badge aside for a while and roll with the punches, ‘Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack’ is yet another perfect, mindless slice of everything that makes early ‘70s Japanese exploitation movies so exhilarating.

*Not that stopped him also finding time to fit in such classy-sounding pinku productions as ‘Tokugawa Sex Ban: Lustful Lord’ and ‘Modern Porno Tale: Inherited Sex Mania’ during these years. Bit of an autobiographical slant going on there, Nori…?

Mp3 > The Sukeban Blues

THINK PINK, Round II:Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal(Yasuharu Hasebe, 1970)

The second or possibly third entry in the Stray Cat Rock series (as they were filmed back to back and realised in pretty quick succession, the chronology is kinda unclear), ‘Machine Animal’ is a more substantial venture than Toshiya Fujita’s light-weight Wild Jumbo, but it’s still pretty throwaway stuff in the grand scheme of things, and can probably best seen as a warm up for Yasuharu Hasebe’s more accomplished work on the exhilarating Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, released later the same year.

Far milder and less salacious than the Toei pinky violence movies that quickly followed, the ‘Stray Cat Rock’ films (with the notable exception of ‘Sex Hunter’) stick pretty closely to the format of post-‘Hard Days Night’ youth/pop music movies, assuming a jaunty, upbeat tone and interspersing their gang war/crime caper storylines with cod-psychedelic musical interludes, way-out fashion shows and assorted goofy montage sequences, rich in gratuitous split screen, camera swirl and other low budget visual effects. What differentiates these Japanese youth movies from their Western counterparts though is of course the fact that they’re prepared to go so much further with their counter-cultural mischief. Restrained as ‘Machine Animal’ may be in view of what came later, it’s still hard to imagine a similarly light-hearted American film in which the heroines get ahead in life by hot-wiring cars, fighting with knives and wantonly guzzling LSD, and it’s that spirit of unrepentant, amoral wildness that keeps us coming back to these films, helping to render even such comparatively minor efforts as this solidly entertaining.

And speaking of wildness, the promise of crazy shenanigans would certainly seem to be on the table when it becomes clear that the plot-line here concerns Meiko Kaji’s gang (the same one seen in ‘Sex Hunter’, to all intents and purposes) getting mixed up with a couple of lively characters who have arrived on their Yokahama turf harbouring an American deserter from Vietnam, and hoping to pay their way out of the country using profits from the 500 hits of acid they’re carrying. Crikey. Contemporary or what?

Sadly, our dreams of a wild sukeban trip sequence are never quite realised – the girls who initially sample the goods just act a bit dopey for a while then get over it, whilst limited means and sparse production design prevent the later ‘freak out’ sequence from really scaling the heights of psychedelic delirium the way we might have hoped, although it’s nice enough as far as these things go.

It’s also nice to note that, whilst they may have been slightly more enthusiastic about it than their American counterparts, Japanese filmmakers were apparently just as clueless about the emerging drug culture, as witnessed by the fact that LSD in the Stray Cat Rock world comes in the form of industrially produced pharmaceutical capsules that can be gulped down by the dozen with no apparent ill effects – a goofy detail that sits well alongside the ridiculous stream of beatnik-via-blaxploitation banter that the fan sub-titles on my copy of the film subject us to. (I mean, not that I’m saying the characters aren’t presumably busting out their best Nippon hep-cat moves at any given point, but if you’re reading sub-title dude, I’d love to know the precise Japanese vocab for “you jive turkey!” or “friggin’ dames!”)

Though it’s only fully manifested in ‘Sex Hunter’, one interesting aspect of all the SRC films – missing from many of Toei’s later PV flicks – is their political undercurrent, particularly as regards the tensions raised by the influx of foreign culture and foreign visitors into post-war Japan (even the air-headed ‘Wild Jumbo’ features buried crate of WWII weaponry and a scene in which Meiko Kaji and Tetsuya Fuji humiliate some American tourists). Of course much of the angst-ridden contradiction that makes ‘Sex Hunter’ such fascinating viewing arises from the fact that, socially and culturally speaking, these youth movie owe their entire existence to the influence of American culture, and as such, ‘Machine Animal’ seems to present a proudly internationalist vision of Japan, with scenes taking place in a Greek bar, a German bakery and an American bowling alley.

The presence of a sympathetically portrayed Vietnam deserter meanwhile seems like a particularly daring inclusion, especially as by far the film’s most harrowing moment comes when he’s mercilessly gunned down by Japanese police, in what seems like a clear nod to the agenda of Japan’s militant student protest movement. (It must be said however that the effectiveness of this storyline is undermined somewhat by one of the film’s strangest time/budget-enforced inconsistencies, vis-à-vis the fact that this brave refugee from the good ol’ USAF is portrayed by a bemused looking teenage Asian guy who speaks broken English in a broad Japanese accent.)

In keeping with a lot of other sukeban flicks, the girl gangers here are initially presented as being somewhat subordinate to their male counterparts, with the opening scenes seeing them riding as passengers with the male ‘Dragon Gang’, rather than conducting their own gang business. In fairness though, the plot does swiftly move in the direction of a male/female gang war (just like in ‘Sex Hunter’, actually), and ‘Machine Animal’ is one of the relatively few sukeban movies I can think of in which the girls actually DO get to do some bike-riding at one point.

