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Posted on 11.28.05 by David @ 7:53 am
Country and Year: Japan (1971-73) Review By: David Austin
The Pinky Violence Collection is a fantastic entry-point to a genre that, until very recently, was almost completely inaccessible to the Western viewer. In the 1970s, facing stiff competition from television, the Japanese film industry fought back by providing viewers with what television couldn’t – excessive sex and violence. Nikkatsu started with its Roman-Porno line of bizarre soft-core films, and Toei, in response, chose to follow a more action-oriented route. The resulting Pinky Violence films featured female heroines, and unprecedented levels of on-screen sex and violence. The closest parallel would be the blaxploitation films of the U.S., which created a similarly heady mix of eroticism, action, and social justice. Similarly, the Pinky Violence films blur the line between empowerment and exploitation. Just as blaxploitation films were among the first to star strong African-American protagonists but simultaneously traded in the crudest stereotypes possible, the Pinky Violence films depicted strong, independent female characters, while subjecting them to intensely degrading situations, and filling the screen with gratuitous nudity.
Panik House has selected four different movies from four different series, in an attempt to present the cream of Toei’s crop. The films are Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess, Girl Boss Guerrilla, Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom, and Criminal Woman: Killing Melody. All share certain characteristics – a gang of tough outlaw girls, who have only their camaraderie and their fists (knives, grenades) to protect them from a harsh male world of gangsters and officials. Within the confines of that basic premise, the four films run the gamut from biker gang roughies, to schoolgirl sadism, to revenge sagas. They also vary in tone from the relatively light-hearted and more traditional DGB, to the absolutely vicious TGHS, to the brutal but slapstick-filled GBG. The sleaze factor is considerable, though not overwhelming, ranging from the somewhat chaste DGB to soft-core content in TGHS, and most films feature an underlying S&M theme (which will come as no surprise to frequent viewers of Japanese genre cinema). Following is my comprehensive review of the set and all four movies included in it.
Before October, the only legitimate Region 1 options for this type of film were Meiko Kaji films: Shunya Ito’s maniacal Female Convict #701: Scorpion, his follow-up surrealist masterpiece, Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, the two Lady Snowblood films, and the goofy Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter. The anything-goes flavor of Japanese 1970s film industry can also be sampled in numerous Kinji Fukasaku yakuza films and Sonny Chiba vehicles released by Home Vision and Adness (of which Battles Without Honor and Humanity and Street Mobster are the best, and should be considered essential viewing). However, the last several months have seen a new accessibility of Pinky Violence films as new-kids-on-the-block Panik House and Discotek have emerged to feed the growing appetite for the genre. Panik House led off with the two Elder Sister period pieces, Sex and Fury and Female Yakuza Tale, both featuring Reiko Ike. Discotek has since followed up with the ultraviolent, gritty Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs starring Miki Sugimoto. Now, with Panik House’s Pinky Violence Collection, the floodgates have opened.
With this new set, Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto finally get their due. Along with Reiko Oshida, they dominated Toei’s bad girl cinema and starred in countless numbers of these films, often playing opposite each other. Reiko Ike often played a slightly older character, a figure with some gravitas and power. She has a sweet face, but usually a dark sad secret behind it. Ike is more beautiful than Sugimoto, but in a classic way that I think works better in her period Elder Sister films. Sugimoto on the other hand, is less conventionally attractive but channels an intensity and anger that Ike can’t match. Her strong, silent characters usually embrace the wild life, and she always seems more at home in the violent scenarios conjured by the films than Ike does. Three of these films feature both actresses, usually as rivals playing off their real-life competition. Reiko Oshida, featured only in Delinquent Girl Boss, gives off a different kind of energy altogether. Cute instead of sexy, cheery instead of brooding, and positive instead of negative, she is more of a charmer than a bombshell or a bad girl, and harks back to an earlier, more innocent age (it is no coincidence that she is the only one of the three not required to spend copious amounts of screen time in the buff).
