This is the poster on which yesterday’s high-kicking image of Rika Aoki found a home, promoting Konketsuji Rika, aka Rika the Mixed-Blood Girl. In the film Aoki is the offspring of one of the American G.I.s who raped her mother, suffers the loss of her own virginity to a rapist, and is a product of constant physical abuse. Thus we have the two crucial ingredients needed for a pinku movie: a woman who really hates men, and men who really deserve whatever she does to them. The plot behind all the bloody mayhem involves her trying to save her gang of delinquent girls, who have been captured by crooks planning to sell them as sex slaves to American soldiers in Vietnam. Aoki gives a game performance, but she doesn’t radiate the pure heat a movie like this could use at its center. However, she does have the physical size needed to make her destruction of the evil men seem realistic, and in general the movie has enough blood, bullets, blades, and girl-fights to please fans of the genre. As a bonus for fashionistas, Aoki wears some sick jumpsuits. But if you dress like her, you better be able to kick ass. Konketsuji Rika, which was based on a manga comic and is the first film of what would become a trilogy, premiered in Japan today in 1972.
