Nippon Horrors / Horror Express 2020 #10: Kaidan Hebi-Onna /‘Snake Woman's Curse’ (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1968)

 A decade or so after he turned out a series of fairly wacky horror pictures like Ghost Cat Mansion and The Lady Vampire for Shintoho, Nobuo Nakagawa - who had largely retired from directing after directly contributing to the bankruptcy of the aforementioned studio with his 1960 epic ‘Jigoku’ [‘Hell’] - returned to the fray for this considerably more conventional kaidan effort, produced under the unlikely auspices of Toei.

I say ‘unlikely’, because, although they soon would soon go on to cut a bloody swathe across the early ‘70s with some of the most grotesquely violent and OTT genre movies ever made, supernatural horror was never really Toei’s ‘thing’, leaving Kaidan Hebi-Onna [‘Snake Woman’s Curse’] feeling like a bit of a curious one-off.

According to what little background info I can find on the film, the production seems to have originated with writer Fumio Kônami, who apparently told the producers that he would only allow the studio to film his script if Nakagawa (who had not worked in the industry for about five years at this point) was hired to direct. (1)Apparently keen to try to establish a viable kaidan/horror line at the time, Toei acquiesced to the writer’s request, and…. bob’s yr uncle, as we say over on this side of the globe. (2)

Plot-wise, ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ is in most respects a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill kaidan picture - essentially a variation on the old bakeneko (ghost-cat) story, in which a wronged woman returns from the grave with the help of an animal spirit to take her vengeance on the hateful aristocrats who have destroyed her family, only with snakes used as the totem animal this time around instead of cats.

Set (and presumably filmed) somewhere in Japan’s remote far western region, the story opens with an elderly peasant farmer (the ubiquitous Ko Nishimura), practically throwing himself under the wheels of the local landlord’s coach, as he begs for leniency vis-à-vis the repayment of his debts. Needless to say, such mercy is not forthcoming from the venal plutocrat (Seizaburô Kawazu), but, on his death-bed, the farmer is still pleading deliriously for the chance to save his family’s small-holding, uttering the key phrase which will go on to become something of a catch-phrase for the film’s spectral avengers: “even if I have to eat dirt, I will pay you back”.

After the man’s death, the landlord decrees that his homestead will be demolished in order to clear space for the planting of mulberry trees (used in the production of silk), whilst his wife (Chiaki Tsukioka) and adult daughter (Asa, played by Yukiko Kuwahara) are cheerfully informed that they will be taken into service in the landlord’s household, there to ‘work off’ their late patriarch’s debts.

As you might imagine, this is far from an idyllic prospect for the two women. Set to work weaving silk in what basically amounts to a small scale Victorian sweatshop, Asa must work sixteen hour days under the supervision of the landlord’s thuggish, lecherous son (Toei yakuza/action regular and future Roman Porno director Shingo Yamashiro), whilst her mother meanwhile becomes a general domestic dogsbody, bullied and belittled at every turn by the landlord’s sadistic wife (Kurosawa regular and future ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ / ‘Sex & Fury’ legend Akemi Negishi).

Although their fellow servants treat them with kindness, and although Asa still has steadfast fiancée Satematsu (Kunio Murai) waiting for her on the outside, the inhumane treatment doled out to the two women leads them, inevitably, to their sad and undignified deaths. Asa’s mother, significantly, has always made a habit of habit of helping unloved animals (she was nursing a pigeon back to health when the family lost their home), and she is struck down whilst attempting the prevent the killing of a snake which has intruded into the landlord’s house.

As anyone who knows the ‘rules’ of this genre will be well aware by this point, the Big Man and his horrid family had better watch the hell out, as Nakagawa and his crew prepare to get busy with the thunder crashes, gel lighting, stage blood, green-faced living corpses and double-exposed snake effects, for the riotous closing act of vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave.

