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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 tatekan 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 tatekan 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.
American journalist, playwright, and author Richard Harding Davis dies of a heart attack at home in Philadelphia. Not widely known now, Davis was one of the most important and influential war correspondents ever, establishing his reputation by reporting on the Spanish-American War, the Second Boer War, and World War I, as well as his general travels to exotic lands.
In Mexico, revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata is shot dead by government forces in the state of Morelos, after a carefully planned ambush. Following the killing, Zapata’s revolutionary movement and his Liberation Army of the South slowly fall apart, but his political influence lasts in Mexico to the present day.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is published in New York City by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Though Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s best known book today, it was not a success upon publication, and at the time of his death in 1940, Fitzgerald was mostly forgotten as a writer and considered himself to be a failure.
American clergyman and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., is buried five days after being shot dead on a Memphis, Tennessee motel balcony. April 7th had been declared a national day of mourning by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and King’s funeral on the 9th is attended by thousands of supporters, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta is sentenced to seven years in prison by the nation’s British rulers for being a member of the Mau Mau Society, an anti-colonial movement. Kenyatta would a decade later become independent Kenya’s first prime minister, and still later its first president.
Major League Baseball player Hank Aaron hits his 715th career home run, surpassing Babe Ruth’s 39-year-old record. The record-breaking homer is hit off Al Downing of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and with that swing Aaron puts an exclamation mark on a twenty-four year journey that had begun with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro League, and would end with his selection to Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.
