vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Continuing with our recent theme, we’ve done a deep search on our site and found every instance where we said we’d get back to a subject later. We can’t fulfill all those promises, but we’re shortening the list again today. After sharing a couple of promos of an underwear clad Meika Seri from a 1974 photo session, we said we’d reveal whether the Secret Chronicle actress shed any more clothing. Above is your answer. She shed all her clothing.
If the Siri voice application for iPad is ever given a visual form, we vote for this one. The two panels above show lovely Japanese actress Sayaka Seri, aka Meika Seri, who made her debut in 1973 with Yasagure anego den: sôkatsu rinchi, aka Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition and Torture, but became well known for the Nikkatsu hit (Maruhi) shikijô mesu ichiba, aka Secret Chronicle: She Beast Market, which was released in 1974. These photos date from that year. You may be wondering if Seri keeps disrobing in subsequent shots. Actually, she does, and if you’re really good maybe we’ll show you those a bit later.
(Maruhi) shikijô mesu ichiba, aka Secret Chronicle: She Beast Market is the third installment of Nikkatsu Studios’ prostitution-centered trilogy that began with Maruhi: joro ichiba (Prostitution Market) and continued with (Maruhi) jorô seme jigoku (ProstituteTorture Hell). This one was directed by Noboru Tanaka and stars Meika Seri as an Osaka prostie trying to survive her difficult profession and dysfunctional relatives. Some highlights (or lowlights) include one character killing another using a love doll inflated with explosive gas, Seri sexually indulging her mentally impaired younger brother, and the brother later doing what can best be described as choking the chicken (literally). In other words, it’s trademark Nikkatsu craziness, often disturbing but beautifully shot in both color and b&w. (Maruhi) shikijô mesu ichiba premiered in Japan today in 1974.
Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who co-founded the movie studio United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, become the first celebrities to leave their impressions in concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, located along the stretch where the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame would later be established.
During the last days of the Third Reich, as Russia’s Red Army closes in from the east, Adolf Hitler marries his long-time partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker during a brief civil ceremony witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Both Hitler and Braun commit suicide the next day, and their corpses are burned in the Reich Chancellery garden.
After refusing induction into the United States Army the day before due to religious reasons, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his heavyweight boxing title. He is found guilty of a felony in refusing to be drafted for service in Vietnam, but he does not serve prison time, and on June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses his conviction. His stand against the war had made him a hated figure in mainstream America, but in the black community and the rest of the world he had become an icon.
Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his five man crew set out from Peru on a giant balsa wood raft called the Kon-Tiki in order to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. After a 101 day, 4,300 mile (8,000 km) journey, Kon-Tiki smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947, thus demonstrating that it is possible for a primitive craft to survive a Pacific crossing.
After two days of rumors and denials the Soviet Union admits there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Reactor number four had suffered a meltdown, sending a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Today the abandoned radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl is rife with local wildlife and has been converted into a wildlife sanctuary, one of the largest in Europe.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and fifteen supporters are arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, Italy while attempting to escape the region in the wake of the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist government. The next day, Mussolini and his mistress are both executed, along with most of the members of their group. Their bodies are then trucked to Milan where they are hung upside down on meathooks from the roof of a gas station, then spat upon and stoned until they are unrecognizable.