To Western audiences, these films often play more like ritual re-enactments of familiar folk tales than exercises in contemporary story-telling, which perhaps to some extent accounts for their failure to gain much of an overseas following, as the lack of novelty within their narratives can soon become pretty dispiriting. Once you’ve seen a handful of ‘em, you’ll know exactly how things are going to play out, right from the outset. The only interest comes from seeing how efficiently the filmmakers will accomplish their task, in technical and dramatic terms.

For domestic audiences however, we must assume this would not have been so much of a problem. More accepting of the traditions behind the bakeneko form, and more able to appreciate the more subtle cultural resonances within it, one hopes they would have been able to view each addition to the cycle with fresh eyes. 

(By way of comparison, we can perhaps imagine how a viewer largely unfamiliar with American culture would feel after being sat down and told to watch 25 early ‘80s slasher films. We might love them all for their minor eccentricities and variation on the theme, but to the uninitiated, aren’t they all kind of the same, more or less?)

In some ways, ‘Snake Woman’s Curse’ feels like a case in point in this regard. As eye-rollingly over-familiar as the basic storyline may be, look deeper and some very specific points of departure from the norm begin to emerge. For a start, the film is set during the Meiji era (1868-1912), a time of dramatic change and modernisation for Japan, immediately differentiating it from the more historically static Edo or Tokugawa eras in which kaidan stories more traditionally take place.

Again, domestic audiences would likely have been keyed into this right from the start, as the landlord is seen roaring through his domain in a Western-style coach, whilst his son sports a bowler hat and other foreign accoutrements. The mechanised ‘sweat-shop’ in which Asa is put to work likewise represents a form of industry unknown in pre-Meiji Japan, but whilst the the adoption of these innovations by the film’s villainous aristocrats would seem to indicate an implicit support for the older, folk-based way of life favoured by the hard-done-by peasants, the approach taken by Kônami’s script is, as usual, a little more nuanced than that.

The ambiguous attitude to modernisation and/or Westernisation so frequently encountered in early ‘70s Japanese genre cinema is perfectly encapsulated here via a memorable one scene cameo from Tetsurô Tanba, playing a regional police chief dispatched to investigate the murderous goings on within the landlord’s domain.

Effectively acting as the very personification of modern, democratic state governance, Tanba reduces the landlord to a fit of spluttering disbelief as he calmly undercuts the local lord’s Shogunate-derived feudal authority, daring to suggest that the police may wish to investigate the death of one of his peasants, and that he might even dare to implicate members of the aristocrat’s own family in the process - an absolutely unthinkable prospect for a man born into the strict caste system of the Tokugawa era, and an amusing demonstration of that the way that, however keen the ruling classes may have been to enrich themselves using technological innovations offered by contact with Western capitalism, their understanding of the social and political implications of such development tended to lack somewhat behind.

As you will no doubt have gathered from the preceding paragraphs, ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ is about as politically conscious a kaidan pictures as you could possibly hope to find, taking the age old fantasy of the rural peasantry exacting revenge against their cruel feudal overlords baked into all bakeneko stories, and hammering it home for strongly than ever, applying it to a more nuanced, more realistic and more historically recent setting in the process.

Some might be apt to suggest that the film’s success as a horror movie suffers as a result of this heavy emphasis on socio-economic angst, and indeed Nakagawa’s pacing here is glacially slow, whilst the atmosphere he builds is painstakingly sombre. The inevitable horror ‘effects’ which dominate the final act meanwhile, whilst inventive and fun, are strictly conventional within the genre.

So, we’re definitely not looking at a Friday night horror banger here I’m afraid, but, if you can approach the film in an appropriately sober, arthouse-y frame of mind, Nakagawa’s execution at least is absolutely top notch. Performances are excellent across the board (in addition to the aforementioned esteemed actors, there are also turns from such Toei notables as Yukie Kagawa and Hideo Murota), whilst Yoshikazu Yamazawa’s photography, highlighting the fertile-yet-foreboding topography of Japan’s mountainous Western coast, is beautiful, radiating an overpowering brown n’ green aura which seems to link the earth where the snakes crawl directly to the hallowed afterlife from whence the spectres emerge.

