| Modern Pulp | Jan 7 2018 |
When we get together we do the usual stuff—chat, drink wine, endure whippings, have a forced enema or two.
We don't share pinku and roman porno posters just because we're interested in the films. We also share them because, first, the art is always great, and second, it's easy to get. Its availability is a reflection of how many productions of the type were made—in a word, many hundreds. That's two words. Let's go with thousands—which is not an exaggeration. These were incredibly popular films is the point, made by multiple studios trying to place double features into vertically integrated, wholly dependent cinemas every weekend. Many of the movies have fallen prey to the ravages of time, which occasionally leads to us sharing art from movies that no longer exist, but today's offering, Nawa to chibusa, aka Rope and Breasts, starring Nami Matsukawa and Izumi Shima, is one we did in fact find and watch.
The movie premiered in Japan today in 1983, and it involves a couple running a traveling bdsm show who arrive in Kyoto and are hired for a private performance that turns into something more. The woman is planning to retire, but now learns what bondage and discipline really are as she and her man are teased and tortured to within an inch of their sanity. When all is said and done the woman forgets retirement, not because she loves torture, but because she realizes her life is hell anyway and if she has to live in hell she'd like to at least make money from it. Very upbeat stuff. An interesting aspect of the copy we saw is its use of pixelation to obscure the private parts of the actors (see below). Since roman pornos are softcore the masking is purely directorial flourish, designed, we suppose, to give the action a veneer of the forbidden.
For those who've missed our previous discussions about the roman porno genre, the filmmakers generally contend that the sexual abuse depicted is symbolic of patriarchal Japan's subjugation to occupying Americans, or to modern life, or to a burgeoning counterculture, etc. As a smart man once said, when something is symbolic of everything, it's symbolic of nothing. In other words, we don't buy the boilerplate on roman porno, at least
not fully. We think it was primarily money driven, and the more intellectual aspects were secondary, distantly. But the main thing we try to remember as outsiders looking in is that cultural judgement is a slippery slope, and while in this particular 2018 moment of discussion about the all too prevalent dangers men present to women, it's easy to dismiss roman porno films as masculine horror fantasies sprung from the brows of unrepentant misogynists.
not fully. We think it was primarily money driven, and the more intellectual aspects were secondary, distantly. But the main thing we try to remember as outsiders looking in is that cultural judgement is a slippery slope, and while in this particular 2018 moment of discussion about the all too prevalent dangers men present to women, it's easy to dismiss roman porno films as masculine horror fantasies sprung from the brows of unrepentant misogynists.But times change, and there are layers to the issue that make such assessments a bit too facile. It's possible to be on one side of a cultural issue during a certain moment in time, but be judged as on the exact opposite side a generation or two later. Today's observers could easily conclude that roman porno filmmakers were conservative nationalists, but in reality many were liberal feminist allies satirizing conservative patriarchs/patriots. Their sexualization of women was spurred in part by studio demands, but there's also no doubt many thought of themselves as modernist trailblazers smashing social barriers through the use of sexual symbolism. The path their output has taken through the decades is parallel to that of Hugh Hefner, hailed as a women's rights hero in 1967, reviled as a cog in a destructive porno machine half a century later. Times change.
If Japanese viewers of 1980s American horror movies had demanded to know why so many productions featured people being lured into the woods to be slaughtered it would have led to some uncomfortable conversations about apocalyptic American attitudes toward sex, as well as the eternal American worship of violence. These discussions would have been much more needed than any concerning 1970s Japanese mores. But as for modern observers, they get to judge earlier filmmakers only up to a point. They weren't there. They forget that work in
commercial media has its demands, if the work is to be secured at all. Old targets are no longer fully relevant, as well as being way too easy to criticize in hindsight. Subversive messages are often slipped into popular art and those messages matter. They wink at us. They say, “You and I both know this is just entertainment, but this other thing—if you are detecting it—is what we're really about here.” But modern viewers of old films often miss these important messages. As culture changes receptivity to these small signals changes too.
