Vintage Pulp

December 15 2023

BAD STUDENTS

Why study when you can party?

Joshi gakuen: Yabai sotsugyô is known in English as Hazardous Graduation, and is the sequel to Joshi gakuen: Warui asobi, aka Girls’ Junior High School: Dangerous Games (1970) and the predecessor of Joshi gakuen: Otona no asobi, aka Girl’s Junior High School: Too Young to Play Like This. In brief—it’s too dumb to recommend. Like the other films, this one stars Junko Natsu, and plotwise she and her coterie of rebellious followers resist attempts by school adminitrators to teach sexual abstinence. They of course prove that adults are hypocrites. While the movie isn’t worth watching (there’s even a cake fight, for fuck’s sake), we decided to share the poster anyway because Natsu is an important action star who would later feature in important films such as Bad Girl Mako and Wolves of the City. Joshi gakuen: Yabai sotsugyô premiered today in 1970.

Japan, Nikkatsu, Joshi gakuen: Yabai sotsugyô, Hazardous Graduation, Joshi gakuen: Warui asobi, Girls' Junior High School: Dangerous Games, Joshi gakuen: Otona no asobi, Girl's Junior High School: Too Young to Play Like This, Junko Natsu, Jirô Okazaki, Seizaburô Kawazu, poster art, cinema, movie review

Vintage Pulp

July 14 2022

LUST AND FOUND

You can attain enlightenment through years of mental discipline, rigid study, and incessant ritual. Or you can just get properly laid once.

Above you see a poster for Yakuza kannon: Iro Jingi, known in English as Yakuza Justice: Erotic Code of Honor, and to dive right into this one, the movie starts bizarrely when a fisherman hooks the corpse of a drowned woman. She died pregnant, and defying all scientific laws, the fisherman delivers the child, though a cadaver obviously can’t produce the labor contractions needed to push a baby out. But perhaps there’s something mystical at work.

The infant grows into handsome Jirô Okazaki, who has been indoctrinated into monkdom and lives and works on the grounds of a vast temple complex. Onto those grounds one day comes Nozomi Yasuda, who is the daughter of a yakuza boss, and is promised to another yakuza boss. But she’s broken the engagement, and when her erstwhile fiancée sends men to kidnap her the attempted snatch happens right in front of Okazaki. Boy saves girl, and sparks fly.

Okazaki’s days had been filled by the typical meditation and drudgery of monks, but dealing with the slick yakuza and getting some sweet, sweet Yasuda lovin’ changes him to the point where he soon sees the world through a modern, violent, sexual lens. He says at one point (speaking about himself in third person, which we guess monks do): “Seigen has had a taste of earthly life—starting with the tip of his cock.” The eloquence of the man is stunning.

The tale then takes a circular route that explains how Okazaki’s mother ended up dead in that river in the first place. It’s a stretch, but when it comes to Japanese films from this era that was their stock-in-trade. Okazaki continues down a dark path and eventually risks losing himself. Or finding himself, if you believe this is always who he was under his monk’s robes. Birth or rebirth—in either case, Yakuza kannon: Iro Jingi is a pretty interesting story of transformation. It premiered today in 1973.

Japan, Nikkatsu, Yakuza kannon: Iro Jingi, Yakuza Justice: Erotic Code of Honor, Jirô Okazaki, Nozomi Yasuda, Chizuyu Azami, poster art, cinema, yakuza, movie review

ABOUT

EMAIL

LEGAL

SEARCH PULP INTERNATIONAL

PULP INTL.
HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

July 12

1971—Corona Sent to Prison

Mexican-born serial killer Juan Vallejo Corona is convicted of the murders of 25 itinerant laborers. He had stabbed each of them, chopped a cross in the backs of their heads with a machete, and buried them in shallow graves in fruit orchards in Sutter County, California. At the time the crimes were the worst mass murders in U.S. history.

July 11

1960—To Kill a Mockingbird Appears

Harper Lee’s racially charged novel To Kill a Mockingbird is published by J.B. Lippincott & Co. The book is hailed as a classic, becomes an international bestseller, and spawns a movie starring Gregory Peck, but is the only novel Lee would ever publish.

July 11

1962—Nuke Test on Xmas Island

As part of the nuclear tests codenamed Operation Dominic, the United States detonates a one megaton bomb on Australian controlled Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. The island was a location for a series of American and British nuclear tests, and years later lawsuits claiming radiation damage to military personnel were filed, but none were settled in favor in the soldiers.

July 10

1940—The Battle of Britain Begins

The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.

July 9

1948—Paige Takes Mound in the Majors

Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.

DON’T RIDE THE WHITE HORSE

Rafael DeSoto painted this excellent cover for David Hulburd's 1954 drug scare novel H Is for Heroin. We also have the original art without text.

BARN GIRLS

Two Spanish language digest novels from Argentine publishers Malinca Debora and Malinca Nueva Pandora.

Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.

LOVES OF A BLONDE