In addition to the three protagonists, several other character actors make frequent appearances. Tsunehiko Watase plays a tough guy with a heart of gold, one of the rare positive male figures in the films. Nobuo Kaneko (the smarmy, oleaginous Boss Yamamori in the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series) stays true-to-form, playing a succession of sleazy, villainous authority figures. Yumiko Katayama (Horror of Malformed Men) and Yukie Kagawa also play members of the girl groups, but with a sadder, softer touch. Panik House has done a tremendous job on this release, from the packaging, to the extras, to the selection of films. While the movies are not all of the same quality, all are entertaining and the variations on the basic theme add interest. Our reviews of similar films may be found here: —————————————————————————————————- Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess Rating: 3 out of 4 stars (good)
Worthless to Confess is the fourth and final film in the Delinquent Girl Boss series starring Reiko Oshida. This film follows the misadventures of a group of delinquent girls after they are released from reform school. DGB is simultaneously the most innocent of the four films comprising the Pinky Violence Collection, and also the most traditional. Viewers familiar with the conventions of the older ninkyo, or chivalry, yakuza films will recognize many of the conventions of the genre. While the characters in Girl Boss Guerrilla and Terrifying Girls’ High School are forces of anarchy with little room for sentimentality, the girls of DGB are fundamentally good people, just looking for a place in society. Their allegiance to each other is a unifying bond, not a destructive one. Of course, in traditional ninkyo eiga fashion, their code will ultimately force them to commit violence in order to uphold honor and avenge those they love. Our protagonist is Rika, the leader of the delinquent gang, played by Reiko Oshida. This is the only Reiko Oshida film included in the set, and definitely leaves one hungry for more. Oshida’s persona is significantly more girlish and cheerful than the characters played by Sugimoto and Ike, though just as tough. Rika is a happy, wholesome, well-adjusted girl. She’s not out to cause trouble, and she goes out of her way to help everybody she comes across. Oshida’s 10-megawatt smile really helps the compassion and charm shine through her tough girl exterior.
When the film begins, Rika and her gang are still in reform school (a great early scene pays homage to a legend of the ninkyo genre, Ken Takakura, when the girls riot after prudish officials cancel the showing of one of his Abashiri Prison yakuza films). After leaving the school, Rika goes to work for the kindly Muraki (Junzaburo Ban), the father of a girl she knows from reform school. Muraki runs a mechanic’s shop in Shinjuku (an extremely fun neighborhood in Tokyo known for yakuza and electronics, among other things) along with his comic-relief assistant Makao, and is happy to give orphan Rika a home, a job, and a chance to make something of herself. Unfortunately, Muraki’s daughter Midori (spitfire Yumiko Katayama) is an angry rebel with a yakuza gambler boyfriend. Midori and her boyfriend put her father into debt with the local yakuza clan, headed by greedy Boss Ohya (Nobuo Kaneko). Meanwhile, Rika’s other friends, Yuki, Senmitsu and Choko, are also trying to adjust to their new lives working as waitresses and hostesses at the Ginza Girls club, while pregnant Mari (Yukie Kagawa) puts in time as a nude model in a sleazy set-up in order to support her tubercular yakuza husband Arai (Ichiro Nakatani). Everything is going great for Rika, who loves her job and is being courted by Arai’s brother, truck driver Ryuji (Tsunehiko Watase), but when she tries to intervene with Midori and the Ohya Gang on behalf of Muraki, things spin out of control. Eventually, Rika, her friends, and a repentant Midori have no choice but to don their bright-red rain-slickers and carve up the Ohya gang in an outrageous display of violence.