commercial media has its demands, if the work is to be secured at all. Old targets are no longer fully relevant, as well as being way too easy to criticize in hindsight. Subversive messages are often slipped into popular art and those messages matter. They wink at us. They say, “You and I both know this is just entertainment, but this other thing—if you are detecting it—is what we're really about here.” But modern viewers of old films often miss these important messages. As culture changes receptivity to these small signals changes too.So, okay, Nawa to chibusa is a weird movie. It's a weird movie hailing from a weird genre. The genre was meant to both make money and provoke people, and all these years later the films remain as artifacts of an industry embarked upon a radical social discussion, spearheaded by filmmakers who hadn't yet realized that images also carry weight apart from their alleged political intent. In other words, the question becomes whether the same goals could have been achieved by other means—i.e. other means of provocation, other types of imagery. We can't answer that. We weren't there. We don't know of anyone who has tallied the social gains and losses, if any, brought about by all this shocking cinema. All we have is an inadequate twenty-first century perspective, an inadequate Western perspective, an incomplete male perspective, and a whole lot of crazy posters.
JapanKyotoNikkatsuNawa to chibusaRope and BreastsNami Matsukawa縄と乳房Izumi ShimaHugh Hefnerposter artcinemaroman pornopinkunuditybdsmshibarikinbakumovie review
| Modern Pulp | Dec 5 2017 |
Junko Mabuki gets deflowered.
We just saw Junko Mabuki last week, and here she is again in the roman porno vehicle Dan Oniroku bara jigoku, which is known in English as Hell of Roses. Oniroku Dan was Japan's perv laureate of erotic bondage literature, and he became so famous that his name often appeared on the front of movies adapted from his material. And his material was pretty fringy stuff, at least by our standards. Last week's Oniroku Dan movie was centered around a slimy photographer's bondage obsession. This time there are two photographers, working in tandem to produce bdsm shots of young women who don't have any real idea what they've signed up for. Junko plays a famous singer who gets into their crosshairs. She'd never submit voluntarily, so the two predators subdue her with chloroform and spirit her away to an isolated house. Once she awakens she puts up a real fight and even manages to bloody one of her captors, but she still ends up caged, roped, dildoed, etc., and then there's that roman porno pee thing again. And a snake. And a kinky blood fixation. But you know what this movie doesn't have? Roses. Go figure. Dan Oniroku bara jigoku premiered today in 1980.
JapanNikkatsuDan Oniroku bara jigokuHell of RosesJunko MabukiOniroku Danroman pornopinkuposter artcinemabdsmshibarikinbakumovie review
| Modern Pulp | Nov 27 2017 |
Junko Mabuki starts a chain reaction.
Junko Mabuki is an important actress of second generation Japanese S&M movies, and that's her above on a poster for Dan Oniroku onna biyoshi nawa shiku, aka Female Beautician Rope Discipline. What you see is what you get here. Junko is a hairdresser who meets a photographer who shoots bondage and discipline. At first she's repulsed, but this being a roman porno flick, the thought of it grows in her mind. Meanwhile we meet Izumi Shima, who's one of Junko hairdressing clients. Junko is attracted to her—and who wouldn't be? Shima also happens to be the ex of the perverted photographer. It's a pretty big coincidence, but not the biggest in the film. The photographer also randomly stumbles upon Junko after she's been tied up and assaulted. It's just the beginning of a descent into degradation, jealousy, sexual assault, and serious male-driven pee-version.
We're still trying wrap our heads around the various forms of Japanese cinema. Toei's pinky violence films usually had cool ’70s street action and ass kicking gang girls, whereas Nikkatsu's roman porno had submissive women and sexual subjugation. They're all generally considered to be pink films, along with output from OP Eiga and other studios, but to us they're night and day. Pinky violence and roman porno represent two big studios in competition with each other, but more and more the patriarchy smashing ethos often embedded in the former versus the sexist subjugation usually present within the latter feel like a corporate level political divide writ large. In this one, though, the sadistic photographer gets his—spoiler alert!—head deservedly bashed in. So lines were occasionally crossed. Dan Oniroku onna biyoshi nawa shiku premiered in Japan today in 1981.