But again, the inept / tongue-in-cheek execution of said sequence tends to foul things up a bit; “Jeepers! We need our Hondas!” Meiko (allegedly) exclaims about an hour into the film, and the subsequent scenes in which the girls putter about on two-stroke mopeds sporting groovy goggles & colour-coordinated helmets as they slowly negotiate a series of carefully placed ramps and obstacles are pretty hilarious to be honest – obviously shot as quickly and cheaply as was humanly possible, presumably without the use of any stunt personnel, and generally played for laughs.

And, as in ‘Sex Hunter’, the girls’ street gang abilities are compromised to the extent that they don’t even take part in the fighting during the movie’s final showdown, instead standing round helplessly as the two male heroes duke it out with their opponents – disappointing, to say the least.

Ah well. One thing Stray Cat Rock movies are usually good for at least is rockin’ music and awesome psychedelic nightclub scenes, and, although some of the incidental music is pretty square, ‘Machine Animal’ certainly delivers the goods in this respect. In the Astro Go-Go Club, the girls’ hang-out of choice, silver-clad girls dance suspended above the stage on an elaborate scaffolding type arrangement, whilst a female organist/flautist busts out some wild prog moves, leading a Sunset Strip styled garage band through a couple of loungey yet enjoyable tunes (a soundtrack note on IMDB identifies the band as Zee Nee Voo, if that means anything to Group Sounds aficionados out there). I’d love to tell you that Hasebe’s presentation of these performances matches the psychedelic splendour of ‘Sex Hunter’s club scenes, or the director’s earlier pop-art triumphs in 1966’s ‘Black Tight Killers’, but sadly that’s not the case, and again, things seem rushed, with unimaginative lighting and awkward jump cuts giving things of bit of a ‘70s Top of the Pops vibe (UK readers will know what I mean).

Elsewhere, Michi Aoyama – a singer/actress who turned up in at least a couple of other films for different studios during the ‘60s – makes a memorable appearance as a 12-string strumming folk goddess who hangs out in the aforementioned Greek bar, where she dissolutely belts out a couple of ballsy, low-register blues numbers that are genuinely rather fantastic. Further information on her life and career would certainly be welcomed, should anyone have any.

Meiko Kaji too is her usual cool self, with her trademark vengeance-hat present and correct and the solemn, untouchably bad-ass persona that she’d adopt in so many classic movies over the next few years already well in evidence – more-so than this material demands or deserves, really. It’s notable that her character doesn’t take drugs or join her sisters in the gang acid freakout, and maintains a discreet distance from the rest of the film’s goofy hi-jinks too. Basically it doesn’t take a genius to spot that she had her eye on more demanding, tonally ‘serious’ roles than Nikkatsu were offering her here. Naturally the beautiful, lonesome ballad she sings to an empty boat-shed is another of the film’s highlights (although sadly, for all his/her jive-talkin’ fortitude, the sub-titler of my copy has neglected to provide translated lyrics for the film’s songs – always one of my favourite aspects of watching these movies).*

Regular SCR male lead Tatsuya Fuji also fares pretty well in ‘Machine Animal’, as one of the two acid-dealin’, deserter-shelterin’ dudes, and Meiko’s presumed love interest. This time playing neither a raging psychopath nor an insufferable goon, he’s surprisingly effective as a kinda rough-hewn, free-wheeling leading man in the Peter Fonda mould, revealing some of the charisma that made him a minor star in the Nikkatsu cosmos, prior to his later ascent to cinematic immortality in Nagisa Oshima’s ‘In The Realm of The Senses’ in ’76.

If it seems like I’m concentrating a lot on such incidental detail here, that’s largely because the actual thread of this movie’s plot after the initial set-up has been established is crushingly simplistic and repetitious, as drugs, then money for drugs, then hostages go back and forth and back and forth between film’s feuding factions like some infernal merry-go-round, seemingly for a lack of any other ideas to keep the narrative ticking over, until we just want the damn thing to end.

Nonetheless, Hasebe does his best to maintain interest, throwing in a lot of the kind of “just for the hell of it” formal experimentation that the SCR series does so well, with split screens, slo-mo etc. all present and correct, helping to generate a real out-of-nowhere emotional charge for the film’s few serious/violent moments, and pointing the way toward the stylistic tour de force of ‘Sex Hunter’, a film that sees all the best elements hinted at here magnified ten-fold.

In keeping with previous ‘Think Pink’ entries, I’ve uploaded a few of the film’s best musical moments for you here.

*Although it may seem like I’ve dissed the poor subber(s) a few times in this review, I’d nonetheless like to earnestly thank them for their efforts – I realise it’s a lot of hard work for zero reward, and without their help I’d probably never get the chance to watch films like this one with even the slightest understanding of what was going on, so please, keep up the good work guys – it’s appreciated.

