Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (Japan, 1970)

Nikkatsu's Stray Cat Rock films established a couple of precedents in Japanese exploitation cinema. For one, they contained the seeds of the Pinky Violence films that Toei would produce throughout the 70s. Second, they mark a first step in the ascent of actress Meiko Kaji, who was just on the cusp of achieving Tarantino-certified cult icon status with her titular roles in the Lady Snowblood and Female Convict Scorpion series.

However, those coming to the first film in the series, Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss, with hopes of seeing a nascent version of the cold-eyed badassery Kaji would evince in those later films will be at least a little disappointed. Because here Kaji is little more than a supporting player, leaving the spotlight to star Akiko Wada, a Japanese pop singer here making her screen debut. And that is as it should be.

Wada makes her first appearance in the film under it’s opening credits, playing surly loner Ako, who comes roaring into town on her motorcycle like a distaff Brando, her face—and gender—obscured by her helmet. Soon she runs into Mei (Kaji), a waifish street kid who demands she give her a ride. Ako drops Mei at a mucky unused reservoir, where she joins in a fight against a rival gang with her fellow cadre of bad girls. Mei and her friends quickly lose their advantage, and are saved by Ako, who chases the other gang away while doing sick jumps on her hog.

Now having made fast friends with the gang, Ako retires with them to a noisy psychedelic nightspot, where she finally removes her helmet to reveal her long hair and arguably feminine features (by which I mean that the permanent cocky smirk on her face is somewhat on the far side of demure.) Mei is undeterred by this revelation and asks Ako to dance, which she does. This is as far into Sapphic territory as the film goes, though there are other vague intimations of Mei’s attraction for Ako.

Mei is saddled with a boyfriend, Michio (Koji Wada), who, by all appearances, is a cowardly loser. Michio is intent on gaining entrance to a neo-fascist criminal gang called the Seiyu Group, and endeavors to do so by convincing the gang to bet heavily on his boxer friend in an upcoming match, with the understanding that he will convince his friend to throw the fight. He fails in this, and ends up a prisoner of the Seiyus, who beat him mercilessly. A real “stand by your man” type, Mei convinces the other girls to join her in rescuing him--and, in the ensuing brawl, Ako comes very close to blinding Hanada, the gang’s boss. This is enough to make the elimination of the gang, and Ako especially, a top priority for Hanada and his giggling top enforcer Katsuya (Tatsuya Fuji).

In classic Pinky Violence tradition, the battle-hardened young women of Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (not to be confused with just plain Delinquent Girl Boss, a later Toei film) find themselves in a world populated only by the most grotesque examples of the male species. This is true from the sickeningly weak-willed Michio all the way to the leering Katsuya, who, at one point, leads his men in violently raping Mari, a member of the gang portrayed by Yuka Kumari, the sister of  Branded to Kill's Annu Mari.

These portrayals are given a sharper edge by the fact that the movie has a bit more grit than later PV films, which had a tendency to go over the top into lurid absurdity (surprising, given its director Yasuharu Hasebe is famous for directing the modish fever dream Black Tight Killers.) Unlike some of Toei's later PV films, which seem targeted at dirty old men, you get the sense with this picture that the filmmakers are actually trying to speak to the disaffected youth they are portraying. To this end, there are a lot of moody location sequences that, while celebrating Tokyo nightlife, also seem to hint at its emptiness and isolation. The nightclub scenes are harshly chaotic, and gain an added sense of verisimilitude from the appearance within them of actual bands of the time, like long-haired psych rockers The Mopps and OX.

All of this is not to say that the film is without stylization, as the occasional appearance of blinding, primary colored wipes and overlays clamorously attests. Also, it being a Japanese studio film of its era, it almost goes without saying that many of the shots are beautifully composed--especially when Hasebe chooses to forefront his young actors, dwarfed by the indifferent urban landscape looming above them. As an added concession to pop consciousness, we also get a couple of songs from Akiko Wada, including her hit “Boy and Girl”, (which was featured on Volume 2 of Big Beat’s Nippon Girls series if you want to hear it.) To these the husky voiced, sleepy-eyed Wada brings the same confident swagger that she does to her acting.

I have to say that Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss seems pioneering for how it so matter-of-factly presents an androgynous female protagonist in the typically male role of the laconic outsider hero. Contrary to expectations, none of the exploitative tropes concerning same sex attraction (the shower scenes, the leather clad bdsm, etc.) are in evidence.

All of this allows Wada to emerge as a female action hero of rare charisma and gravity. Though Kaji would eventually take over the lead in the Stray Cat Rock films, in Delinquent Girl Boss it is Wada who provides the film with exactly the kind of compelling central presence that Kaji did to her more well-known films. Check it out.

Decapitation Island (Japan, 1970)

Though Decapitation Island would make a fantastic title for a reality TV series (while obviously not as fantastic as Celebrity Decapitation Island), it is instead an example of that surprisingly near-inexhaustible 1970s sub-genre, the women in prison film. And being that it is a Japanese example of the form -- in this case from Gamera’s zookeepers over at Daiei -- you can rest assured that it includes a fair share of picturesque bondage and torture.

