Above, a poster for Noribumi Suzuki’s Ero shogun to nijuichi nin no aisho, aka Lustful Shogun and His 21 Mistresses, aka The Erotic Shogun and His Twenty-One Prostitutes, which starred Tôru Abe, Yasumori Hikita, and also features three of our favorite pinku actresses, Reiko Ike, Yayoi Watanabe, and Miki Sugimoto. We had a bit of a debate here at Pulp HQ as to the actual number of buns 21 women possess. Would it be 21 or 42? The PI girlfriends just rolled their eyes at this question, by the way. But it’s worth exploring. In the strictly physical sense, a bun possesses two halves, right? Thus one woman has one bun, comprised of two halves, each of which might be useful for an open face sandwich, perhaps, but which cannot by itself constitute a whole. Alternatively, when referring to a person’s backside, you might observe that she has nice buns. More to the point, if there were, say, a tattoo there, you might say, “She has a tattoo on her right bun.” Actually, first you might say, “Poor girl. That looks really frickin’ trashy and she has no idea.” But then you’d say she has a tattoo on her right bun. Or left bun, as the case may be. Or saddest of all, across both buns. All of which would seem to imply that 21 women have 42 buns. The PI girlfriends suggested we go with the British term “bum,” which is not in any way ambiguous, but also doesn’t rhyme with “gun,” which was really the whole point. Actually, it technically could rhyme with gun, depending on how loose your interpretation of rhyming is. Certainly, a rapper would agree that bum rhymes with gun, but we don’t rap, so in the end, we went with bun. That is, one woman has one bun. All pretty confusing, truthfully. At this point we’d normally do a quick review, maybe show you some still shots of these 21 mistresses that populate Ero shogun to nijuichi nin no aisho, maybe even mention that it premiered in Japan today in 1972, but after dragging you through the cramped, dark spider hole of our editorial process, the least we can do is show you an/some actual bun/buns. So there’s Reiko’s below. Hooray!

 

Above, a poster for Tatsumi Kumashiro’s 1968 sexploitation flick Kaburitsuki jinsei, aka Front Row Life, aka Life of a Striptease Love, et. al. This was Kumashiro’s first directorial effort, and it didn’t do well. Afterward, he was banished back to screenwriting and assistant directing, which is where he’d been toiling for years, but in 1972, when he was forty-five, Nikkatsu gave him a second chance and he helmed the hit roman porno Nureta kuchibiru, aka Wet Lips. Kumashiro went on to direct many successful Nikkatsu productions. Interestingly, he married his Front Row Life leading lady, Hatsue Tonooka, but they divorced after a few months. 

 

We love this. It’s a poster for Nikkatsu’s 1971 sexploitation flick Yoru no saizensen: Tôkyô onna chizu, which starred Satoko Sato and her interesting leather outfit, and was released internationally as Secret Zone of Tokyo. But that isn’t a literal translation of the Japanese title. If you glance at the bottom of the poster, the first two figures, if you’re looking left to right, say “Tokyo.” The red shape with the heart in the middle is a nifty mash-up of the two figures that make up the word “women.” And the last two figures say “map” or possibly “atlas.” Of course, in Japan reading is done right to left, but whichever direction you go, it says “Tokyo Women Map.” Which is something that we really could have used at times in the past. 

Above is a piece of beautiful Japanese promo art for the West German sexploitation flick Mädchen beim Frauenarzt, aka Teenage Sex Report, part of an incredibly popular subgenre of films purporting to inform moviegoers about the sex practices of co-eds. Helmed mainly by Austrian director Ernst Hofbauer, the series of more than thirty films included thirteen entries in the famed Schulmädchen-Report franchise. Mädchen beim Frauenarzt stars Monika Dahlberg, Christine Schuberth, Brigitte Harrer, Evelyne Traeger and numerous others, and what mostly happens is pretty frauen go to a gynecologist, strip and climb into the stirrups, then we learn in flashback what problems preceded their visits. The girls are presented as studies, complete with superimposed text reading things like “The Case of Ulrike (20),” but even with its medical pretensions Mädchen beim Frauenarzt is a garden-variety 1970s muff-fest. We support muff-fests. We’re friends of muff-fests. But this is joyless stuff. And certainly, the cervix shots are a touch of clinical verisimilitude we could have done without. All things considered, the Japanese poster, with its dreamy light and cotton candy colors, is false advertising. Because if the movie were half that lighthearted we’d really have something here. But alas, no. Mädchen beim Frauenarzt opened—in more ways than one—in Japan today in 1972. 

 

Because it’s been written about on pretty every much cinema blog in existence, there’s really no point in us adding our two cents about ’Gator Bait. But you know what? We’re going to do it anyway. How else are we supposed to use what is possibly the greatest promo image ever shot? (See below). We hadn’t seen ’Gator Bait since we rented it for a bad movie night during college, and we’d forgotten how tame it is for a sexploitation film. Not to say it’s chaste. It isn’t. But for this genre, it’s strictly middle-of-the-road—or rather, the swamp. The plot involves Jennings being framed for murder, and later battling a gaggle of slobbering crackers who want to kill her almost as much as they want to climb inside her Daisy Dukes. ’Gator Bait was panned upon release, but today it’s a cult classic, owing, of course, to the presence of Jennings. She has only a few lines of dialogue, but she performs most of her own stunts and generally plays her semi-feral character Desiree to the hilt as she kicks redneck caboose all over the bayou. The movie isn’t very good, truthfully, but she’s the best thing about it. In fact, it’s safe to say that if not for Jennings, ’Gator Bait would be totally forgotten by now. It premiered this month in 1974. 