Think Pink: Sex & Fury(Norifumi Suzuki, 1973)

Thus far in this series we’ve been looking at films with a contemporary setting, but there were also quite a few pinky violence-affiliated films with a period setting - attempts to incorporate the 'violent female action' sub-genre into the more traditional confines of the ninkyo (‘chivalry’) films pioneered by Toei during the ‘50s and ‘60s, presumably with the aim of rejuvenating the latter genre’s fading box office appeal.

Of the three films I’d consider a rough ‘holy trinity’ of these kinds of cross-overs, two - Toshiya Fujita’s ‘Lady Snowblood’ and Teruo Ishii’s startling ‘Blind Woman’s Curse’ – are very much borderline entries that I’d be reluctant to place under the ‘pinky violence’ banner. The third though – ‘Sex & Fury’ – certainly makes no bones about its alignment to the genre, as the reliably manic Norifumi Suzuki drags all the chaos and sleaze of his girl gang and WIP films back in time, with (needless to say) hugely entertaining results, working with what looks to have been an unusually lavish budget to create a movie that's basically the closest thing the world will ever see to a Pinky Violence Historical Epic.

As distinct from feudal era Samurai films, ninkyo movies are usually set in the Meiji era, which began with the end of Japan’s isolation from the wider world in 1868 and officially ended in 1912. A period of vast social change and political turmoil, the Meiji era can (in filmic terms at least) be roughly equated to Japan’s own ‘Wild West’, with the heroes of these movies – gamblers and gangsters attempting to uphold the traditional virtues of chivalry in the face of strife, corruption and malign foreign intervention – perhaps veeery roughly equating to the last-real-men-in-a-doomed-world heroes of a Leone or Peckinpah western.

I mention this background simply because it plays into ‘Sex & Fury’ to a considerable extent. Our tale begins in 1886 (or Meiji year 16) with a young Ocho seeing her father (a police detective) killed by yakuza. (Funny isn’t it how so many PV films feature daughters avenging their fathers, a fairly rare turn of events in Western revenge films?) He dies clutching a handful of hanafuna playing cards, providing the transition in to a wonderfully stylised opening sequence that sees Ocho, now grown up into the shape of Reiko Ike, tattooed and wielding a short-sword, striking combat poses amid a brightly-lit pop-art fantasia that reproduces the imagery from the bloody cards on a huge scale – a pretty striking visual device that immediately marks out ‘Sex & Fury’ as something a bit grander in ambition than your average PV flick.

This impression is underscored by the fact that the credits are immediately followed by a lightning fast history lesson, with captions and still photographs giving us the skinny on significant Meiji era events, including the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, leading all the way up to 1905 (Meiji 38). “Now is a civilised era of enlightenment”, the on-screen text concludes, on what we already know is going to be a blackly ironic note.

An independent woman par excellence, the grown-up Ocho seems to be doing alright for herself pursuing her interests as a gambler, sword-fighter and compulsive pick-pocket, but fate swiftly takes a hand when she steps in to aid the escape of an apparently crazed anarchist who has just tried to assassinate a big-shot politician named Kurokawa. (Very much a ‘modern’ sort of chap, he is seen engaging in internationalist power-broking in baronial, Western style surroundings.)

After Ocho subsequently witnesses an entirely unconnected (or is it..?) murder at a gambling house she frequents, the boss of the house apparently dispatches a gang of armed men to take her down, leading directly to what is almost certainly the film’s overall highlight, an absolutely breathtaking sequence that sees our heroine leaping nude from the bath and slaughtering about a dozen warriors in glorious slo mo – as the snow falls on the ornamental garden outside, naturally. I’ll admit that even on my second viewing I wasn’t *entirely* sure what’s supposed to be going on here plot-wise, but who cares frankly – the sight of Reiko Ike, blood-soaked, tattooed and naked, performing acrobatic leaps and dives as she severs limbs and slices throats surely has to be one of the quintessential images of all Japanese exploitation cinema.

It’s an exhilarating bit of filmmaking, inexplicably accompanied by a jaunty tune that sounds like something off a Herb Alpert album, and the crazy echo on the sword swoosh sound effects alone blows my mind. Aside from anything else, it’s a testament to the professionalism of the film’s editors, technicians and fight choreographers that they managed to cut together a five minute, multi-angle sequence in which a naked woman spins around a room fighting multiple assailants, without once breaking Japanese cinema’s pubic hair embargo. And if the rest of ‘Sex & Fury’ never quite manages to top this scene, well, it’s certainly not for want of trying. Unexpectedly throwing in a sequence that outdoes the finale of 90% of action movies in the opening fifteen minutes sets the bar pretty high for the subsequent seventy five.

By the time we’ve got our breath back and poured a stiff drink, an ambitious and convoluted tale has already begun to unfold, honouring the film’s historical setting with a real Dickensian sprawl of intersecting storylines, packed with intrigue and melodrama to beat the band.

First off, it turns out that the anarchist whose life Ocho saved is desperately in love with a foreign spy named Christina. Not only “the foremost female gambler from a Western country”, but also apparently “the most popular dancer in the stormy city of London, England”, Christina is played by none other than Scandinavian sexploitation goddess Christina Lindberg. Unable to even speak the same language, it seems its love at first sight for these two, prompting all manner of star-crossed shenanigans, set against some pretty complex political machinations. Christina’s ‘handler’ is a chap named Guinness, an Englishman and guest of Kurokawa who secretly aims to bring Japan under the influence of the British Empire by means of “starting a second opium war in this barbaric country”.