Shunsuke Kikuchi’s score meanwhile is richly evocative, and the carefully wrought production design includes a wealth of great “folky stuff” (songs, costumes, local festival customs) for Japanophiles to enjoy. Most importantly perhaps, Nakagawa manages to imbue the script’s off-the-peg structure with a handful of genuinely haunting, transcendental images which will live long in the viewer’s memory after viewing.

Born in 1905, the director was sixty-three years old as the time of this film’s production, and it would be all too easy to interpret the slower, more meditative direction Nakagawa takes here as the work of a filmmaker trying to establish himself as a more ‘serious’ voice in cinema during the twilight years of his career, after half a lifetime spent churning out rushed 60 minute programmers and battling the studios for budgets.

Unfortunately for us reviewers’ desperate need to try to impose a narrative onto everything however, Nakagawa rather kicked this idea in the nuts by immediately going on to make a brief but prolific comeback as a commercial director in 1969, directing five action/yakuza pictures for Toei in quick succession before, curiously, adopting the pseudonym “Ise Tsugio” in order to make what I presume to be a series of obscure, independently distributed pinku (erotic) titles (ubiquitous S&M / rope torture guru Oniroku Dan is credited as writer on at least one of them). All of these hit cinemas before the year was out, with the director’s anonymity surely somewhat undermined by the fact that they were all proudly produced by his own ‘Nakagawa Pro’.

So, once again, we return to the idea of ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ seeming like a real one-off - an odd, inexplicable diversion in the paths followed by its director, writer and studio. It is what it is, I suppose - but thankfully for those with an interest in this particular overlooked corner of Japanese culture, what it is is very worthwhile indeed.

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(1) An absolutely pivotal figure in the golden age of Toei exploitation, Kônami (1933-2012) went on to contribute to a huge number of the studio’s best and/or most outrageous films from the early ‘70s, including the entire ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ series, Sonny Chiba’s Yakuza Deka movies, the extraordinary Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope, the horrifying Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs and Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Sympathy for the Underdog’ and ‘Graveyard of Honour’, to name but a few. 

(2) CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE DEPT: All background info on the production of this film is taken directly from Jonathan M. Hall’s well-researched commentary track on the 2007 Synapse DVD release.

Nippon Horrors: Horrors of Malformed Men (Teruo Ishii, 1969)

Although it has achieved a certain level of cult notoriety in the West following its release on American DVD, Teruo Ishii’s ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’ remains largely unseen in its country of origin. Surprisingly, it is effectively banned in Japan to this day, with no officially sanctioned screenings or releases on the horizon.

From a foreigner’s point of view, the film’s continued suppression seems slightly mystifying, but most likely it all stems from the use of the taboo word kikei (translated as ‘malformed’) in the title. Direct reference to physical disability has always been a big no-no in polite Japanese society, and this word - perhaps roughly equating to something like ‘schizo’ or ‘spastic’ in English but with more of a sweary connotation - was considered extremely distasteful when used on a movie poster, particularly in conjunction with a storyline that touches on the idea of disabled people taking their revenge against the able-bodied world.

Presumably, such potentially offensive material made distributors reluctant to handle the film, and the ensuing negative publicity caused Eiran, the usually fairly relaxed Japanese censorship board, to single out ‘..Malformed Men’ for special attention, making it a hot potato somewhat along the lines of ‘The Devils’ or ‘Straw Dogs’. Quite how Toei (the studio who produced the film) reacted to this controversy, I’m unsure, but perhaps they simply chose to bury the damn thing forever, too resentful to bother opening old wounds again, in spite of the growing demand from cult movie aficionados for the film to be seen.