This excellent vintage poster is for the Italian nunsploitation flick Interno di un covento, which was known in English as, alternately, Within a Cloister, Within the Convent, and Behind Covent Walls. So, what exactly goes on behind convent walls? Well, they have lots of sex. With each other and with whatever men happen to be around. And they exercise naked a lot. Well, almost naked. They never take off those cornettes, no matter what, but everything else is on display, including some really lovely bushes. All of this depravity is the work of Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, working from a novel—a novel!—by the French writer Stendhal, aka Marie-Henri Beyle. But we’re giving Borowczyk most of the credit, er, blame here, because we don’t think Stendhal had a scene in his book where a nun devirginized herself with a Jesus-faced dildo. What’s the plot here? It isn’t important. The question is, what’s the point? Well, we’re talking about a movie made in Italy, so the point seems to have been to annoy the very powerful Catholic Church. Mission wholly accomplished, we suspect. We gotta say though, we have never gotten this fascination with nuns. But if that’s your thing, then this is your movie. It premiered in Italy today in 1978. We have a few screen shots below, and if you just can’t get enough nunnage, check out this amusing post. 

Tanya’s Island may not be the best sexploitation flick of all time, but it’s surely one of the most earnest. Before she hooked up with Prince and became known as Vanity, Canadian actress D.D. Winters headlined this deeply Freudian beauty-and-the-beast psychodrama about a young actress who lucidly dreams of going to live with her painter boyfriend on a deserted island, only to discover that they are in fact not alone. The imaginary island’s other inhabitant is a sort of tropical sasquatch (but with soulful blue eyes), and within the reverie Tanya develops, her boyfriend becomes jealous and aggressive while the ape seems to take on increasingly more humanity. Since this all takes place in Tanya’s head, some pretty interesting questions are being raised about the nature of female desire, as well as both the savage and civilized sides of man. Perhaps you’re rolling your eyes now, and that’s fair enough, but a big reason why these seventies skin flicks are great to watch is because the filmmakers took themselves so seriously. Writer/producer Pierre Brousseau even plastered the 1982 Cannes Film Festival with posters in hopes of generating attention for his movie. His strategy probably didn’t boost box office receipts much, but it did increase interest in his lead actress, resulting in her appearance in Playboy, and thence into the arms of Prince. Since Tanya’s Island is indeed about a woman searching for her prince charming, there’s a certain symmetry in this. But probably the only symmetry you’re really interested in is Vanity’s, so you’ll be happy to know she’s completely naked before the opening credits have finished and remains half or wholly bare through much of the film. And for our female readers, her boyfriend’s member makes a brief appearance as well (though we suspect you won’t find the man attached to that appendage particularly alluring). Soon after this film Vanity would become famous as a singer and consort, and in one of her most memorable songs she cooed: “Ooh yeah, such a pretty mess.” That neatly sums up Tanya’s Island. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1980. 

When we first saw this poster for 1971’s The Godson, we were of course struck by its brutal nature. Then our realty filter kicked in and we realized that, though the art is a photo-illustration, an actress probably wouldn’t sign up for that kind of abuse. Thankfully, our assumption was confirmed. The film frame used on the poster has been slightly but crucially altered to achieve a more violent effect. The reasons why an instance of sexual violence would be made to look even worse on a promo poster raises some disturbing marketing-related questions, but we’ll leave those for another time. Moving on to the actual film, The Godson is just a sexploitation flick with bad direction (William Rotsler), bad scripting (William Rotsler), bad editing (William Rotsler), and astoundingly bad acting (everyone). Basically, it’s the story of an ambitious mafia thug trying to succeed in his godfather’s organization. It all goes wrong in the end and everyone dies. Is that giving away too much? Well, at least we saved you 90 minutes. Perhaps we should note that Lois Mitchell and Uschi Digart appear in this film, legendary sci-fi writer and firebrand Harlan Ellison pops up briefly, and some of the scenes were filmed at his bachelor pad. Does any of that make it worth watching? No. The Godson premiered in Japan today in 1972. 

Above is a nice panel length poster for 1972’s Sukeban berûsu: mesubachi no chosen, aka Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Challenge, the second entry in the Girl Boss series made by Toei Studios in the early 1970s. This one stars Reiko Ike (before the tattoo), along with Chiyoko Kazama, and Miki Sugimoto in an appearance just lengthy enough for her to get a couple of bottles of cola sprayed up her ya-ya. If you can wrest your eyes from the constantly recurring tableaux of perfect skin, there is a plot, and it involves a pair of girl gangsters/bitter rivals captured by a yakuza boss and subjected to various sadistic tortures (including that old Japanese favorite—rope bondage, aka kinbaku-bi). Of course, the abuse in these films is inevitably followed by much deserved revenge against the evil males, up close and bloody. But it isn’t all violence and vengeance. There are some effective moments of comedy, and of course, the film is beautifully shot. All-in-all, Sukeban berûsu: mesubachi no chosen is a must-see for pinku fans. You’ll learn exactly how effective a handful of soap foam can be for covering a woman’s bush.