We're still trying wrap our heads around the various forms of Japanese cinema. Toei's pinky violence films usually had cool ’70s street action and ass kicking gang girls, whereas Nikkatsu's roman porno had submissive women and sexual subjugation. They're all generally considered to be pink films, along with output from OP Eiga and other studios, but to us they're night and day. Pinky violence and roman porno represent two big studios in competition with each other, but more and more the patriarchy smashing ethos often embedded in the former versus the sexist subjugation usually present within the latter feel like a corporate level political divide writ large. In this one, though, the sadistic photographer gets his—spoiler alert!—head deservedly bashed in. So lines were occasionally crossed. Dan Oniroku onna biyoshi nawa shiku premiered in Japan today in 1981.
JapanDan Oniroku onna biyoshi nawa shikuFemale Beautician Rope DisciplineJunko MabukiIzumi Shimaposter artcinemaroman pornobdsmshibarikinbakupinkunuditymovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 12 2017 |
There's a thin line between love and hate.
Above is a poster we're reasonably sure you won't see anywhere else. It was made to promote a movie called 愛憎のからみ. The film never had a western release, but if it had it would have been called something like A Love Hate Relationship. It was from Aoi Film, another company that delved into softcore pink cinema during the 1960s and 1970s, and this one was directed by Taskashi Chiba and starred Yuri Izumi, who during a career encompassing dozens of screen credits would go on to become one of Japan's bondage queens. This is obviously a pretty obscure movie, since we can't come up with its rōmaji or romanized title. We also can't pinpoint its exact premiere date. But we know it appeared sometime this month in 1972. Below we've included some detail from the poster, and just for the fun of it we also have one of Izumi's many provocative bondage shots.
| Vintage Pulp | Sep 2 2017 |
Okay, I take it back—you don't hit like a girl.
Above you see a great Sam Peffer cover for Jonathan Latimer's Solomon's Vineyard, originally published in 1941, and banned in the U.S. until 1988. We could go into why it was blacklisted, but as always it doesn't really matter, because save for a brief mention of underage sex the book is not racy by today's standards. Its best quality is not sexual innuendo anyway, but toughness. To give you an example, we'll transcribe one of its many interesting scenes. The main character Karl Craven—a burly ex-football player-turned-private detective—becomes upset at the layered deceptions he's had to deal with and finally loses his temper:
I grabbed her by the arms and shook her. Her false teeth fell out and rolled across the carpet. [snip] I started into the parlour, but a thin man in shirtsleeves was in the way. I hit him and he went down. In the parlour the blonde who'd slugged me with the lamp began to scream. She thought I was coming for her. I went to the big radio in the corner. I picked it up, tearing out the plug, and tossed it across the room. It shattered against
the wall. I kicked over a table with two lamps on it. I tore some of the fabric off a davenport. I threw a chair at a big oil painting over the fireplace. I took a metal stand lamp and bent it up like a pretzel. I pulled up the oriental rug and ripped it down the middle.
That's going berserk like you mean it. We won't bother with a long plot summary since you can find those all over the internet, but basically the protagonist is hired to spring a woman from a cult and finds himself neck deep in corpse worship, hidden treasure, police corruption, and sado-masochism. The book is reasonably well written, very hard boiled, and built around a set of unlikely characters—including a femme fatale known by all as “The Princess.” Great Pan published it in 1961, and it had an alternate cover which you also see here. It was re-issued several times after its debut—including by Popular Library as The Fifth Grave—which means it isn't hard to find. We recommend you give it a read.
