vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
This poster was made to promote the pinku film Konketsui Rika, aka Rika the Mixed-Blood Girl, which premiered today in 1972 starring Rika Aoki. We showed you another high kicking promo for the same film a while back. See that and our write-up on the movie here.
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.
At the Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles, California, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences presents the first Emmy Awards. The name Emmy was chosen as a feminization of “immy”, a nickname used for the image orthicon tubes that were common in early television cameras.
Charles Manson and three female members of his “family” are found guilty of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, which Manson orchestrated in hopes of bringing about Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war he believed would arise between blacks and whites.
A B-52 Stratofortress carrying two H-bombs experiences trouble during a refueling operation, and in the midst of an emergency descent breaks up in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Five of the six arming devices on one of the bombs somehow activate before it lands via parachute in a wooded region where it is later recovered. The other bomb does not deploy its chute and crashes into muddy ground at 700 mph, disintegrating while driving its radioactive core fifty feet into the earth.
The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague, Netherlands, and is the first international drug control treaty. The agreement was signed by Germany, the U.S., China, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam.
U.S. president Harry S. Truman establishes the Central Intelligence Group or CIG, an interim authority that lasts until the Central Intelligence Agency is established in September of 1947.
The New York City “Mad Bomber,” a man named George P. Metesky, is arrested in Waterbury, Connecticut and charged with planting more than 30 bombs. Metesky was angry about events surrounding a workplace injury suffered years earlier. Of the thirty-three known bombs he planted, twenty-two exploded, injuring fifteen people. He was apprehended based on an early use of offender profiling and because of clues given in letters he wrote to a newspaper. At trial he was found legally insane and committed to a state mental hospital.