Anyway, regardless of the exact details, you’ll appreciate that I was pretty apprehensive about the idea of sitting down to watch a film that caused such consternation in a land that happily accepts the excesses of Norifumi Suzuki and Takashi Miike (not to mention those of Ishii himself, who came to ‘..Malformed Men’ off the back of such hits as ‘Inferno of Torture’ and ‘Orgies of Edo’). Believe it or not, I’m not usually someone who much enjoys excessively gruelling or icky cinema, and all signs pointed towards this one being a singularly grim experience. But nonetheless, reviews I’d read sounded intriguing, images I’d seen from the film looked fascinating, and it certainly seems to hold an exalted position within the pantheon of Japanese cinematic weirdness. And, well, y’know - no obscure movie fan ever gained anything by NOT watching a film, right? Taking a deep breath and preparing for whatever morbid insanity you’re about to witness is all part of the fun.

And to be honest, the first feeling that hit me once I settled into the flow of ‘..Malformed Men’ was one of happy relief. Whilst admittedly still stuffed with enough warped behaviour to keep a convention of mental health professionals busy for weeks, Ishii’s film is nonetheless a lot more fun than I had been anticipating – a colourful and vibrant work that often seems closer in spirit to the cracked surrealism of early 20th century pulp fiction than to the bleak travails of modern day Endurance Horror.

One of those movies that throws together so many different strands that trying to tie them all together in a few paragraphs is liable to leave one pretty breathless, ‘..Malformed Men’s pleasantly pulpy atmosphere is far from accidental when viewed in the light of a storyline that fuses a particularly disturbing variation on H.G. Wells’ ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ with a mish-mash of additional ideas taken from the writing of celebrated mystery writer Edogawa Rampo. And you guys all know what’s up with celebrated mystery writer Edogawa Rampo, right..?

Well, ok - time for another deep breath. A hugely popular figure in Japanese culture, Rampo – real name Tarō Hirai - began writing in the 1920s, taking his cue from Western weird tales and detective fiction, and in particular that certain, peculiar combination of the two perfected by Edgar Allan Poe (just try saying his pen-name out loud with a Japanese accent). Rather than simply rehashing the work of his inspirations though, Rampo refashioned the form in uniquely Japanese style, adding strong elements of the perverse and erotic imagery that fascinated him in his private life to create a new sub-genre of horror/mystery fiction, the ubiquitous ‘ero-guro-nansenso’ (yes, that’s ‘EROTIC GROTESQUE NONSENSE’ to the likes of us), that has gone on to exert an influence upon just about all subsequent horror-themed films and manga in Japan.

I’ve not yet had the pleasure of reading Rampo’s work in translation, but I can easily believe that watching the opening half hour of ‘..Malformed Men’ gives a pretty good idea of what being thoroughly immersed in the world of ‘ero-guro-nansenso’ might be like, as a succession of bizarre and seemingly inexplicable incidents pile up at dizzying speed, pulling us into a macabre web of mystery, and establishing a pulpy atmosphere that Ishii cannily proceeds to cross-breed with a heavy dose of the kind of confrontational experimentalism that makes Japanese culture from the late ‘60s such a consistently wild ride, resulting in a cinematic experience that is, well… unique, to say the least.

Unsettling right from its opening seconds, ‘..Malformed Men’s credits sequence sees composer Hajime Kaburagi offering up a unholy mess of doomed choral bombast and crashing industrial noise, accompanying close-up nature footage of assorted poisonous spiders, broken up by bright blocks of primary colour. Following this, the first shot of the movie proper gives us a screen full of darkness and a deranged female shriek, before our gaze moves down across an unhinged woman’s face and a mighty pair of bare breasts, coming to rest on the blade of a nasty-looking dagger raised in her hands. As the camera pulls back, we find a lone male, trapped in a poorly lit prison cell, surrounded by a crowd of apparently insane women in torn red kimonos who cavort around him in uncoordinated and generally menacing fashion, drooling, cackling and writhing in erotic oblivion as they caress the bars of the cell and torment their male prisoner, the camera  leering at their distressed bodies in a decidedly distasteful manner. If there’s a more comprehensively ‘ero-guro’ way to begin a movie than this, I’d like to see it.