As an aside, can anyone help me ID the actor who plays Guinness? IMDB has him down as one ‘Mark Darling’ in his only screen appearance, but I’m SURE I’ve seen the guy in a few Euro-horror movies and such. Anyone care to jog my memory?


Like any good pinky violence heroine, Ocho has her own gang of loyal female buddies, time in the form of a sisterhood of fellow orphan pick-pockets who operate as part of a kind of benevolent Bill Sykes / Fagin type operation overseen by the big-hearted lady who describes herself as their adopted mother. Then there’s a sub-plot about Ocho taking up the cause of a dying gambler who was trying to raise money to stop his sister is being sold into slavery. Oh, and of course she’s also trying to identify the coded yakuza animal tattoos that identify her father’s killers, in order to wreak the necessary vengeance upon them.

So seriously, there’s all kindsa shit going on, all realised on the kind of scale that Western exploitation flicks of the same period barely even attempted. Suzuki certainly doesn’t skimp on the sex or the fury either though, happily rocketing through his usual line-up of OTT set-pieces, this time taking in a battle with switchblade-wielding nuns onboard an express train to Osaka, and Lindberg in a cow-girl outfit whipping a chained Ike to the accompaniment of spookshow organ music in a weird Christian chapel / torture chamber straight out of ‘School of the Holy Beast’ (what is WITH this guy’s thing for cowgirl outfits and Xtian imagery anyway..?). One particularly eye-popping / credulity-stretching scene even features Ocho’s pick-pocket friends being tied to the ceiling and beaten with sticks in a darkened room that looks like one of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable concerts, prints of Japanese military exploits projected on the wall overlaid with psychedelic lighting and flashing strobes.

Plenty of the usual rapey unpleasantness is also in evidence of course, but even several lengthy (semi-consensual) sex scenes don’t slacken the pace – they’re excitingly shot with kinetic camerawork and some winningly kinky details (the bit where Ocho kills a vengeance-recipient by smearing her body with poisoned perfume is worthy of Jess Franco’s fevered imaginings). Many things ‘Sex & Fury’ may be, but it’s NEVER boring, the beautiful, lively photography full of fast cutting, crash zooms and focus shifts, detailed close-ups and solid blocks of bright colour, reminiscent of both Jack Hill’s better exploitation efforts and the technicolor frenzies of Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Toyko Drifter’.

As with many of Norifumi Suzuki’s films, ‘packed with incident’ scarcely does the maximalist approach on display here justice. To all intents and purposes, it’s a‘70s exploitation fan’s wet dream come true, a rollercoaster ride through everything that made that decade’s popular cinema so wild and vibrant, and a directorial high wire act that serves up enough sex and fury to satisfy the audience’s appetites ten times over, with vast swathes of barbed socio-political commentary, historical melodrama and pop art visual excess thrown in for good measure – the kind of densely-packed, rip-roaring 90 minute entertainment that shows up today’s slack-ass multiplex directors for the time-wasting clowns they are. God bless you Norifumi, you freakin’ maniac.

Surprisingly, about the one thing this movie doesn’t manage to cram in is an enka ballad, so instead here’s a nice English language voice-over segment in which Christina Lindberg discusses the sad lot of a female spy.

Think Pink: Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo (Toshiya Fujita, 1970)

“When I get lonely, I come to the beach
I play this melody, thinking of you

Please waves, don’t disturb my melody
My lovely girl is listening to it

Pororo, pororo
Waves in the sea
Pororo, pororo
A sad melody”

Although the relatively high level of technical professionalism that resulted from the classic Hollywood style ‘production line’ ethos at Japanese studios in the '60s and '70s often served to disguise the fact, the truth is that commercial films were generally produced at incredible speed on minimal budgets, with popular stars and directors sometimes turning out over ten features per year.

Normally such haste isn’t really an issue (in fact it probably helped fuel these films’ wildly imaginative excess to some extent), but sometimes the limitations of relentless, studio-enforced turnover time become all too clear, with ‘Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo’ perhaps providing a definitive example.

Sadly not featuring a storyline in which Meiko Kaji’s girl gang fights a rogue elephant, the film basically plays as if the team behind it woke up one morning with a blazing hangover and realised they had about four days and a few thousand yen to create a whole movie from scratch or else lose their jobs, with predictably wayward results. If you were in a charitable mood, you could perhaps align ‘Wild Jumbo’s best moments with the breezy ‘first thought/best thought’ style of early Godard, or the pure headfuck cinema of Koji Wakamatsu, but in all honesty the film’s fragmented style seems to have less to do with any deliberate artistic process, and more just with the filmmakers’ need to just throw whatever they could at the screen in a desperate attempt to make the deadline.