I grabbed her by the arms and shook her. Her false teeth fell out and rolled across the carpet. [snip] I started into the parlour, but a thin man in shirtsleeves was in the way. I hit him and he went down. In the parlour the blonde who'd slugged me with the lamp began to scream. She thought I was coming for her. I went to the big radio in the corner. I picked it up, tearing out the plug, and tossed it across the room. It shattered against
the wall. I kicked over a table with two lamps on it. I tore some of the fabric off a davenport. I threw a chair at a big oil painting over the fireplace. I took a metal stand lamp and bent it up like a pretzel. I pulled up the oriental rug and ripped it down the middle.That's going berserk like you mean it. We won't bother with a long plot summary since you can find those all over the internet, but basically the protagonist is hired to spring a woman from a cult and finds himself neck deep in corpse worship, hidden treasure, police corruption, and sado-masochism. The book is reasonably well written, very hard boiled, and built around a set of unlikely characters—including a femme fatale known by all as “The Princess.” Great Pan published it in 1961, and it had an alternate cover which you also see here. It was re-issued several times after its debut—including by Popular Library as The Fifth Grave—which means it isn't hard to find. We recommend you give it a read.
| Modern Pulp | Aug 28 2017 |
Please don't tease the animals.
Operating on the same level of explicitness as cable softcore doesn't mean roman porno flicks can't push the envelope. Japanese filmmakers working in this genre were solidly experienced by the time Dan Oniroku aoi onna came along, and it's amazing how adept they were at implying everything while showing little. Content-wise Dan Oniroku aoi onna gets pretty far out. The film had no U.S. release, but the title would be “Oniroku Dan,” after Japan's most famous author of sado-masochist fiction, and “blue girl.” The blue girl in question is Izumi Shima, one of roman porno's truly radiant actresses, who spends most of this film trapped in a perverted private sex club in bondage-related distress. We could describe how she ends up in this place, but why bother? We could also describe the various pokings, proddings, and probings the lovely Miss Zu endures, but there's no point. She's naked and helpless is all you need to know, and that—apparently—is what drew Japanese audiences to these films in droves. Most of the time we like to provide a set of stills or screen grabs to give you an idea what to expect. For this one we're giving you only a single production photo, below. That should about cover it. Dan Oniroku aoi onna premiered in Japan today 1982.
Japan団鬼六 蒼いおんなDan Oniroku aoi onnaDan Oniroku Blue GirlIzumi Shimasexploitationshibarikinbakubdsmroman pornopinkunuditymovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 11 2017 |
Are you sure I need an entire superhero outfit? I'd feel more comfortable—and frankly more fabulous—fighting crime like this.
Danny Shannon, the lead character in Peter Sinnot's 1966 sleazer Young Danny does not fight crime. We made that up. He's actually just a regular guy with no superpowers whatsoever, who gets a job working in a combo hotel/health club/steam bath where wild bondage parties are held, and becomes the favored staff member of all the guests. See what we just did there? Staff member? Anyway, by the mid-1960's sexploitation books of all types had reached the point where little was left to the imagination, and this one is a prime example, as its rear cover bluntly proclaims: “Once you enter this hotel prepare to get raped.... or rape... anything goes!”
Eric Stanton is on the cover chores here and—this is where we got the idea about crime fighting—he was strongly influenced style-wise by Jerry Robinson, the comic artist who created Robin of Batman and Robin, as well as Batman's butler Alfred, and the villain Two-Face. Stanton was also a friend of Steve Ditko, the man who illustrated the first Spider Man comics. In fact, Stanton claims that the character of Aunt Mae was his idea. Now we know exactly where the strong comic book feel of Stanton's art came from, and why Danny Shannon looks like a crimefighter having a costume fitting. Or maybe that's just us. You can see plenty more from Stanton here, here, and here.
| Modern Pulp | May 29 2017 |
All jerks and no play make Linda a very dull movie.