After a few minutes of this sort of thing, a doctor enters, calming the women down with a few blows from his bull-whip, and we learn that we are actually inside an extremely poorly organised lunatic asylum, where Hitomi (Teruo Yoshida), a former medical student and current inmate, has awakened to find himself mistakenly locked in the women’s cell. The doctor returns him to his appointed cell, but this does little to improve his state of mind. You see, Hitomi has completely lost his memory, and has no recollection of how he arrived at his current predicament. The only clues he can dredge up from the recesses of his mind are images of a rocky coastline, upon which a horrifying, androgynous figure dances, and the melody of a particularly haunting children’s nursery rhyme. Furthermore, a sinister bald man in the opposite cell seems intent on trying to assassinate him, which scarcely helps matters.

When the bald man attacks him during the night, Hitomi ends up killing his assailant in self-defence, and in the ensuing confusion manages to flee the asylum. Whilst making his getaway, he encounters a young female circus performer who seems to be humming the lullaby he remembers from his dream. Accosting the girl, Hitomi learns that she is an orphan, adopted by the circus with no memories of her childhood, but that she thinks the melody originates in a village somewhere along Japan’s Western coast. The pair meet again later, at the circus, but as the girl begins to tell Hitomi more about where she learned the song, she is struck down by a flying dagger. Seeing the bloody knife in Hitomi’s hands, the crowd assume him to be the murderer, and he’s on the run again.

And so things go on. Before long, Hitomi discovers that a man with an identical face to his own and an identical scar of his foot, an heir to the wealthy Kimodo family, has recently died. The dead man’s father, a somewhat feared and eccentric character rumoured to possess deformed, webbed hands, has apparently not been seen since he set sail for his private island, a rocky outcrop dimly visible from the mainland, announcing his intention to turn it into some sort of “pleasure island”. A spot of grave-robbing, a faked suicide and a surprise ‘resurrection’ later, and Hitomi has taken on the identity of the dead man and finds himself being alternately seduced by both his doppelganger’s wife Chioko, and his mistress Shizuko (Yukie Kagawa, whom we last saw making her mark on the pinky violence genre in Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack).

At this point, the film briefly threatens to become rather conventional, as the tale of Hitomi trying not to slip up as he impersonates his dead doppelganger rambles on to no great effect. But after Chioko is mysteriously poisoned, and Shizuko subjected to threatening notes and poisonous snake attacks, our hero(?) once again finds himself determined to unravel the mystery of precisely what in the hell in going on… and all clues point toward that mysterious island, where his “father”, the enigmatic Jagoro Kimodo (Tatsumi Hijikata), holds court.

If there is one image in ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’ that viewers will never forget, it is that of Jagoro himself – stick-thin, long-haired, Rasputin-eyed – performing his near-inhuman dance of torment amid the crashing waves and jagged rocks of his island shore. The word ‘extraordinary’ scarcely does justice to this character’s physical presence, and, though I was surprised to find such a notable high-brow personage appearing in a disreputable exploitation film, it still made perfect sense when I hit up Wikipedia and discovered that Hijikata (who also appeared the following year in Ishii’s excellent ‘Blind Woman’s Curse’) was actually a Big Figure in the world of post-war Japanese art - the founder of the Butoh school of dance and performance art, no less.

One of the main themes explored by Hijikata’s dance performances is said to have been “the transmutation of the human body into other forms, such as those of animals”, and, as it turns out, that is a project that his character in ‘..Malformed Men’ has been undertaking in a somewhat more direct fashion, as Ishii proceeds to build Jagoro up into a truly terrifying villain – a sort of unholy amalgam of Dr. Moreau, Fu Manchu and Charles Manson, bent on wreaking cathartic destruction upon both the norms of the human body and those of the world in general, which he sees as having ‘wronged’ him and his deformed ‘people’.