It’s rare for Japanese movie series to carry across characters and storylines from film to film, but even by these standards, Nikkatsu’s ‘Stray Cat Rock’ franchise plays pretty fast and loose with its central concept. Initially conceived with the idea of focusing on all-girl biker gangs and co-staring pop star Akiko Wada alongside Meiko Kaji and male lead Tatsuya Fuji, the series had lost both Wada and the motorbikes by the time it got to Yasuharu Hasebe’s superb ‘Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter’ (the third film to hit cinemas), and 'Wild Jumbo', the fourth installment, doesn't even have a girl gang, or indeed any gang at all in the conventional criminal / delinquent sense, and sees Kaji is pushed back to what is essentially a pretty pointless supporting role. In fact, the only elements to really cross over from ‘Sex Hunter’ are a lot of gratuitous jeep-driving, a similarly run-down looking harbour setting and the sight of Fuji sporting ray-bans and a crappy pencil moustache.

Concentrating instead on the exploits of a bunch of hippy-ish male losers (one of them has long hair, and Fuji wears beads and a poncho, so I’ll assume they’re supposed to be hippies) who apparently comprise something called ‘The Pelican Club’, the film plays for the most part as a kind of broad, youth-orientated comedy, spending a disproportionate amount of time following these guys as they simply goof around – holding running races, doing handstands, driving jeeps, dancing around with their shirts off, pulling gurning sex faces and laughing uproariously and, in one extraordinarily childish sequence, repeatedly mooning the security guards at a beach and then driving away sniggering.

To some extent, all this stuff could perhaps be seen as a hangover from Nikkatsu’s late ‘50s / early ‘60s ‘sun tribe’ movies, wherein the sight of free-spirited youngsters running around enjoying themselves provided a gently subversive thrill in the midst of the more austere reality of Japan’s post-war reconstruction. Assuming there’s any truth in this at all (I’m just bullshitting really), it’s difficult for me to determine whether all the hi-jinks in ‘Wild Jumbo’ are a deliberate throwback to this era or merely a late period continuation of it, but either way, it certainly has a very different feel to it than the kind of late ‘60s/early ‘70s Japanese films we’re used to seeing in the English-speaking world.

Whilst it does have some nice location shooting, period detail and occasional outbursts of really cool music to recommend it (a couple of great fuzz-rock songs can be heard briefly, and I loved the ‘pedal-steel / harmonica funk’ cue that plays incessantly), I’m sad to report that ‘Wild Jumbo’ still comes across as excruciatingly witless for the most part. Perhaps some of these oddball comedy scenes just don’t translate very well, but I fear it’s more likely they’re just totally stupid wherever you come from.

Why is Meiko Kaji even hanging out with these oafs, you might well ask. She doesn’t really partake in their antics with any degree of enthusiasm, and doesn’t seem to share any particular bond with any of them. It’s like they just threw her into the movie because she’s the star, but forgot to actually assign her a character, or think of anything for her to do except grin and look politely tolerant of her co-stars’ assorted tomfoolery.

Things get plain surreal when one of the guys starts spending his nights obsessively digging holes in the recreation yard at the local high school, taking his new hobby to such extremes that he gets written up in newspapers as “the mysterious moleman”. Initially he refuses to tell anyone what he’s up to, causing his friends to understandably worry for his mental health, but eventually all is revealed: he was digging for a forgotten cache of WWII weaponry, which the gang subsequently make their own, decamping to a patch of wasteland for some light-hearted target practice.

At this point, temporarily remembering what kind of film it’s supposed to be, ‘Wild Jumbo’ takes a sudden lurch toward a crime story, as the gang get mixed up with a mysterious woman who eventually recruits them to undertake a daring heist involving the theft of a cool thirty million yen from an armoured car belonging to a mysterious religious organisation called 'Seikyo Gakkei'. Quite why she’d entrust this dangerous mission to a bunch of goons who don’t even have the wherewithal to get a new front door for their house is beyond me, but, I dunno… I’ll buy it I suppose. It sure beats watching them lighting their farts and playing ping-pong for the duration.

For the final reel or two depicting the robbery and its aftermath, the film’s tone shifts drastically toward a sorta ‘doomed & out of their depth’ seriousness, and, though clearly derivative of every heist movie ever made, the whole thing is done quite well, incongruous moments of sudden violence leading up to a fairly astonishing final two minutes that are more memorable than the rest of the movie put together. Hazy clifftop long-shot, sudden gun shots punctuating a kind of weird existential calm, cut to bold white-on-red lettering and a final fade as incongruously jaunty music plays on a distorted loop.

It’s difficult to know what to make of a film like ‘Wild Jumbo’ really. As discussed above, the “made incredibly quickly and cheaply” theory is my best guess. The one widely reported nugget of info regarding the film’s production states that it was actually made concurrently with Hasebe’s ‘Sex Hunter’, with personnel shuttled across town from one shoot to the other as part of a Nikkatsu drive to knock out as many ‘Stray Cat Rock’ sequels as they possibly could in 1970. This makes sense, and as the more established and respected of the two directors, maybe Hasebe simply got the better deal re: time and resources, leaving ‘Wild Jumbo’ to flounder..?