Some of the other titles of the West German sexploitation flick Linda are Captive Women, Naked Super Witches of the Rio Amore, and Orgy of the Nymphomaniacs. Those should tell you everything about the content of this movie. Plotwise, it involves a woman forced to work as a prostitute at a bdsm brothel on the island of Madeira, Portugal. How that actually happens doesn't much matter. The circumstances are ridiculous, and not at all the point. The point is nudity, which is delivered often and steadily. Characterwise, almost every man in the film deserves to be drawn and quartered, which makes it too bad that doesn't actually happen. It's actually a scorpion that turns the tide and allows the heroine to finally escape.
The movie is notable really for only two things: it was one of more than 100 productions helmed by Jesús Franco, that misunderstood genius, and it features 1979 Playboy centerfold Ursula Buchfellner, billed here as Ursula Fellner. Three things, actually: it's as humorless a sexploitation flick as we've ever seen. Even Katja Bienert in the title role can't save it. No way we can recommend this one, but we wanted to show you the Italian promo poster. It has the look of pieces painted by Mafé, but he signed all his work, as far as we know, so this must just be a convincing imitation. Linda premiered in West Germany for the first time today in 1981, and don't say we didn't try to steer you away.
Bonus material: just for the hell of it, just because they exist, we've uploaded a couple of promo shots of Bienert and Buchfellner below. Their names together sound kind of like a cop show, like a prime time drama where every problem is solved within an hour. We think it would have been a hit, because they've solved our problems in just a couple of minutes. But our previous advice holds true: don't watch the movie.
West GermanyItalianPortugalMadeiraLindaCaptive WomenNaked Super Witches of the Rio AmoreOrgy of the NymphomaniacsPlayboyJesús FrancoJess FrancoUrsula BuchfellnerUrsula FellnerKatja BienertRaquel Evansposter artcinemasexploitationnuditybdsmmovie review
| Vintage Pulp | May 12 2017 |
Likes include fine saki, sunset walks, and light humiliation.
Above, five promo posters featuring Naomi Oka, who appeared in dozens of pinku and roman porno films between 1972 and 1987, with 1979 being her banner year as twelve films hit Japanese screens. As you might imagine based on the above evidence, she was one of the queens of bondage. The posters above are for, top to bottom, Onna keimusho shikei, aka Women's Prison: The Lynching, Hentai shikijô nawa fujin, aka Abnormal Rope Wife, Hitozuma hentai, aka Abnormal Bride, Nihon no rinchi, aka Japanese Lynching, and Kinbalu ijo-ma, aka Distributing agency: Shin-Toho, also sometimes referred to as Disturbing: Rope Master. It's always important to note that restraint and bondage have a special place in Japanese culture, where it's considered—if not quite normal—not outstandingly weird either. Below you see Oka mercifully freed from bondage.
JapanOnna keimusho shikeiWomen's Prison: The LynchingHentai shikijô nawa fujinAbnormal Rope WifeHitozuma hentaiAbnormal BrideNihon no rinchiJapanese Lynching丘なおみNaomi Okaposter artcinemabdsmroman pornopinku
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 23 2017 |
When they say love hurts they aren't kidding.
This wintry poster for Hakkinbon bijin ranbu yori: semeru!, aka Beauty's Exotic Dance: Torture! shows star Junko Miyashita looking miserable and cold. Which actually happens in the movie. It tells the story of an artist who engages a prostitute to satiate his need for sadistic sex, which he uses to fuel his art. The prostitute, Miyashita, is a consensual partner in all this, wanting to please the artist and out-do his dearly departed wife. You gets lots of drawn out sadism involving rope bondage, asphyxiation, ice baths, scaldings with candle wax, and more. And if that isn't dark and weird enough already, matters take a really nasty turn when Miyashita turns out to have inherited something unusual from her mother. If you watch the movie, don't say we didn't warn you. Hakkinbon bijin ranbu yori: semeru! premiered in Japan today in 1977.
JapanHakkinbon bijin ranbu yori: semeru!Beauty's Exotic Dance: Torture!Junko Miyashitapinkuroman pornosexploitationshibarikinbakubdsmposter artcinemamovie review
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