As Hitomi and Shizuko arrive upon the island, greeted by Jagoro as heirs to his insane legacy, the film explodes into a kind of kaleidoscopic oblivion worthy of Alexandro Jodorowsky at his most unglued, as Ishii’s taste for cinematic grotesquery and the choreography and design of Hijikata and his fellow Butoh practitioners combine to summon up a harrowing circus of impossible, Heironymous Bosch-esque delights, in a series of  short sequences upon which the film’s reputation as a world class freak-out presumably rests.(1)

“Let me show you my ideal world”, says Jagoro. As if on cue, an army of slender, long haired figures, naked but for chains and red capes, crest the hilltop, headbanging on all fours like some otherworldly Slayer crowd, as whip-wielding hunchbacks goad them on. On the waters of a river beside a sylvan forest grove, a silver skinned woman sits legs spread on the prow of a boat, juggling flaming torches beside an artificial tree of bird cages. Covered in blood and sand, another naked girl writhes, apparently surgically attached to the rear end of a goat. Huge fires rage as more naked, chalk-covered women writhe in eerie silence… and that’s all before we hit the island’s mylar-sheeting bedecked psychedelic nightclub, to say nothing of the Bava-esque gel lit operating theatre…

Needless to say, once the narrative regains some ragged semblance of normality, there is a wealth of dark and dreadful family secrets to be revealed through the remainder of the film, acts of awful vengeance and twisted reconciliation to be enacted… but, out of respect for the spirit of mystery, I will leave you in the dark about these for the time being.

By this point this is going to sound like a fairly redundant observation, but ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’ is a pretty strange business. In its top-heavy piling of mystery upon mystery, it reminded me a little of Kim Ki-Young’s extraordinary A Woman After a Killer Butterfly. But unlike that carefully controlled venture into labyrinthine gothic melodrama, Ishii’s film has a crazed and rather uneven feel to it. Whilst some sequences are bold and unforgettable, others are shoddy and unconvincing, betraying either an extremely stretched budget/production schedule or a variable level of engagement from the director (in reality a little of both, most likely), often attempting to save the day with ‘shock’ visuals that come across as cheap and prurient, undercutting the film’s stronger, more affecting, moments.

In its attempt to cram as many Rampo stories as possible into a single storyline, the narrative also becomes frustratingly digressive and episodic, failing to capitalise on many of its best ideas and refusing to let any of the characters (save maybe Jagoro) develop any personality beyond a cardboard cut-out level, meaning that, despite grasping at a grand emotional sweep for its suitably bizarre conclusion, it never really manages to transcend its origins as a gory comic book potboiler.

But since when did the weirdo horror warriors amongst us care about that sort of thing, right? Some films invite praise for their perfect conception and realisation, but everyone involved in this one hopefully realised they were competing in a different arena entirely. On a purely visceral level, ‘..Malformed Men’ is as imaginative, repulsive and rich in cognitive dissonance as the contemporary films of Koji Wakamatsu, and as feverishly unpleasant as the later works of directors like Kazuo Komizu.(2) A singular experience, whichever way you look at it, and as perfect an expression of the dictats of the ero-guro-nonsenso philosophy as one could possibly wish for.

(1) For what it’s worth, I think the inevitable influence of Erle C. Kenton’s ‘Island of Lost Souls’ can be felt heavily here too, from minor details such as the cave the visitors walk through en route to the rest of the island, to the disturbingly crude make-up effects used to realise the ‘malformed men’ and the incongruous jungle noises and animal calls that often dominate the soundtrack. I think it says a lot for the 1932 film that, in spite of ‘..Malformed Men’s myriad excesses, it is arguably still the more upsetting of the two.

(2) See Komizu’s ‘Entrails of a Virgin’ (1986) for a particularly mean-spirited cinematic kick to the face.

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