Watching it blind, it’s difficult to know whether Toshiya Fujita was a young director trying out a few new ideas in an inexperienced, devil-may-care sort of fashion, or an older man reluctantly making a ‘youth’ film whilst under the impression that the youth in question were so degenerate that they’d put up with any old slack-jawed rubbish, occasionally perking up when he got the chance to handle some old school crime/action material. Hitting IMDB and reminding myself that Fujita was born in 1932 and went on to direct Meiko Kaji in the far, far more accomplished ‘Lady Snowblood’ films a few years down the line, I think we’re gonna have to go with the former possibility and contentedly file ‘Wild Jumbo’ in the “for completists only” pile.

About the best things in this movie are the sporadic bits of great music heard throughout, and as such I’ve actually done a quick .zip of choice bits and pieces, including not just the obligatory ballad but a cool fuzz-rock number and an absolutely beautiful Meiko Kaji vocal / guitar performance amongst other things: check it out.

Think Pink: Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom (Norifumi Suzuki, 1973)

“A cold wind is blowing
Not a soul on campus
The shadows cast are full of lies
That’s me in my school uniform

Days of songs are so far away
They’ll never come again for me”

If you’re looking for a demonstration of what makes Japanese exploitation cinema from the early ‘70s so unique, consider the fact that not only did they routinely make movies called things like ‘Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom’, but that, after watching them, you’re often able to sit back and think “yes, on reflection, that would seem to be an entirely appropriate name for this particular film”.

Certainly, renowned maniac Norifumi Suzuki wastes no time in letting us know just how terrifying life at Kanto’s ‘School of Hope for Girls’ is, throwing us straight into an alarming, horror movie-esque sequence that sees the school’s fascistic ‘Disciplinary Committee’ clad in red rubber gloves and surgical masks, using equipment in the science lab to drain the blood from a half-naked victim, calculating how long she’ll be able to remain conscious as she slowly bleeds to death.

Thus we’re introduced to the shock troops of the film’s institutional villains, but frankly the three new transfer students who comprise our heroines are scarcely much less terrifying. Denim-clad Noriko (Miki Sugimoto) – called ‘The Boss with the Cross’ on account of her crucifix pendant - actually manages to get arrested whilst en-route to the school, kicking a cop in the balls as her attempts to steal a car outside the train station. Cowgirl-attired Remi the Razor meanwhile does.. well, exactly what you’d expect really, landing a transfer to Kanto after cutting up a bunch of hooligans in a street brawl, and bisexual Kyoko (“I only do it with guys to wash out the taste, have sex with me once and I’ll drive you insane”, she announces within her first few minutes on-screen) finds herself in hot water after being caught masturbating a truckdriver as he crashes into a police checkpoint.

Plot-wise, ‘Lynch Law Classroom’ quickly establishes itself a variation on yr standard Women In Prison set-up, with a corrupt, authoritarian institution, bungling, ineffectual principal, scheming vice-principal, sadistic guards (in the form of the aforementioned Disciplinary Committee). Gratuitous shower scenes, cat fights and demeaning initiation rituals are all present and correct. Suzuki never lets things trundle along dull WIP rails for long though, concentrating on an astounding array of exploitation set-pieces, taking in lesbian toilet seduction, genital light bulb torture, boob electrocution, and one particularly memorable sequence in which a girl is prevented from going to the toilet until she wets herself in public.

After my review of ‘Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs’ last week, you might anticipate some tut-tutting from this corner, but remarkably, Suzuki just about manages to get away with it all I think. Rather than throwing this stuff around just for the sake of sheer cruelty, he invests it with a kind of grotesque, anarchic humour that renders these scenes freaky and blackly hilarious, rather than merely offensive. At a push, you could maybe even compare Suzuki’s approach here to early John Waters - whilst still unrepentantly prurient and gratuitous, he seems less concerned with providing unwholesome titillation for his audience, and more with simply getting a reaction out of people any way he can. Not content to merely introduce these icky concepts, he seems determined to milk them for as much visceral impact as possible, handheld camera spinning crazily, zooming in for hair-raising close-ups as victims struggle, scream and generally freak-out, often to the accompaniment of incongruous action-scene funk-rock.

Although the film’s universe is pretty sketchy at times (for instance, the way the girls seem to be able to leave the confines of the school when they feel like it and even have access to vehicles, money etc., but nonetheless spend most of their time hanging around in the playground in approved school uniform, is never quite explained), one gets the feeling that any concept of ‘coherence’ was wisely left eating dust as Suzuki simply raced from outrageous sequence to the next, and, rejoicing in their own ridiculousness, the results are really something to behold.

A harder sell for Western viewers perhaps is the film’s middle section, wherein our heroines collaborate with a suave blackmailer guy to try to bring down the school’s top brass by means of a series of ‘honeypot’ stings, wherein the men (who are naturally all lecherous comedy bozos of one kind or another) are coerced into having sex with the pupils, photos and tape recordings of their shameful depredations subsequently ruining their careers. As well as introducing us to the uncomfortable notion that young women don’t really mind being violated by disgusting fat men as long as it serves their eventual goals, these Porkys-goes-to-hell style japes are just a bit predictable and repetitive, causing the otherwise lightning fast pacing to sag somewhat.