The film follows the classic WIP template by introducing its oppressive milieu through the eyes of a pair of new arrivals, the mouthy card cheat Okiyo (Genshu Hanayagi) and her opium addicted pal Osen (Reiko Kasahara). Together these women are ferried to a small prison colony on the remote and barren island of Nenbutsu, off the coast of Nagasaki, where they and their fellow inmates are forced to perform perilous slave labor along the island’s treacherous cliffs, overseen by both an unforgiving sun and a crew of abusive male wardens. Meanwhile, the arrival of a newcomer among the island’s administrators, a disgraced policeman who is also the son of Nagasaki’s governor, creates dissention between the officials that, along with an untimely outbreak of bubonic plague on the island, ultimately sets the stage for a daring escape attempt on the part of the prisoners.

Despite its Edo period setting, Decapitation Island bears some surface similarities to Roger Corman’s jungle set “women in cages” films from roughly the same time, though without those pictures’ gleeful debauchery. The mood is instead relentlessly grim and pessimistic -- in a manner that will likely be familiar to anyone who’s seen enough of these 70s era Japanese exploitation films. As often as not, these female centered entries come across as howls against society’s thorough and irredeemable rottenness, with society’s most manifest crime being, apparently, it’s turning of the woman characters away from the feminine ideal and instead toward a violent life as cold eyed and masculinized she-thugs. Not that these hardened dudettes exist alongside men equally, mind you; as in Shunya Ito’s Female Prisoner Scorpion films, Decapitation Island presents its society of women, while fractious, as being forbiddingly insular and coven-like, with its members, even in slavery, still able on occasion to exert an unearthly power over their male captors via their lady parts.

Given this vantage point, it should come as no surprise that the female prisoners in the film suffer as much at the hands of their own as they do at the hands of their male jailers. Each is constantly and ruthlessly gaming for their own advantage, with the only example of any kind of nurturing behavior being that shown between Okiyo and the doomed Osen. Omasa The Ripper -- the self-appointed leader of the group, who is every bit as delicate as that name suggests -- maintains discipline through a program of ritualized beatings, while at the same time secretly colluding with the island’s officials in hopes of gaining release. Meanwhile, Segoshi, the disgraced policeman, is positioned as something of a protagonist due only to the threat he poses to his scheming colleagues, yet is nearly as enthusiastic a participant in the sadistic goings on as the rest.

Decapitation Island came along during what was something of a golden age for torture in Japanese popular cinema, what with the success of Teruo Ishii’s long running Joy of Torture series over at Toei and its spiritual brethren. Still, the film is comparatively retrained, with little nudity and a general avoidance of being too graphic in its presentation of violence. It also helps that the tortures presented are at times baroque to the point of being surreal. One major set piece involves a naked Okiyo being poked with swords as a flaming pot of oil, attached by a chain to a bit in her mouth, teeters precariously over her head. Of course, all of this is lensed by director Toshiaki Tahara in that classic Japanese manner which, by its aggressive formalism, maintains a tenuous air of respectability in spite of however unsavory its subject matter might be.

Ultimately, Decapitation Island ends up being only nominally about decapitation, with just one token beheading in its opening moments to establish the penalty faced by the women for attempted escape. This may serve as a disappointment to fans of head rolling, but the film is nonetheless capable of satisfying the casual viewer whose demands are perhaps not so specialized. All told, it’s just one of many Japanese potboilers made with rigorous competence but little in the way of audacious artistry. While comparing it to Ito’s aforementioned Scorpion trilogy might seem unfair, there is certainly no shame in falling somewhere between the median and the high bar of artistry that those films set for the WIP genre. Nor is it necessarily damning that Decapitation Island shies away from the more confrontational approach to sleaze taken by directors like Norifumi Suzuki when tackling similar subject matter, as a lot of people find Suzuki’s movies pretty hard to take as it is.

So, despite the temptation on my part to establish my mainstream reviewer credentials by saying something like “You’ll lose your head over Decapitation Island!”, I must, like it, exercise a level of restraint that appearances might not otherwise lead one to expect. For those taxed by the extremes of Japanese exploitation cinema, the film might perhaps represent a somewhat more user-friendly middle point, while at the same time leaving more hardcore fans wanting. This, of course, leaves aside the much wider swath of humanity who see no appeal whatsoever in the spectacle of female bodies being bound and brutalized, no matter how prettily it may be realized.

Here's looking at you

The subject of my latest Teleport City review is a film about a steely-eyed beauty driven by a molten core of white-hot rage; a woman who lashes out with sudden and devastating violence at all who dare cross her. No, it's not a Naomi Campbell biopic; it's Jailhouse 41, the second film in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, and you can read my full review here.

A woman of conviction

I generally try not to cover movies that have already been written about to death, but the sheer awesomeness of Shunya Ito's Female Prisoner Scorpion films beckoned and I had to follow. My review of the first film in that series, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion is now available for perusal over at Teleport City, with reviews of the second and third film to follow some time over the next few months.

Any similarity to "High School Musical" is purely coincidental

Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom takes the two most terrifying things known to man -- girls and high school -- and combines them in a sleazy, ultra-violent package that's appropriate for the whole family -- provided your whole family is made up entirely of seedy old men with panty fetishes. Read my depressingly mostly SFW review, just posted over at Teleport City.

Girl gangs, yakuza, and delicious corn

(NOTE: Someone recently challenged my use of the word "delicious", so in churlish retaliation I plan to use it in the titles of as many posts as possible. My apologies to any innocent parties who may be unjustly annoyed as a result of this practice.)

I know that a more appropriate screencap to accompany a post regarding the Delinquent Girl Boss films would be one of Reiko Oshida punching someone in the head, but this one of her eating corn on the cob was just too adorable to resist. To read my review of the first film in that series, 1970's Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams (just released on DVD by Media Blasters) head on over to Teleport City.