DGB is definitely a more chaste and traditional film than the others in the set. The sleaze factor is very low – aside from a few leering shots, DGB has no more sex and nudity than the average Fukasaku or Seijun Suzuki film, and sexualized violence is almost non-existent. Anything else would be inconsistent with the tone of the film, and compromise the essential innocence of Oshida’s character. The picture maintains a bright and colorful atmosphere, from the butterfly-winged go-go dancers and musical number at the Ginza Girls club to Oshida’s cute “Love” t-shirt and leather shorts get-up. The music is a peppy hybrid of standard Japanese background and Spaghetti Western inflections. Of course, were it not for the absolutely over-the-top finale, DGB might be a little disappointing for those expecting out-and-out craziness. DGB definitely delivers in the end. Clearly inspired by Seijun Suzuki’s Tattooed Killer, director Kazuhika Yamaguchi leads the girls on a kill-crazy sword-wielding rampage through a series of brightly-colored mod sets, and films the action with colored gels, and upwards through a see-through floor. I’ve seen far more than my fair share of this type of “few against many” swordfight finales in Japanese films, and this ranks as one of the most enjoyable. —————————————————————————————————- Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom Rating: 4 out of 4 stars (great)
Lynch Law Classroom, the second film in the Terrifying Girls’ High School series, moves into very different territory than DGB from its opening shot. Without any context, the audience is dropped into a scene that would do any horror movie proud. A struggling terrified girl is trapped in a high school science laboratory by a group of sailor-suited girls with red surgical masks and gloves, wielding scalpels. They begin to fatally drain her of blood while director Suzuki films at skewed angles and intercuts the action with disturbing close-ups of stuffed animals from the lab (in a manner that evokes Norman Bates’s eerie taxidermy collection in Psycho), and long shots of other schoolgirls innocently studying and playing tennis. When the victim breaks free, she is pursued to the roof, attacked, and falls to her death. The entire scene is shot masterfully and raises the stakes for the rest of the film. As it turns out, her tormenters are the Disciplinary Committee, fascist enforcers for the cruel Assistant Principal Ishihara (Kenji Imai) who runs the School of Hope for troubled girls with an iron fist. Ishihara romances a rich teacher, conducts an affair with Yoko, leader of the Disciplinary Committee, dominates the weak-willed principal, and keeps the school’s founder, politician Shigeru Sato (Nobuo Kaneko), happy by supplying him with fresh, young girls. All goes according to plan, until three new students stir things up. Miki Sugimoto plays Noriko the Cross, a hard-as-nails gang leader out to discover the truth behind the murder and to bring down the power structure at the school. She is joined by urban cowboy Razor-Blade Remi (Misuzu Ota), and sleazy but cheerful Kyoko Kubo (Seiko Saburi), known as the “Sappho of Osaka” for soon-to-be-obvious reasons. Sugimoto is also assisted by a rival gang boss (Reiko Ike) and by Tsunehiko Watase, playing a blackmailing tabloid reporter who is happy to help the girls as long as it advances his own interests.
TGHS is a delightfully well-crafted, nasty, vicious little film. The schoolgirls are positively feral, and the atmosphere is poisonous. TGHS is also the most overtly political film in the series - equally attacking antiquated gender roles, politicians, and school authority figures. The delinquent girls are practically role models next to the people running the school and the government. Sex and violence in the set also reach a crescendo, with frequent nudity and vicious torture being common with the vast majority of the violence and unpleasantness taking place between the girls themselves (excepting the finale). Reiko Ike has a small but fun role as Sugimoto’s mysterious rival and counterpart. She challenges Sugimoto to a knife fight and only backs off because she respects that Sugimoto has to finish the investigation that she has started. Their relationship here mirrors their respectful rivalries in Criminal Woman and Girl Boss Guerrilla. While TGHS makes some missteps along the way, it surprisingly manages not only to match, but also to top, its excellent beginning. The film closes by evoking the student protests of the late ‘60s in an ambitiously conceived and wonderfully executed finale where Sugimoto and Ike lead a veritable army of schoolgirls against the forces of the state, represented by the school administration and an entire battalion of riot police. Students smash windows, light cars on fire, and defend barricades with hoses and kendo sticks, creating image after gorgeous image of anarchy and chaos, burning flags, and revolution.