Fear not though, sukeban fans, as, as if realising things are starting to drag a bit, Suzuki orders 20 CCs of Reiko Ike, stat, and verily she appears, gate-crashing the classroom on her motorbike as the leader of a chapter of rival Kanto girl gangs with a score to settle with Noriko. As joint queens of the pinky violence era at Toei, it seems to have been written into their contracts that Ike and Sugimoto have to square off for a knife fight in every film they appeared in together, and, well, say what you like… their showdown certainly got me back on-side.

Somewhat surprisingly given his no holds barred approach to sleaze though, Suzuki’s more serious anti-authoritarian agenda creeps up on us with a certain degree of subtlety amid the mayhem. About an hour in, the corrupt political big-shot who acts as the school’s patron takes a look at the school yearbook, and decides to rape Tomoko, the film’s pure-hearted, hard-working innocent girl. Despite what has gone before, this scene and the victim’s subsequent suicide are handled in a surprisingly restrained and harrowing fashion that not only seems to cast a dark reflection back on the more casual instances of sexual degradation we’ve seen earlier in the film, but also conveys an unmistakable feeling of genuine rage against a system that allows the wealthy and powerful to ruin the lives of those beneath them.

As the big-shot prepares for the arrival of his victim, he sits in tranquil ryokan surroundings, reading aloud from a passage in the ‘Compendium of the Law’ praising the Imperial family. Sparing us the gory details of the assault itself, Suzuki’s camera subsequently pulls away, zeroing in instead on the book, which has fallen open on a page detailing the sentencing of rapists.

Tomoko’s subsequent death (she hangs herself in a classroom) signals a definite shift in the film’s tone, as gross-out exploitation is increasingly sidelined in favour of a more tangible attack on institutional hypocrisy. Angry and disgusted at their friend’s fate, the pupils hold a vigil around her corpse and, led by Noriko, Remi and Kyoko, instigate a full scale insurrection against the powers that be, destroying the campus in a fit of rage, barricading the entrance gates and attacking riot police with rocks, water cannons and wooden clubs – a breath-taking outburst of anarchy, like some crazed Japanese exploitation take on Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If..’.

In the closing minutes of the riot, a Japanese flag burns on an overturned limousine as Reiko Ike, clad in a red mini-dress, beats the crap out of a policeman with a giant wooden pole, and, finally overwhelmed, the girls laugh defiantly, sharing gestures of solidarity as they’re carted off to an even sterner detention centre. Hell yeah! Right on, comrades! Every school you trash takes us one step closer to a world in which delinquent gang girls can go about their business unmolested by weaselly comic relief men with Hitler moustaches. And that, I think, is a cause we can all get behind.

I suppose it should go without saying by this point that ‘Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom’ comes with a ‘NOT FOR THE EASILY OFFENDED’ warning in ten foot high neon letters, but beyond that, it’s an unruly, punk-ass masterpiece that anyone with a taste for the crazier end of world cinema owes it to themselves to check out.

Mp3> Ballad of the Lynch Law Classroom

Think Pink: Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (Yukio Noda, 1974)

"The city’s lights must strain you
You must long for your mother’s breast
Oh, you poor lost puppy
If you lose faith, it’s all over

The world is filled with such sadness
It is difficult to keep walking towards the future
“Someday, happiness will come to me”
I believe this in my heart and live on"

At completely the other end of the spectrum from the genteel ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly’, we have ‘Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs’, adapted from the long-running manga created by Toru Shinohara. The Zero Woman stories centre on the character of Rei (here portrayed by Miki Sugimoto), a renegade ex-cop/assassin whose raison d’etre is hunting down rapists and other extremely bad men, posing as an innocent victim and then executing them when they least expect it, often by means of her trademark red handcuffs, which she manages to use as a kind of midair decapitation device. All of which could be seen as potentially jolly and female-affirmative stuff, were it not for the employment of the old ‘have your cake and eat it’ exploitation strategy of deferring this violent payoff until the villains have already given her poor body a good going over – a tradition that is recreated to a somewhat unhappy extent in Yukio Noda’s film.

The plot line here – which bares more than a passing resemblance to Umberto Lenzi’s excellent poliziotteschi movie ‘Almost Human’ – sees the daughter of an influential politician kidnapped by a gang of feral thugs. Rei is thus extracted from her prison cell and offered a deal by the corrupt cops who want to hush the whole thing up. Her mission: to infiltrate the gang, rescue the girl and kill everyone else, in exchange for her freedom.

And so the scene is set for… well, for about ninety minutes of utter psychosis, to be honest. By far the most violent and misanthropic entry I’ve seen in the ‘pinky violence’ cycle thus far, ‘Red Handcuffs’ seems to blur the boundaries somewhat with the nastier rape/sadism-focused films that began to predominate at studios like Nikkatsu from the mid ‘70s onwards, its promising opening as a hard-boiled crime story swiftly becoming little more than an excuse to fill the screen with as much cruelty and depravity as possible.

