vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: another promo poster for the 1976 ninja actioner Kunoichi ninpo: Kannon biraki, aka Female Ninjas – In Bed with the Enemy. We talked about the movie a few years ago and shared its tateken poster. Shorter version: Megumi Hori, Keiko Kinugasa, and Maki Tachibana are sent on a secret mission, bad men lose pints of blood. What could be better?
Kunoichi ninpo: Kannon biraki, for which you see a tateken size poster above, along with a stimulating zoom, was known in English as Female Ninjas – In Bed with the Enemy, as well as Magic Female Ninjas: Open Altar Doors. The movie was a Toei Company production, and though it’s a period piece set during Japan’s Edo era, it has all the expected elements from Toei’s mid-1970s output—those elements being action, nudity, and tough-as-nails women.
Three ninjas named Oyou, Oen, and Oran are sent on a mission to recover 30,000 ryou in stolen gold meant for the king as tax payments. The trio have at their disposal acrobatic physical abilities, masterful sword skills, magic spells, and super tight vaginas. They use the latter to perform tricks like the “insect pinch”—trapping a guy’s penis until he confesses out of sheer pain. Sounds crazy, we know, but what can you say? Remember Onsen mimizu geisha and Reiko Ike’s extraordinary pussy that feels like worms writhing? From that point, being able to crush dicks is just a logical progression.
In any case, the trio of ninjas, played by Megumi Hori, Keiko Kinugasa, and Maki Tachibana, set off across the land in search of the gold, and along the way they brave dangers, slice and dice, resist emotion, and get help from an unlikely quarter, finally realizing that the Sanada and Kuwagata clans were the culprits. Or were they? Tricks and betrayals may loom. As a hybrid ninja drama/pinku flick, we enjoyed Kunoichi ninpo: Kannon biraki quite a bit. It premiered today in 1976.
The board game company Parker Brothers acquires the forerunner patents for Monopoly from Elizabeth Magie, who had designed the game (originally called The Landlord’s Game) to demonstrate the economic ill effects of land monopolism and the use of land value tax as a remedy for them. Parker Brothers quickly turns Monopoly into the biggest selling board game in America.
American actress Gene Tierney, one of the great beauties in Hollywood history and star of the seminal film noir Laura, dies in Houston, Texas of emphysema. Tierney had begun smoking while young as a way to help lower her high voice, and was hooked on cigarettes the rest of her life.
Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting with Nazi officials and states his intention to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space for Germany. An old German concept that dated from 1901, Hitler had written of it in Mein Kampf, and now possessed the power to implement it. Basically the idea, as Hitler saw it, was for the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations to the east, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate those lands with a Germanic upper class.
American actor Fred MacMurray dies of pneumonia related to leukemia. While most remember him as a television actor, earlier in his career he starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity, one of the greatest films noir ever made.
American baseball player Cy Young, who had amassed 511 wins pitching for five different teams from 1890 to 1911, dies at the age of 88. Today Major League Baseball’s yearly award given to the best pitcher of each season is named after Young.
A thirteen year-old child who had been kept locked in a room for her entire life is found in the Los Angeles house of her parents. The child, named Genie, could only speak twenty words and was not able even to walk normally because she had spent her life strapped to a potty chair during the day and bound in a sleeping bag at night. Genie ended up in a series of foster homes and was given language training but after years of effort by various benefactors never reached a point where she could interact normally in society.