The film’s main flaw is its gratuitously lengthy sex scenes, which drag on long enough to temporarily overshadow its other merits. It is too bad that such a great film also had to pander to studio requirements, but the anger, anarchic spirit, and flat-out artistic merit of TGHS more than make up for its weaknesses. The incredible opening and closing scenes alone are good enough to bump TGHS a notch above its fellow films. Norifumi Suzuki (School of the Holy Beast, Sex and Fury) may have an unfortunate tendency towards sloppiness and sleaze, but he also clearly has a great artistic ability. TGHS is a minor masterpiece of the genre. For those fans following Suzuki’s obsession with Christian imagery, TGHS’s Noriko, the Boss with the Cross, carries a prominently displayed crucifix. —————————————————————————————————- Girl Boss Guerrilla Rating: 2 out of 4 stars (average)
Girl Boss Guerrilla is the weakest of the four movies for two reasons – an unfocused, meandering plot, and a surfeit of irritating slapstick and gross-out comedy. Moreover, director Norifumi Suzuki, with a few exceptions, skimps on his usual artistic flourishes. Despite these flaws, Miki Sugimoto turns in her best performance yet, as her character is given a bit more depth and range than in the past, and the action is by and large up to par with the rest of the Pinky Violence films. GBG starts with the revving of engines, and moves straight into Easy Rider territory. Sachiko (Miki Sugimoto) and her Shinjuku Red Helmet motorcycle gang from Tokyo cruise into Kyoto looking for trouble. After roughing up a horny local male bosozoku motorcycle gang, they run into the local girl gangs, who aren’t interested in sharing their turf with out-of-towners. When they best local leader Rika in a one-on-one and she tries to renege on their deal , old boss Nami (Reiko Ike) steps in and enforces the code of honor. Now in control of the town, Sachiko must deal with a vengeful Rika and the local Tsutsui gang, who insist on their right to extort money from the girl gangs. The situation is complicated by the fact that one of the lead yakuza, Nakahara, is Nami’s estranged brother. Ultimately, Sachiko is a lot less interested in running Kyoto than she is in pursuing Ichiro, a lean, handsome boxer who attracts her attention when he helps her out of a jam. When Ichiro and his gym crew move to a hot spring resort town to train, Sachiko is happy to leave Kyoto to its own devices and road-trip down to join him. Unfortunately, the Tsutsui gang also has an interest in Ichiro, an interest which leads to tragic consequences and a grudge match between Sachiko, Nami, and the Tsutsui gang.
Miki Sugimoto is quite a sight in her black jumpsuit, red helmet, gloves and scarf. When confronted, she zips her jumpsuit straight down the front, revealing a tattooed breast that demonstrates her allegiance to the criminal life. Sugimoto also has a great knock-down, drag-out fight with Reiko Ike that ranges from the land into a river. However, it is in her scenes with Ichiro that we get to see a different side of Sugimoto, as she plays an aggressive, ferocious lover, serious but playful, and, for once, happy. The rest of her gang, Kyoto-native Yuki, English-speaking Linda, and slutty but well-meaning Ukko, are similarly entertaining, and their different styles and skills are well-exhibited in an early scene where the girls split up to earn some money. Unfortunately, Suzuki’s notoriously schizophrenic style really hurts this movie. Every now and then he pulls off a fantastic shot – for example, Reiko Ike’s first appearance is a stunner, using shocking blue tones and an extreme low angle shot to her standing atop an outdoor spiral staircase. Footage of the girls biking is also great, as Suzuki zooms in to extreme close-ups of the sunglass-wearing bikers looking about as cool as could be. On a few occasions, handheld camera is also used effectively, as during an extended circling close-up of lovers Sachiko and Ichiro. More often, though, Suzuki saddles us with lengthy scenes of atrocious slapstick and gross-out humor, as in an extended scene where the girls try to collect the … ahem … evidence of a Buddhist abbot’s illicit tryst, or Ukko’s contraction and passing-along of a nasty venereal disease. A new recruit for the gang - chunky, shaven-headed nun Okei - provides plenty of opportunity for low humor. There are also odd, sloppy touches, like a character who plays the guitar yet somehow produces the sounds of a piano! [For those Suzuki watchers out there keeping tabs on his obsession with Christian imagery, GBG also features a not-so-chaste priest being “defrocked” by one of the girls]. Also, unlike TGHS, GBG features sexual (as opposed to sexualized) violence, with scenes of the women being brutalized and assaulted by yakuza, which detract from the enjoyment of the film (kudos, by the way, to TGHS for having the closest thing possible to a tasteful rape scene - no nudity, quick cut-away, and clearly not intended to titillate - unlike what is on display in so many other Japanese and HK genre films). Girl Boss Guerrilla, the third film in the Girl Boss series, certainly has its moments, and Sugimoto is genuinely great (in fact, this is my favorite of her performances that I have seen). However, the film does not really come together, and does not achieve the level of the other three. —————————————————————————————————- Criminal Woman: Killing Melody Rating: 3 out of 4 stars (good)
Criminal Woman: Killing Melody is not a particularly original story, nor a complex story, but it is a good story told well. Criminal Woman is a combination of several premises – the revenge saga, the women-in-prison film, and the story of a middleman playing two gangs against each other to destroy both. We have seen the latter before, most notably in the classic Yojimbo, where Toshiro Mifune pretends to assist both sides while encouraging them to whittle each other away. The twist here is that the Mifune role is played by a gang of cute girls in mod outfits armed with grenades and rifles. Elements of Criminal Woman also evoke the more recent Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Reiko Ike plays the protagonist, Maki, a woman who lost her father and her honor to a rapacious yakuza gang led by Boss Oba (Ryoji Hayama). After a failed public attempt to slay him (in a topless go-go bar, naturally), Maki is thrown into prison. There she meets a group of outcasts and criminals who become her friends. The group includes wild Kaoru (Yumiko Katayama), who assaulted a deadbeat john, super cute and sunny Natsuko (Chiyoko Kazama), who injured a cop during a wild motorcycle chase, and pickpocket Yukie. She also meets, and clashes with, Masayo (Miki Sugimoto) a gangster’s moll who first challenges her to a deadly prison knife fight, but later grows to respect her.
When Maki leaves prison, she and her three friends hatch a scheme to play the Oba gang against Tetsu (Takeo Chii), the uncontrollable heir to the weaker Hamayasu gang. Tetsu, channeling Sonny Chiba’s memorable turn in the second Battles Without Honor and Humanity film, is an unruly thug who is all too happy to break the truce, especially when Maki starts supplying him with weapons she acquires through her connections at the local U.S. Army base. Eventually Maki and her gang must confront not only Boss Oba and his intense henchman Yabuki, who spits deadly globs of chewing gum(?!), but also Masayo who, unbeknownst to Maki, is Oba’s girl. Ike can’t be the living embodiment of rage and vengeance that is Meiko Kaji – she doesn’t have it in her. Recognizing that, she instead plays Maki as initially inexperienced, getting along on spirit and determination. Still, she does not suit the role as well as she did Inoshika Ocho in the Elder Sister series, and her accomplices often steal the spotlight, especially Katayama and the winsome Kazama.
The plot may be simple but it is laid out with style and pizzazz. Ike and her girls carry out their work in skin-tight leather, club gear and motorcycle gang chic. The battles between Ike and Sugimoto are catfights extraordinaire. Some unnecessary S&M scenes aside, the sleaze factor is high but not ridiculous (and this is one the few women-in-prison films ever to not feature at least one shower scene). There are also plenty of exciting action scenes, and Takeo Chii as Tetsu is a force of nature. Criminal Woman does not break any new ground, but it’s still a blast. —————————————————————————————————- Recommended? Panik House has put together one of the best DVD sets of the year. To fans of Japanese genre cinema, the Pinky Violence Collection will be essential viewing. Fans of gritty ‘70s exploitation and action might want to give it a try also. Be warned though, that with the exception of Delinquent Girl Boss, sexual content is quite strong (though these are definitely not pinku soft-core films primarily devoted to sexual scenes), and there is something in here to offend just about anyone.
If you like this, you might like: Female Convict Scorpion 1 + 2, Sex and Fury, Switchblade Sisters, Teenage Gang Debs, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, Battles Without Honor and Humanity, Street Mobster, The Wild Ones —————————————————————————————————- DVD DETAILS DVD Production Company: Panik House (www.panikhouse.com)
Panik House has provided one of the best genre DVD packages of the year, on par with Home Vision’s outstanding Battles Without Honor and Humanity collection, and Anchor Bay’s definitive Dawn of the Dead set. The set comes in an appealingly-garish hot pink puffy DVD book, graced with tough girl Reiko Oshida done up to the nines. It’s an innovative and attractive presentation that signals to the viewer that he or she is in for something out of the ordinary. The book features easy to access swing-open DVD holders, and a bound-in, lengthy, and informative booklet by American Cinematheque’s Chris D. with tons of background on the movies, the genre, and the actresses. The booklet includes detailed mini-reviews of the other films in the four featured series, which will whet your appetite for more. Also included is the previously-unobtainable Reiko Ike Sings! audio CD, and a “Pinky Violence” sticker reproducing the cover image of Reiko Oshida. Video quality is uniformly excellent. All four films come to Region 1 DVD in anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen with gorgeous restored picture and clear sound. English subtitles are optional. Each disc features similar extras specific to the film at hand, including original trailers, still and poster galleries, production notes by Chris D., and biographies for the directors and some of the actors and actresses. My only suggestion (and this applies equally to Panik House’s previous releases) is to make it possible for viewers to see the stills used as background for their biographies without obscuring text. Perhaps they could be added to the excellent still gallery on their company website, or included as a still reel on future releases.
Finally, each movie has an accompanying original full-length audio commentary. Chris D. provides his usual dry but informative commentaries on TGHS and DGB, invaluable as always for identifying the hard-to-recognize minor players. Andy Klein and Wade Major comment on Criminal Woman, and their commentary, while fast-paced, is limited by their lack of in-depth knowledge about the film. Finally Asian Cult Cinema’s Wyatt Doyle and Panik House President Matt Kennedy team up for GBG, though I cannot comment on the quality of the track due to an disc error which I am assured is only present on screener copies, and not on retail DVDs for sale to the public (hence the delay of the set’s release). Individual merits of the films, and appreciation of the genre aside, Panik House has done a tremendous job on this set. © David Austin Click here to buy the Pinky Violence DVD set from Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: Japan and DVD News and DVD News: Japan and DVD Reviews and DVD Reviews: Japan and Contributors: David and Rating: Average ★★ and Rating: Good ★★★ and Rating: Great ★★★★ and DVD Companies: Panik House Comments:
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just picked this collection up at a film convention in New Jersey Saturday. Haven’t had a chance to watch it yet; but, find all of the artwork and packaging intriquing. In curiousity… I found this great article and photos on the dvd. Almost wish the distributors of Pinky Violence had also included this article
inside the dvd set! Nice job to the author / photographic composition designers of this article! Can’t wait for the next compilation to
be released because of this article!
Comment by Edward Dimmer — October 30, 2006 @ 9:13 pm
Its Yumiko Katayama at her wildest.What’s become of her these days?
Comment by Keith Sewell — November 7, 2006 @ 1:36 pm
I finally picked up this collection for myself. I saw it a couple of years ago (after finally getting into exploitation films) and I enjoyed it. Sugimoto, Ike and Oshida are awesome in these roles. Miki Sugimoto became my all time favorite. Panik House did a great job putting this collection together. I hope that they will continue to release more of these films in the future. As not many of them have been released in decades. The ‘Scorpion’ series is another excellent pick. I picked that up as well. Meiko Kaji’s role is incredible. I would love to see some of the sequels that followed (ie, Delinquent Girl Boss). As the first was released by another studio and the last was released by PH. Though I’m curious to Miki Sugimoto’s whereabouts. She just disappeared from the scene. It would have been nice that when they did these re-releases that they would have been able to get actual interviews of the actors. It would have been great to hear about their involvement in these films. Great review on this collection.
Comment by Maxwell Hunter — June 1, 2010 @ 12:12 pm