The film is full of sex and nudity, absolutely none of it consensual, and in fact nothing approaching a normal human relationship is portrayed at any point. Aside from Sugimoto’s dead-eyed avenger, every character on screen is either a depraved, hideous beast or a voiceless victim - this is pure exploitation movie nihilism, thrilling and repulsive in equal measure.

And I can roll with that to a certain extent - certainly the kind of unpleasantness showcased here is comparable to that seen in the work of Shunya Ito or Norifumi Suzuki, whose films I love – but what nixed my enjoyment of ‘Red Handcuffs’ wasn’t only the lack of human feeling, but also a crucial lack of content. As a drama, the movie fails to really make a connection with the viewer even on the basic rape/revenge level usually favoured in films like this, and as a crime story, it just plain doesn’t work.

Having infiltrated the gang’s hideout and proved her ability as a fearless killer by promptly filleting their sole female member after a botched lesbian rape attempt, why does Rei not only let the rest of them live, but actually collaborate with their plans and give them advice, meekly putting up with them as they turn against her, torture and brutally rape her, then drag her halfway across the country on the run from the cops, as they perpetrate further outrages against innocent civilians…? Why only THEN – in far less salubrious circumstances – does she finally get around to dealing with them..? Because otherwise the story would only have stretched to about forty minutes, presumably. With all tension and narrative drive thus diffused, and with no particular goal to be achieved or point to be made, the film basically just descends (or ascends, depending on your point of view) into a senseless parade of increasingly exaggerated mayhem.

And it pains me to say this, but Miki Sugimoto’s performance scarcely helps matters either. She’s a fantastic presence in a lot of girl-gang focused pinky violence flicks, but here, carrying the whole movie without an ensemble cast to back her up, she just seems a bit out of her depth. Whereas Meiko Kaji saw through the various abuses her character suffers in the ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ films with a look of burning hatred in her eyes, Sugimoto seems unable to move beyond her default expression of vague dissatisfaction, meaning that her character seems to shrug off gang-rape and torture with an attitude of ‘whatever, all part of the job’, re-emerging five minutes later looking completely unscathed. Maybe that’s just the nature of the Zero Woman character, or maybe I’m just mistakenly applying Western sensibilities about such things, but still… not really a nice message to leave people with, y’know?

Not that ‘a nice message’ is something anyone but me would be stupid enough to expect from a movie as thoroughly fucked in the head as ‘Red Handcuffs’, mind you. And with that in mind, I don’t want to do a total burn on the film, because as a pure, visceral experience it’s still pretty damn impressive. Realised with a kind of fast-moving, shot-from-the-hip stylistic flair, and with characteristically brilliant Toei photography still strongly in evidence (if only more Western b-movies from 1974 looked half this good..), the closing car chase / gun battle sequence packs an incredible punch, utilising dutch angles, freeze frames, montage cutting, beserk stunt work and absolutely ridiculous quantities of gore to ensure that, as a piece of low budget action cinema, the last few reels just plain kick ass.

And, horrible, one dimensional characters though they might be, the criminal gang certainly pull their weight as all-purpose avatars of cinematic destruction, fucking, killing or blowing up everything in their path in about ten seconds flat as they plough on relentlessly toward a suicidal showdown with the police. Gang leader Nakahara – I’m not 100% sure on the actor who plays him, but he looks pretty familiar - totally steals the show, his descent into foaming-at-the-mouth homicidal mania played to such comical extremes that he makes Tomas Milian’s equivalent character in ‘Almost Human’ look like a refined man of letters by comparison. The taciturn bad-ass second in command guy – mirror shades, denim cap, evil grin – is great too, spending the first half of the movie whittling female figures out of wood with his hunting knife, and most of the second half holding it to the throat of the kidnap victim as he pumps her full of dope, occasionally pausing to reiterate the fact that he don’t trust no one.

Searching in vain for a bit of depth amid all this mess, there is at least a touch of the same criticism of post-war Western cultural imperialism that can be found in films like Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter in evidence in 'Red Handcuffs'. Fleeing to that ubiquitous Japanese movie showdown location, the abandoned US navel base, the gang promptly piss all over an American ‘Urination Prohibited’ sign and invade the privacy of some Japanese people who seem to be living in a American style suburban home, reciting stilted English dialogue for a production of ‘Romeo & Juliet’.

During the finale, Nakahara – a Japanese/American half-breed – is even presented to some extent as the tragic result of cultural miscegenation. “My mother was a prostitute here..”, he remarks to nobody in particular as he cowers in the ruins of the US base, a brief photo montage seeking to show us how his troubled, rootless upbringing inevitably led him to a life of sociopathic criminality. But such blunt commentary seems pretty crass compared to the more complex treatment given to East/West co-dependence in some of the better pinky violence films, and as an attempt to try to invest ‘Red Handcuffs’ with some sort of a point, it’s too little too late.

One has to admire the technical skill, crazed audacity and sheer unrelenting nastiness of ‘Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs’, and if pure, unfiltered exploitation is your bag you’ll probably dig the hell out of it. But, like the psychopathic characters it portrays, there’s an emptiness at the heart of the film that’s cold, man, real cold, and I didn’t really go for that.

Mp3> Closing Theme (Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs)