Tag: pinky

Girl Boss Guerilla

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★★★½
“Faster pussycats who kill, kill.”

After my disappointing first foray, this is more like it, right from the moment Sachiko (Sugimoto) rips open her top, revealing a heavily-tattooed breast, before she and her Red Helmet Gang of biker chicks kick the asses of another, male gang who are hassling them. It’s clear that Sachiko deserves the title far more that the ‘Delinquent Girl Boss’. She and her crew from Tokyo head off to Kyoto, where they face off against, and end up taking control of, the local girl gang – some of whom are none to happy by this invasion [Kyoto being the former capital, its residents seems to hold a grudge against those from Tokyo]. Sachiko ends up on the wrong side of the local Yakuza, one of whom has a sister, Nami (Ike), who is an independent free-agent girl gangster, affiliated with none, but kinda over-seeing all. Sachiko meets and falls for a boxer, Ichiro (Mizushimi), after he helps her girls out of a tough spot with the Yakuza, and follows him to a seaside resort where he is training. Needless to say, love does not quite conquer all.

I really like the two heroines here, who are just about everything I expected from the genre, combining toughness and beauty, savagery and tenderness. Both actresses are excellent, fleshing out (pun not intended…) what could easily have been no more than shallow stereotypes. What doesn’t sit so well is the strange lurches in tone. Oh, look: here’s a (supposedly) hilarious sequence where one of the girls catches VD from a priest, then deliberately passes it on to the Yakuza! Oh, hold my aching sides… Then, there’s a bit of unintentional hilarity where a Japanese hippie sings a mournful lament to a dead friend, accompanied by his guitar – but the soundtrack is very clearly a piano. Barely have you finished rolling around the floor laughing hysterically at that, then there’s a genuinely nasty torture sequence involving rather a lot of topless whipping, which appears to have strayed in from a very different movie entirely.

This inconsistency of approach makes for a rather jarring experience, as it switches gears like a badly-maintained Model T, and seems at odds with the female empowerment present in much of the film. However, this still remains a pleasing slab of exploitation for the not-easily offended. Below, you’ll find what Youtube calls a ‘trailer’ but is really more a random selection of clippage; however, it’ll still give you an idea of what to expect.

Dir: Norifumi Suzuki
Star: Miki Sugimoto, Reiko Ike, Michitaro Mizushimi

Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess

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★★½
“Not very violent, and certainly not pink.”

When Rika (Oshida) gets out of reform school, she goes to visit her friend Midori (Katayama), and gets a job working in the garage belonging to Midori’s father Muraki (Ban), even though Midori is estranged from him – except when she needs money to pay off her boyfriend’s gambling debts to the local Yakuza under Boss Ohya (Nobuo Kaneko). Another friend of Rika’s is working in an “art studio”, doing nude modelling to support her sick husband, and still others are hostesses at the Ginza Girls cabaret, a dance-hall which Ohya’s gang are also extorting for protection money. After Muraki has to take a loan using the garage as collateral to pay Ohya, Rika tries to offer herself as an alternative to the boss. This goes about as well as you’d expect, though there’s a genuinely cool twist in which we find someone isn’t quite who we seem. There’s a tragic fatality, which sets the scene for all the girls to get together and take on Ohya’s gang.

As you can tell, there’s no shortage of plot going on here. However, the overall result is more like an overwrought Japanese soap-opera, with a lack of much delinquence, or indeed, real action of any kind from the girls, up until the last ten minutes. Indeed, there’s very little exploitation present at all, with a surprising lack of nudity as well, though personally, this is less a concern. Reading various reviews elsewhere, there is a broad spectrum of opinion as to whether this makes it the best or the worst in the series. I tend to be somewhere in the middle: while I can appreciate the dramatic elements, and the two lead actresses are good in their roles, it’s not what I expected at all, being too worthy, and completely lacking any sense of excess of transgression.

I’m definitely uncertain where the poster image comes from, although that may be because I had to look at it twice, since the first time I thought she was holding a yo-yo. Must have been some kind of residue from Sukeban Deka, I guess.

Dir: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
Star: Reiko Oshida, Yumiko Katayama, Junzaburo Ban

Pinky violence

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pinkyl“Pinky violence” is a genre of cinema that flourished in Japan during the 1970’s. It was spawned from the “pink film” genre of sexploitation movies, which started the previous decade with Satoru Kobayashi’s Flesh Market, which grossed over 100 million yen on a budget of just eight million. It was originally the domain mostly of independent producers and studios, but as the Japanese market became tougher, due to competition from imported movies and other forms of entertainment, major studios like Nikkatsu and Toei moved in to the field. While the former took the more traditional route, Toei opted to merge sex with the other staple of exploitation cinema, violence.

But what makes them of interest here, is their focus on women as the central characters, active participants in the violence, rather than simply being passive victims. Frequently, the heroines are sukeban, a term which means “delinquent girl” or “bad girl”, often operating in conjunction with, or leading, other girls in a gang, This may form part of a larger Yakuza enterprise, or work entirely independently. Sometimes, the focus is on obtaining revenge or justice for some past crime, whether against the girl or someone she loves. The ratio of sex to violence did vary, as did the setting: while most had a contemporary setting, films like Lady Snowblood took the themes are ran them out against a period backdrop.

While the ‘golden era’ of the genre is generally considered to be in the seventies, the influences and general themes continue on. They can be seen in the likes of the Female Prisoner Scorpion and Zero Woman series, and arguably, even in the new wave of Tokyo Gore movies, such as Mutant Girl Squad or Gothic & Lolita Psycho. We started by reviewing the four movies included in the box-set released by Panik House in December 2005. While it’s now out of print, its contents remains available from various sources, and it’s as good a place to begin as any. Further entries will continue to be added during the coming months, with the movies listed in order of release date.

See also

And, in chronological order