Vintage Pulp | Mar 31 2009 |
The titles of these pinku flicks can be comically descriptive. Kyôfu joshikôkô: bôkô rinchi kyôshitsu, aka Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom is the type of title that might leave you thinking you’ve just learned all there is to know about the film. But that isn’t true because it isn’t plotting, but creative staging of sex, nudity, and violence that makes pinku so interesting. Director Norifumi Suzuki isn’t at the top of his game here, but a subpar effort from the Hendrix of bloodporn still blows most of his peers clean off the stage, especially when it stars Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike. Kyôfu joshikôkô: bôkô rinchi kyôshitsu opened in Japan today in 1973.
Vintage Pulp | Feb 17 2009 |
Any time you get Reiko Ike in a flick, vital fluids will stain the walls. Furyô anego den: Inoshika Ochô, aka Sex & Fury, falls into a category generally known as “pinky violence,” which was conceived and created by the movie studio Toei Company. Like yesterday’s Seijû gakuenaka, this film is a Norifumi Suzuki-conducted symphony of lesbian sex, shock-nudity and hyperviolent action.
Near the mid-point Suzuki treats us to a sequence in which the heroine is surprised in the bath by eight Yakuza, but leaps from the tub and fights them naked. The vicious sword battle spills from the bath chamber into a courtyard, all in wonderfully choreographed slow motion, with arterial spray jetting hither and yon like water from the Bellagio Fountain. It’s one of the most famous and daring sequences in cinema history, and was echoed by David Cronenberg in his recent thriller Eastern Promises.
You may notice that Reiko Ike is upstaged on the poster (and the black-bordered alternate version below) by a bare-breasted Christina Lindberg. Ms. Lindberg is a sexploitation queen who we’ll talk more about in the future. Furyô anego den: Inoshika Ochô premiered in Japan today in 1973.
Vintage Pulp | Feb 16 2009 |
If you haven’t seen a nunsploitation flick you really haven’t lived. Norifumi Suzuki’s shlock masterpiece Seijû gakuen, aka School of the Holy Beast, has a little bit of everything, including blood, whippings, copious nudity, and lots of tender lesbian love. The beautiful Yumi Takigawa plays a woman who enters a convent in order to learn why her mother died there eighteen years earlier. Surprise surprise, she finds herself trapped in a den of depravity that would make de Sade blanch. When nuns go bad, they go real bad. But blasphemy never looked so gorgeous. And neither have the movie's posters. The version above is the standard one, hard to find but not impossible. Below is the two panel version, and it's exceedingly rare. Seijû gakuen opened in Japan today in 1972.